German reaction to Trump-Rubio lecturing Europe - a 'must read' for Americans - Daily Kos

Trump sent Marco Rubio to the Munich conference to ‘lecture’ Europe, and I’ve translated what one German journalist (usually stationed in the US) wrote in response. Please understand, it’s VERY difficult for intelligent people living outside the American news bubble to respond calmly, but this man accomplishes it with grace. Here goes:

We should say confidently, “No thank you, Marco”

Why Europe must not comply with the poisoned offer of a country that has long since gambled away its leadership claim as a model student.

Author: Dirk Hautkapp is US correspondent of Hamburg’s Abendblatt newspaper

One week after Marco Rubio's Munich "Bend down, Europe" speech, the bait is still on the table. The EU should join Trump's "renewal and restoration" - otherwise America will “go it alone". In the small print are the contempt for climate protection ("cult"), the devaluation of the welfare state to the "global welfare administration", and the lying mantra that migration threatens the "survival of our civilization". All this is not something which will appeal to the majority. This is a rotten test of ideology. Europe should confidently say: No, thank you, Marco.

Rubio sells Trump's Maga ideology as a Western bond. In fact, it is a reinterpretation of what the West learned after 1945: limitation of power, legal binding, institutional self-control. If Trump's "We don't ask for permission before we act" becomes a virtue, then leadership quickly becomes guardianship. Europe should not only buy more tanks, exclusively preferably in America, but exercise less contradiction - and please also be grateful for it.

But even if you share Rubio's pathos, the USA is not a role model for Europe. Not because America is "different", but because it fails on the inside due to the very foundations that it preaches to the outside. Ten reasons why the ‘civilizational’ leadership claim is already exhausted:

1. Firearms as state religion.

A country in which tens of thousands of people die every year because of "guns", because a constitutional bonmot is misinterpreted, can hardly act as a senior teacher. Freedom, which ends in "active shooter drills" in the classroom, is a bad export item.

2. Suckling mortality as the disgrace of a superpower.

The fact that babies die more often in the USA than in almost all European OECD countries describes the precarious state of affairs in supply, education, residence, and the environment. In short: state capability.

3. Life expectancy.

The richest country in the world remains poor while staying healthy. Europe debates care, America debates donation links. Life expectancy in the USA is lower than in the EU due to avoidable causes of death, violence and broken prevention.

4.Wealth gap.

When the richest one or two percent skim off larger and larger parts of the cake, while the middle class finances itself through credit cards and part-time jobs, a "West" is not created, but a market for resentment - and politics according to billionaire whims.

5. Medical

Anyone who has to check the account balance after a diagnosis before agreeing to an operation does not live in "freedom", but in a subscription model for fear. Freedom in installments is not really freedom.

6. Lack of social security.

Rubio's mockery of the welfare state ignores Europe's strategic advantage. Social policy is defense policy: it stabilizes trust, makes societies crisis-proof, dampens extremism. Here the big industrialized country America is nothing more than a developing country.

7. Fentanyl.

A nation that loses hundreds of thousands due to overdoses every year, people who have been hooked through its own pharmaceutical industry and doctors, cannot present itself as a model case of "strong community". It's a bankruptcy declaration.

8. Mass imprisonment.

Creating order through imprisonment. The American penal system is a parallel state of prisons, probation and lifelong stigmas designed for profit optimization. Inhuman.

9.Homelessness.

If in a glossy economy people freeze in tents in front of tech campuses, this is not individual failure, but politics. It’s housing as an object of speculation, not as a fundamental right.

10. Democratic decay under Trump.

Anyone who considers institutions as prey, and puts loyalty above law and even brands the criticism of the Supreme Court as "un-American", does not want an alliance, but rather followers and vassals. If you don't sing along, you lose the protection.

Trump's America, announced by Rubio, is not a concept for security and prosperity, but an ‘offer’ of identity - and ‘identity offers’ regularly need scapegoats. Today they are migrants, tomorrow climate activists and globalists, the day after tomorrow the ‘non-loyal’ Europeans. These stories are basically toxic. It has taken Europe a long time to understand that identity policy dictated from above ‘saws apart’ societies from within. It should not voluntarily import the saw.

You can use the USA as a partner without worshipping it as a role model (as the German neo-Nazi party AfD is doing at the moment). And you can remain transatlantic without being drawn into a cultural war that America has long been fighting against itself. Europe's task is not to imitate America - but to preserve what Rubio's Western rhetoric conceals: the ability and will to tame power.