THE GREAT SPLIT

Western Europe and the USA are no longer on the same page. They live in different time and philosophical zones.

The Trump administration is not a government of the brightest. It is a gathering of the corrupt and the uninformed. Never have so many unprepared climbed so high, so fast. Nothing prepared the West for this Armageddon. "Signalgate" is already a Nixon-like watershed. The involvement with Ukraine and other flashpoints is just another clumsy attempt to poach raw materials and rare earths. 

The EU must face the funeral music and regroup, learn to be autonomous, until the Trump bluff crashes (and it will) . Amateurism never gets a long life span. The almost obscene wanderings of the current American administration are a moral affront for allies. Now, for the first time, they have become disenchanted and turned-off by anything American.

Ukraine became the ultimate recipient of Trump's hystrionics. The previous sophisticated all-involvement muted into a slice of pizza, served on Putin's plate. Gaza, today's Guernica, is an afterthought, reduced to another real estate gamble, a casino nightmare built on corpses.

Trump pokes his inferiority complex ("that" is the crux of the matter) in Europe's heart. His many other transgressions from i.a. Canada to the "Gulf of America", Greenland and Panama are just collateral symptoms of a deranged narcissic mindset.

In the first Trump administration there were some Republican grandees who were able to put a lid on the president's more flagrant aberrations. Now there is nobody. His cabinet looks like a slave chorus, out of some forgettable peplum movie.

Europeans had better put the bilateral relationship with the USA on ice. Trying to flatter the elephant in the Western room--as the UK's P.M. tried--will backfire. Maybe Europe has no other alternative than to "Finlandise" itself, by its own determination, between America and Russia for the duration of this season in hell.

Whatever the nature of the spell Putin holds over Trump may be remains a riddle wrapped in a shroud.