Marco Rubio Supports Europe’s ‘Coalition of the Unwilling’
No matter his soothing words at the Munich Security Conference, Marco Rubio, Trump’s Secretary of State, did little to encourage a trembling Europe, that had bravely created what they termed ‘a coalition of the willing’ to aid Ukraine and offset the damage done to NATO by the U.S. abandonment.
“We are not looking for a rupture,” he lied. “We want to revitalize an old friendship and renew the greatest civilization in human history. America will always be a child of Europe.” Whether or not his administration is in the revitalizing business, or marching toward international chaos, is more point-of-view than fact based. If America is Europe’s child, it’s not yet toilet-trained.
It wasn’t much, but Europe feared worse after J.D. Vance’s performance.
But it was enough, which only suggests how much Europe distrusts itself at the moment. Leaving the podium in Munich with a standing ovation of hope against fact ringing in his ears, Rubio stopped by two other nations. You might think it would have been France or Germany, possibly even Ukraine.
It wasn’t.
Our Secretary of State slithered off to throw his support to Slovakia (which doesn’t matter all that much) and Hungary (which matters a great deal). Both nations favor Russia against Ukraine, and are Putin’s sole support in Europe, forming a small but annoying ‘coalition of the unwilling.’
He needn’t have done that. It was certainly an ‘own goal’ and unnecessarily shot down his Munich revitalization mutterings. Yet that’s what Trump and the ‘ragged band of merrie men’ (and several merrie women) he calls a Cabinet are tasked with.
In a political world that’s tinder-dry, our narcissist leadership is fascinated with matches.
Anyone with eyes to see, and even a limited understanding of history, understands that the old-world order is over, perhaps well over. But the man we love to hate in America has little to do with it. He’s not in any way the cause, but simply the result of matches lit decades ago by others.
The first match was struck at the end of World War II, and the birth of the United Nations. One might look for matches by considering which five nations were granted Security Council veto power. China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States separated the winners from the losers of that war, a fatal decision for an organization that purports to represent the present and future nations of a stricken world.
Let’s take a quick look at how that played out.
China was a destroyed nation of 1.4 billion, having lost millions dead and about to enter a civil war; France was merely a hollowed-out ally; Russia a devastated nation, with only a nuclear capability to sustain it; the United Kingdom, ravaged by the war at home and rapidly losing its empire.
Which left, guess who?
The United States was essentially king-of-the-hill, an island-nation protected by two vast oceans, and an enormous, industrial power, above which not a single bomb had dropped.
So, how did we use that power? The answer is, some good and some not so good.
But, few of us are alive today to tell the story. And, history, we know, is written by the winners. But I was around, so I’ll take a stab at it.
On the good, we sent all of our homecoming soldiers to university for free, which powered our executive suites for decades yet to come. We paid for a Marshall Plan that rebuilt our former enemies and instituted NATO to break the history of European nations going to war with one another.
We built ourselves a graduated tax code that fairly spread the economic burden of running a debt-free government. We inved the suburbs, a new-fangled answer to family housing and an interstate highway system to connect it all. Rural electrification, radio, movies and television bound our 48 states to one antenother, and the combination of invention and manufacturing built us a solid, comfortable and growing middle class.
On the not so good, America’s millionaires began to pull up the ladders to their success, initially by fiddling with the tax codes and offshoring the industries they owned to countries with cheaper labor. That took a couple of decades for anyone to notice, until Nixon visited China in the ‘70s and the race was on. Paradoxically, China had become a communist country, and we were fighting communism worldwide, economically in Russia and militarily in Vietnam.
The ‘Cold War’ we fought against Russia’s atomic advances were disastrous to our economic health and nearly fatal to theirs. Cold wars, we failed to understand, are nearly as costly as the hot variety we ventured into in Vietnam, and we ‘won’ neither of them. Those lessons went unlearned, as the military-industrial complex Eisenhower had warned us of grew to unsustainable cost.
On the home front, greed was flattening democracy, as the industries that made us king-of-the-hill were sent off to rebuild that hill in China. Profits soared on labor savings, but weakened our middle class by job loss, while turning millionaires into billionaires. A billion is a thousand million and those thousands of millions came directly out of the pockets of industrial wage earners.
Goodbye middle class, hello contract workers with no unions, healthcare or retirement benefits, as well as low wages. And another great American invention arrived…the two-job, husband-and-wife working family.
It’s worth noting that what is now China’s could have been America’s.
Over the last seven years, China built an internal middle class twice the size of America. Not twice the size of America’s middle class, twice the size of our entire nation…over seven hundred million people (and growing). Can you wrap your head around that middle class growth having happened in America?
Further down the not so good side, the United States moved away from a no debt 1950s nation to a nearly $38 trillion debtor. There is no possible way to entertain that thought in the mind. A million is a thousand thousand. A billion is a thousand million, but a trillion is a thousand billion.
The mind staggers, and drops to its knees.
But this is what the post WWII downside (a plethora of upsides) brought us…endless wars, the end of republican democracy, the demise of international respect, and dictatorship by a monied minority.
If you thought Donald Trump brought this upon us, you have no memory of who we were and how we have come to be who we are.
Take a moment to consider.
Sleep well.