For many Americans, the British vote to leave the European Union last June was pretty arcane stuff that didn't much matter until it was replicated on this side of the pond months later when Donald Trump was elected President.
Right after the vote, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, always at the ready to sound the alarm regardless of whether it's needed, dubbed the Brexit vote a "global crisis". Instead of actually becoming one, Brexit quickly slipped below the radar at MSNBC and elsewhere, its not so gaping void filled with growing interest in the American presidential campaign.
Brexit and the European Union did make a brief but revealing appearance in a conversation between Maddow and a guest on her show March 9 when she interviewed Daniel Fried, a State Department official and former ambassador who just retired after working in government since the Carter years.
Fried, clearly no fan of Trump's, worries that the new president might allow a resurgent Russia to undermine NATO and the European Union. In the process, Fried succinctly demonstrated why Brits voted for Brexit --
MADDOW: On that point of nationalism, I feel like Americans have always studied nationalism as a foreign phenomenon and now we've got a nationalist movement in our country that has a very articulate spokesman in the senior counselor to the president, for example, and I don't think we've thought of ourselves, at least in the modern iteration, as being a nationalist country or a country that has nationalist movements. When you say that it helps Russia undermine, in its project of undermining the West to support nationalism, how does nationalism both abroad and in the United States, undermine the West and the liberal order in general?
FRIED: Well, think of Europe in the 20th century -- two world wars generated by nationalism, France, Germany, Britain fighting with each other. Now the United States comes in in 1945 and we basically blow the whistle -- two world wars are sufficient. And we're the ones who supported this notion of a united Europe, so there would never be another set of civil wars in Europe again, ever, and that was a fabulous success. It was so fabulous that people now take it for granted. And the European Union -- OK, right -- it has a bureaucracy, right, it's sometimes difficult to deal with but so what?! I mean, you hire a couple of people like me to work the European Union and it can be done. It's pretty good. I mean, European Union difficult compared to what -- say, organizing D-Day?
No wonder Fried is retiring from the State Department. Based on his comments here alone, it was only a matter of time before he was shown the door.
Start with his dubious claim that "nationalism" was the impetus behind both world wars -- as opposed to German nationalism and aggression -- along with Fried implying that "France, Germany, Britain" were equally at fault in setting off the conflicts. Maddow goes along for the ride, suggesting that the United States in its "modern iteration" has not been "nationalist" -- providing that one ignores when it was under presidents Wilson, FDR, Kennedy and Reagan. Nationalism gets blamed for starting world wars and none of the credit for ending them.
Then comes the coup de grace from the avuncular Fried -- yes, the European Union has a difficult bureaucracy ... shrug ... "but so what!" Spoken like a man for whom overreaching bureaucracy poses no problems, only job opportunities. As a sales pitch, this leaves much to be desired -- Bureaucrats already costing you dearly? Let's add to your costs by hiring my team to navigate the bureaucracy! Gee, who can resist?
You just know that the "couple" of people that Fried is suggesting actually means several -- at a bare minimum -- and they surely won't come cheap. And after a year or so without results, you can also hear his predictable excuse -- more people "like me" weren't hired to deal with the bureaucrats!
It could be so much worse, Fried also suggests -- we could instead be organizing for another D-Day, to take on the Fourth Reich that's right around corner if the European Union disintegrates. But instead of the pendulum swinging to that other extreme, wouldn't it make more sense to rein in this and other obstinate bureaucracies instead of forcing everyone to comply with their prohibitively expensive, never-ending demands?
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