Joe Wiesenthal

I'm very curious how statements like that play on the ground in Europe, given that on the one hand, this is a situation caused by the US.

I think it's fair to say that Europeans regard Trump as somewhat unpredictable.

Somewhat.

Somewhat.

I'm doing an impersonation of British understatedness here.

Then his message to Europe is basically, well, trust us for your energy security.

I mean, you sort of anticipated where I was going to go with my next question because you've written about

the threat to democracy that both in Europe and the US that you perceive the Trump administration as posing.

You mentioned that perhaps Trump actually prefers China to Europe at this point.

It seems like as you've written, the administration seems to have two specific big critiques of Europe.

One is a particular conception of free speech.

which the administration does not perceive Europe as upholding.

And then, of course, immigration, which they would associate with civilizational decline and so forth.

Interestingly, in your writing, you acknowledge that both of those, they're strange or they're kernels to both critiques that the European government has to take seriously, border control issues.

Maintaining those liberal values around speech.

How much harder does it or like, you know, how does Europe chart a path while also taking into account those factors, which may have some grain of reality to them?

I feel like it's become a cliche at this point to no matter what happens in the world, people always seem to say Europe is like the loser.

Yeah, it's bad for Europe, right?

Is there a sliver of hope down the line?

If we think that one of the things that Europe has struggled with is strategic autonomy and managing all these different national interests, and if we think that