Trump dictates terms to VDL

Britain’s right-wing Telegraph has its own reasons to crow over VDL/Brussels humiliation, but humiliation it assuredly was

Four days ago I posted Part 3 of my ongoing series, Road to WW3. It outlined the case, not hard to make, that Europe’s leaders are betraying their citizenry and economies by:

• eschewing mutually beneficial trade with the rising economies of Russia and China in favour of trade on manifestly less advantageous terms with a declining USA;
• placing said citizens and economies at grave risk by rearming for a non-existent – other than self-fulfillingly prophetic – threat from those two powers “to the delight of Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin shareholders”.

I then asked, why?

I’ve taken of late to widening the definition of a term, comprador – by tradition reserved for elites within an imperialised country who abet its exploitation – to include elites within the empire hub itself. Other terms being quisling, vassal  and – since I share with George Galloway a relish for the pejoratively archaic – poltroon. All are accurate as far as they go – and all are blunt instruments which sacrifice explanatory depth for emotional satisfaction.

… before citing the reply given in a recent paper by Nel Bonilla:

… the answer does not lie in pure and straightforward corruption or ideological fervor. Far more banal and effective, it also lies in biographies, networks, and institutions; in hegemony on the level of the functional elite: when ruling ideas become common sense. And in this case, hegemony is not enforced solely through violence but through education, elite recruitment, and ritualized repetition.

Two days later, EC President Ursula von der Leyen met with US President Donald Trump at his Scottish golf resort, her face a picture of unconditional surrender …

… likened by one commentator to that of a naughty schoolgirl summoned to the headmaster’s office.

Whatever, already struggling EU economies now have a blanket 15% tariff on exports to the US – which, Trump’s MAGA base should note, are also a 15% sales tax on Americans – on top of that commitment to import costly US LNG to heat homes and drive industry, while those Biden sabotaged pipelines – meant to supply cheap gas from a neighbour whose decades of seeking to join the West on equal terms were met with lies, insults, broken promises and provocation on provocation – gather barnacles and rust on the Baltic sea bed.

Funny old world, innit?

Here to discuss that Sunday dictating of Trump’s terms meeting are the two Alexes at the Duran. For once they’ve kept things relatively brief. This one comes in at under nineteen minutes.

* * *