Europe

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon says Pope Francis is ‘beneath contempt’. Bannon is, of course, far from being the only Catholic to criticize the Pope, who is accused of watering down Catholic teaching. The pontiff’s stance on the migrant crisis – he has said migrants’ dignity should be a priority over national security – has also angered many Catholics, as has Francis’s recent suggestion that populism sows the hate that leads to Hitler. For Bannon, who despite having been married three times says that his Catholicism is central to his life, these things show that the Pope is on the side of the elite and not the little guy. His solution?

It’s good of Prince Charles to represent the British royal family at the funeral of President George H.W. Bush in Washington, D.C. today. No doubt, however, Queen Elizabeth II will wish she could be there. The Queen doesn’t do many foreign trips these days — she’s 92 — and Charles is acting as ‘shadow king’. But she and Bush 41 were close. Their friendship evokes memories of a time when the relationship between Britain and America was truly special — not just a lot of hot air about wars. As the Queen’s latest biographer Robert Hardman notes, Elizabeth II and Bush 41 relished each other’s company. They seem to have bonded over the infamous ‘royal talking hat’ moment outside the White House in May, 1991.

Although seldom noticed by anyone west of Warsaw, there has been a war going on in Europe for almost five years now. It began in early 2014 with a Russian secret operation in mid-February that annexed Crimea and soon spread to overt Kremlin military intervention in eastern Ukraine as well. Serious fighting followed, and that conflict remains unfrozen and deadly. While there has been no sustained combat in eastern Ukraine in years, neither is that front quiet. Kiev has never accepted the Russian theft of Crimea and the ‘people’s republics’ in Donetsk and Luhansk, Kremlin-run pseudo-states that serve as bases for Russian military units on Ukrainian soil. Those units regularly shell Ukrainian positions, because they can.

The roundabout on the departmental highway, at the exit for the Super U supermarket and gas station, the closest place to buy fresh milk, has been occupied by the Gilets Jaunes, demanding cheaper diesel. They wear the emblematic yellow safety jackets of their movement, although some are orange. Passing motorists sound their horns and display their own yellow gilets on the dashboard, to show solidarity. There is no barricade, traffic flows rather freely. It is all rather jolly. One man is cooking sausages on a barbecue. I slow down, as seems to be protocol, wind down my window to smile, shake a few hands, say a few bonjours. Hearing my accent, I got a chorus of ‘haffanicedays.’ I smile some more. A lady sends me on my way with a madeleine.

The centennial of the armistice ending World War One has received much attention, and deservedly so, and yet there’s another centennial, closely related, that also deserves to be remembered. On November 23, 1918, Prime Minister David Lloyd George, campaigning in Wolverhampton, declared, ‘What is our task? To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in.’ Lloyd George thus put forth a vision of post-war solidarity, in keeping with the sacrifices made in wartime. National solidarity was made inevitable by mass-mobilization. That is, since the success of the levée en masse in revolutionary France, nations had come to understand that they needed the whole of their population motivated enough — and robust enough — to support the fight.

Donald Trump’s tweet today, au dessous will annoy many people, including me, who are forced to admit he is right. France and the rest of the EU do make it hard to sell American wines in France, and it’s easy for the French to sell wine to the Americans. I’ve a mate here who sells two million bottles a year in the USA and he drives a smart car and lives in a very big house. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1062331024426913792 Mr Trump is famously a teetotaler, yet he can in this instance be said to speak with some authority since he is the proud owner of the Trump Winery, near Charlottesville, Virginia.

Donald J. Trump is home from his whirlwind weekend trip to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the First World War’s end. Even by The Donald’s formidable china-breaking standards, this was a doozy which will be discussed with opprobrium by the Transatlantic smart set for some time. President Trump seemed to go out of his way to upset his French counterpart and host Emmanuel Macron, who’s hit a political rough patch and needed some brotherly love. That bromance is dead and buried, however, and Trump fired off a mocking tweet at Macron as he boarded Air Force One for Paris that denounced the French president’s backing of a European army as ‘very insulting.

Are you enjoying the latest episode of the Trump-Macron show? It’s the most intriguing bromance in modern politics: two leaders from different and opposing political worlds who nonetheless fell for each other. It was self-love-à-deux from the moment they met. And they consummated their love by bombing Syria last year. They even bicker and make up like a passionate couple. Today they are in Paris to mark Armistice Day, and Trump may be pleased to have left behind the Washington brouhaha following the midterms and his firing of Jeff Sessions. Yet the broader and more remarkable point is the extent to which Trump and Macron’s fortunes have reversed.

In a speech richly deserving adaption as a Saturday Night Live skit, US national security adviser John Bolton has unveiled the latest extension of America’s enemies list. Eclipsing the post-9/11 ‘Axis of Evil’ we now have a ‘Troika of Tyranny,’ consisting of those powerhouse troublemakers Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. According to Bolton, ‘this triangle of terror stretching from Havana to Caracas to Managua is the cause of immense human suffering, the impetus of enormous regional instability, and the genesis of a sordid cradle of communism in the Western Hemisphere.’ But fear not. Under the leadership of President Trump, the United States is now ‘taking direct action against all three regimes to defend the rule of law, liberty, and basic human decency in our region.

I happen to be in the Old Country this week, and am glad to report that everything in England is just as I left it. It’s raining constantly, except when it isn’t. No one speaks English in London, except the American tourists. And everyone, regardless of whether they want Britain to stay in the European Union or leave that undemocratic shambles of a superstate, wants to get Brexit over and done with, so they can get back to traditional pursuits like soccer, gardening and smoking crack. Imagine my surprise this morning as, scrolling through today’s New York Times as I mopped up the grease from my cooked breakfast, I saw the headline ‘British Hoarders Stock Up on Supplies, Preparing for Brexit’.

The news that Duchess Meghan of Markle, Britain’s favourite American, has a right royal bun in the oven by dashing sex maniac Prince Harry brings a smile to the faces of all patriotic Britons. An absent-minded smile, the quiet smile of a polite, proud people as it visualises the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, butt naked in various positions, and tries to guess which one it was that resulted in conception. It’s a national game of Clue. This may seem intrusive, but the royals have never had their sex so privately. In the good old days, royalty mated like pandas, with difficulty and before an approving audience. A royal wedding was a diplomatic union, not a love match.

I made no time for the Blasey Ford testimony, and never do for the NFL, but the TV will be on for Ryder Cup this weekend, the greatest show in golf. The bi-annual Europe v. America spectacle is being held at Le Golf National, a relatively new course outside of Paris this year, which seems odd because golf has few roots in France. But tens of thousands of French people will be going, and tens thousands more will journey from Britain and Ireland and the continent. Since 1979, when our Ryder Cup opponents became European (because postwar, the US was beating the British-Irish team too consistently) the Euro team has become one of the few well-regarded symbols of a united Europe, in counterpoint to the sovereignty threatening bureaucrats of Brussels.

Did British prime minister Theresa May take a shot at Donald Trump in yesterday afternoon’s address to the UN General Assembly? It certainly sounds like it. Or was Trump a proxy target for another blond populist, Boris Johnson? It certainly looks like it. On Tuesday, Trump had rejected the ‘ideology of globalism’ and defended the nation state and its ‘doctrine of patriotism’.

Americans, I know you are confused about Brexit. Who isn’t? Even us Brits struggle to keep up with the spats, splits, tensions and bitching Brexit has unleashed across Europe. Take last week’s Salzburg showdown, at which the heads of the EU’s 28 member states met to gab about immigration, security and, of course, Brexit in a bizarrely done-up hall that looked like the Death Star conference room from Star Wars. The highlight, or lowlight, was a late-night dinner at which Theresa May had 10 minutes to convince the gathered heads to embrace her Chequers version of Brexit. She failed. The side-eye award went to European Council President Donald Tusk who posted on Instagram a photo of himself offering Theresa May a cake with the caption, ‘No cherries’.

Want to lecture people about the anti-globalism trend that is supposedly sweeping the West? It goes without saying that you must refer to Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, followed by mentioning the right-wing (‘nationalist,’ ‘populist’ or ‘illiberal’ or ‘far-right’ could substitute as adjectives) political parties that rule Hungary, Poland, and more recently, Italy. After all, they want to Make Poland/ Hungary/Italy Great Again!

Last weekend, while the world was watching the rise of the Sweden Democrats, Swedes were watching Uppdrag granskning (Investigative Assignment). The program’s title sounds like that of a Scandinavian noir thriller. This episode’s plot, set in the Stockholm immigrant suburb of Botkyrka, was murky too. But the criminal dealings in this Sveriges Television production weren’t fictional. Investigative Assignment exposed a scheme to sell thousands of Muslim votes in Sunday’s election, with implications that could have affected the national outcome. Botkyrka is one of Sweden’s largest municipalities, with 92,000 residents. It also has one of Sweden’s highest percentages of first- and -second-generation immigrants; in 2017, 58.

The first sign that Matteo Salvini was destined to do battle with Emmanuel Macron came in June, a few days after he was named Italy’s interior minister. Salvini, whose party, the League, wants to cut immigration drastically, announced that a German-registered rescue ship carrying 629 aspiring migrants from Africa would not be allowed to dock in Sicily. Macron reacted with disgust. ‘The policy of the Italian government,’ a spokesman for his political movement announced, ‘is nauseating.’ Salvini responded that if the French wanted to show their open–heartedness, they might make good on their unfulfilled pledge to feed and shelter some of the 100,000 African migrants Italy had until recently been receiving each year.