JokersUpdates.com: Current Affairs - Stephens: Time to admit it. Americans are not like us. Latest Inside-Out column

The Atlantic alliance is over. The best to hope for is an entente recognising Europe and the US still have shared interests

If there is anyone left in Europe who thinks the past can yet be reclaimed, they would do well to watch the White House video glorifying Donald Trump’s war on Iran. Trumpian triumphalism about America’s military might is not enough. Images of the death and devastation being visited on Iranians are interleaved with violent sequences from the likes of Ironman, Gladiator and Braveheart. The aim? To celebrate “the American Way of Justice”. War as pornography. It’s time for Europeans to own up. These people are not like us.

The absence of restraint or propriety is matched by the Administration’s boastful contempt for international law. Pete Hegseth, the shiny-suited defence secretary and wannabe Dirty Harry, exults in the violence. The US will wage war on its own terms “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically-correct wars. We fight to win”. If scores of children are killed when a Tomahawk missile lands on a school that is, well, tough.

European voters have been more willing than their leaders to recognise the new America. One where the glamour and glitz of Hollywood makes way for the ugliness of troops on the streets and masked militias scouring them for immigrants. It has not gone unnoticed that Trump’s answer to climate change is to burn more fossil views.

Even before his decision to bomb Iran, one nine-country poll showed 48 per cent of Europeans regard him as “an enemy of Europe”. A YouGov survey suggested Germans and Brits think the US as big a danger to their security as Iran. Asked for an overall view of America, between 60 and 70 per cent of voters in Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Spain say it is “unfavourable”.

There are durable alliances between nations and there are ententes and pacts. The first of these identify common ground that reaches beyond coincident security and economic concerns to shared goals for regional or international order. Alliances link interests to values. The second group are transactional arrangements, recognising common threats and ambitions but blind to principle. Remember Britain’s attempt to strike a deal with Benito Mussolini in 1938? My enemy’s enemy is my friend.

https://philipstephens.substack.com/p/lets-admit-it-americans-are-not-like?r=12u3dx&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true&_src_ref=go.bsky.app