when Winston Smith, asks why Big brother has taken power, Obrien reminds him it is the sake of power itself, not any noble reason,

(one might think, Orwell as much aimed that barb at Burnham, the former pragmatist, turned one time admiring of the fascist model and later staunch anti communist and co founder of the National Review,

certainly the atlantic end of Western Europe seem to regard 1984 as a how to manual to be deployed against the people

Mississippi, the poorest state in the United States, is close to surpassing Europe’s largest economy Germany’s GDP per capita.
The poorest US state’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita is higher than that of Europe’s top five economies, except for Germany. However, Mississippi competes closely with Germany, with a difference of just €1,500.
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They are irrelevant. A dead weight. The hi-tech boom of the 80s and 90s has almost completely passed them by, except for a few companies like Nokia.

They are likely to miss the AI boom – or shoot themselves in the foot trying to regulate it.

Soon the rot will reach Five Eyes intel organizations, and they will be completely worthless.

Trump and Vance have hinted at this… they are in for a rude awakening.

Which all too easily segues degenerates into the lust for TOTAL CONTROL.

Which ULTIMATELY evolves disintegrates into the “solution” of TOTALITARIANISM.

Incompetent elites are a peripheral matter…(and maybe one should thank the powers that be that they ARE incompetent…).

@neo: Plus, they know the US and Israel are motivated and will probably save them from the Iranian menace while they themselves continue to safely posture as the great internationalists who oppose the coarse barbarian Trump and the primitive Americans.

Europeans are having their cheese and eating it too.

I said that!

— Huxley

Which is pretty much SOP for sovereign polities, when they can. The United States piggybacked on the Royal Navy to a considerable extent in our early decades, too.

One of the fundamental truths of international relations is that sovereignties act in their own perceived self-interest when the chips are down. Alliances depend on common interests. Trump, at least, apparently is keenly aware of that.

Do I blame the Eurogovernments for being worried about Muslim trouble in their own lands and acting to avoid it? No. Do I blame them (and our government too!) for allowing this situation to arise in the first place over the last 35 years? Oh, yes.

The current fixation of the EU and EU-adjacent(!) countries is to essentially deny their populations the vote UNLESS those populations vote for the “correct” candidates, the “correct” parties.

— Barry Meislin

Yes. To a considerable extent, that is the entire point of the EU. It isn’t entirely about evil intentions, to some extent there’s been an assumption that popular control and popular nationalism and popular religious feeling had led to great disasters (the World Wars, etc.) and needed to be restrained by internationalist secular technocrats. That’s been an animating idea all over the West since the end of WW II. Unfortunately, the technocrats proved incompetent (at best), and the latest generation of them are venal.

The same could be said of the UK and Canada.

And how many others?

Sweden’s tilt to the center-right occurred because Swedish voters—FINALLY—noticed the above “phenomenon” regarding the Left-wing Swedish governments that dominated that country for ages and upended Sweden’s demography.

The current fixation of the EU and EU-adjacent(!) countries is to essentially deny their populations the vote UNLESS those populations vote for the “correct” candidates, the “correct” parties.

Giving the right to vote to massive numbers of immigrants (either “legal” or “legalized” illegals) is part of this strategy—together with hog-tying right-of-center political parties that the Left deems too potentially successful, i.e., too popular or too “populist”, that bogus term used by the Left to mean simply “too fascist”.

At the end of the day, we really only have use of those bases if the host nation is gracious to allow us.

Spain and the United Kingdom, really, have done us a favor here. They’ve reminded us of the fragility of many of our planning assumptions when it comes to overseas bases.

I can understand a host nation saying “we let you have a base but that doesn’t mean you can use it however and whenever you want”. And I can understand the United States re-evaluating its relationship with Spain and the United Kingdom.

These were ceremonial titles referring to geography, as the nation-states themselves did not exist except on paper. The Papal States, Venice, and everything in Italy south of them were not even part of the Holy Roman Empire, as they had devolved from the Eastern Roman Empire. Germany and Italy were divided into hundreds of states of varying size and nature: some republics, some states of the Church, and some states held by various degrees of nobility at varying degrees from the Emperor. The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and the Principality of Liechtenstein are the last of these states.

Well after. France did it what it could to drag out UN approval for the war in Iraq, but deployed their own troops to Ivory Coast in 2002 without asking for anybody’s input. They also fought ISIL in Iraq and Syria from 2014 – 2016.