Last week I was browsing through Henry Kissinger’s 2014 book, World Order, when the news broke that Jim Mattis, the US defence secretary, had resigned, sending a shockwave of new uncertainties across Europe. It made these lines from Kissinger all the more striking: “The United States has every reason from history and geopolitics to bolster the European Union and prevent its drifting off in a geopolitical vacuum; the United States, if separated from Europe in politics, economics and defence, would become geopolitically an island off the shores of Eurasia, and Europe itself could turn into an appendage to the reaches of Asia and the Middle East.”
One key sentence in Mattis’s resignation letter pointed to the importance of the US respecting its allies. It read like a final verdict on something Europeans had been dreading ever since Donald Trump’s election but were wary of acknowledging: the utter indifference of this American leader to postwar alliances. A US “separated from Europe” has suddenly become more of a reality.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2rZdBMC
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