Yasmina@yasminalombaert
A message to Washington!
“Europe does not need a rebellion scripted in either Moscow or Washington.” - Henry Bolton, British former politician, who worked for the EU for more than a year on EU projects in the Balkans.
Bolton is right: Europe knows what a catastrophe looks like. They lived through it.
Bolton is calling out the real scandal: the ‘US National Security Strategy’ openly says they want to 'cultivate resistance' and 'change the trajectory' of allied democracies!
“It is a very old mistake. It's dressed now in the language of pragmatic deals, but it is still the same thing. It is appeasement of an aggressor, and it is equally destined to failure and catastrophe.
So when Europe, which has gone through this before and which has learned the lesson, responds with alarm to the idea of rewarding an invader, it is not, as your National Security Strategy says it is, because European governments are subverting democratic processes. It is because those governments, those European governments understand well, from hard bitter experience, what appeasement leads to. It does not lead to peace. It leads to even worse war later on.
The truth is, the British and our European allies do not want war. We do not want escalation. Nor do we want a settlement, though, that is imposed by outside powers and that hands President putin precisely what it is his invasion was intended to achieve. We, the people of Europe and our governments, fully recognise the stakes. We know what war is. But if we reward putin for his aggression now, we will have to pay again later: in the Baltics, in the Balkans, in Moldova, perhaps even further west, perhaps even in Poland.
It is not warmongering to refuse to reward an aggressor. It is loyalty to the very principles that have kept Europe safe and at peace since 1945. And to suggest that European governments are ignoring these is not only inaccurate, it undermines those governments, the very democratic institutions that America has always encouraged Europe to build and protect. Together, we've tried to spread democracy, justice, and freedoms around the world, not to undermine them.
The National Security Strategy that goes on, though, and it states that the United States should begin, quote, "cultivating resistance inside European countries in order to change their trajectory." America, I cannot overstate how serious this is. Now, I'm the first to say that Britain and Europe face an existential crisis, particularly in the area of mass immigration and the challenges it brings. Indeed, I myself personally have long campaigned on this very issue. My record on it is strong and powerful. I have also expressed my concern at what I call cultural displacement, in other words, the dynamic of foreign cultures being brought in from abroad, pushing our own culture aside. I'm passionate about preserving not only our values, but our history, our heritage, our culture, and our way of life.
However, for the first time in living memory, a United States government document—your country's National Security Strategy, no less—suggests that Washington could actively encourage political movements inside allied democracies and empower them against their own governments. That's astonishing. It's not renewal, that is subversion. And whether intentional or not, it opens the door to United States involvement in European domestic politics in a way that is profoundly disturbing, corrosive, and will breach trust between our nations.
Europe has its own internal problems, as I say, its own divisions. It's got populists, nationalists, reformers, radicals, all fighting amongst themselves. But it also has legitimate institutions, old ones, stable ones, in which legitimate debates about immigration, sovereignty, identity, the economic direction, all take place. And those debates are for Europeans to resolve through persuasion, elections, negotiation, compromise, not through subversion from Washington.
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