Let My People Go!

"California is in many ways out of control." Donald Trump, Feb. 5^th 
 (Bill O’Reilly Interview on Fox)

Another long blog, but perhaps the most important one I have ever written. For a nation of immigrants, we have turned into one of the least immigrant-friendly nations on earth. Until now, we have combed the earth for the best and brightest on earth, and those who have come to the United States from other lands have been among the most productive anywhere. So let’s look at the underlying statistics generated by objective or even conservative sources.

 “Immigrants are now a sizable segment of the U.S. workforce. In 2014, the nation’s 146 million workers included 24 million immigrants, accounting for 16.6% of total employment. Immigrants occupied an even more significant presence within the self-employed workforce last year [2014]. Some 2.8 million, or 19%, of the nation’s 14.6 million self-employed workers were immigrants. Thus, immigrants are also responsible for a good share of the jobs created by self-employed workers, hiring workers at virtually the same rate as the U.S. born.

“Overall, 11% of immigrant workers were self-employed in 2014, compared with 10% of U.S.-born workers. The incorporation rates are also similar. Some 4% of each group of workers had incorporated businesses. But there were proportionally more unincorporated self-employed immigrants than U.S.-born workers, 8% compared with 6%... [What’s more] when considered by racial and ethnic groups, the evidence shows that immigrants are engaged in running businesses far more than U.S.-born workers.” Pew Research Report (10/22/2015)

“One of the principal ways in which immigrants create jobs is through the businesses they establish. Immigrants to our country join native-born Americans in being risk takers. According to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity, in 2014 immigrants continued to be ‘almost twice as likely as the native-born to become entrepreneurs.’ Using census data, the Partnership for a New American Economy estimates that immigrant-owned businesses ‘generate more than $775 billion in revenue, $125 billion in payroll, and $100 billion in income, employing one out of every 10 workers along the way.’ Moreover, immigrants made up 28.5 percent of all new entrepreneurs in 2014—up from 13.3 percent in 1996.” Immigration Myth and Facts, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, April 14, 2016.

But what is particularly fascinating is the difference in immigrant patterns from the West Coast when compared with the rest of the United States (the U.S. has a current population of 321 million). While there are pockets of “special immigration exceptions” (such as Cubans in South Florida), the general difference is that the east and central portions of this nation established their immigration patterns well before WWII, many in the 19th century or before. Italians, Irish, Scandinavians, East Europeans/Russians, etc. fled to the United States in droves. They did hard manual labor, worked on farms, mines, shipbuilding, construction, smelters and brutal assembly lines. They basically built the heavy industry when that was how you built nations… then.

These immigrants may have mostly practiced differing forms of Christianity – mostly Catholicism and various Protestant sects – but except for those descended from slaves, they were almost all white. The industries they built, generation after generation, were products of a fading “industrial revolution.” Pride of working with their hands, hard labor, was reflected in skyscrapers, coal mines and giant car manufacturing plants. But the world was changing, even as this productive belt of hard working Americans believed that they had a solid and permanent place in our economy, technology and global competition rocked their world in a bad way. They slowly became the Rust Belt and felt betrayed by a country they believe they built.

Our West Coast immigrants are recent… increasingly coming from countries where European white populations were largely absent. Sure you have a few stellar immigrants from “the old country” – like Google cofounder, Moscow-born Sergey Brin – but increasingly the top minds being lured to American companies, many having attended prestigious American universities, are/were people of color. The coveted high-skilled H-1B visas were going to people from India, China, Korea and other non-European venues. I might mention that Steve Jobs’ father was Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian (you know, the folks who cannot come here now). No Syrian immigrées, no Apple.

Unskilled and menial labor was covered by economic refugees from Latin America, overwhelmingly from Mexico, with second, third and further generations of Hispanics rising into California’s professions and our most senior corporate and governmental leadership positions. California has become in significant part a Hispanic land. I love that. My wife is half ethnic Mexican, born in Glendale, CA.

What we seem to be witnessing, as America splinters into irreconcilable factions, is a battle between pre- and post-WWII immigrants, mostly a battle between immigrants of the late 20th/early 21st century and those of the 19th century. Most of the newbies settled in what are now the cities and towns of the information age, where productivity is high and our future is decided, and not those built as mainstays during the industrial revolution, a bygone era. “Go West” was the cry, and they came. Cultural diversity is a hallmark of the modern world; insularity is product of a past that will never return.

I love the cultural and ethnic array of our brothers and sisters in Hawaii, and that it was a federal judge – not a “so-called judge,” Donald, appointed by a Republican president – in Washington State, responding to a filing by Washington’s Attorney General with full backing from his Governor, who shot down Trump’s rather clear anti-Muslim foray (excluding countries where he has done business) under guise of protecting us from countries from which not a single U.S. terrorist incident was born. The 9th Circuit also refused to reinstate the ban pending a full appeal.

The West Coast is seriously a long, unified cultural continuum of extreme commonality and technology… the leaders of the age of information and automation. Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Boeing, Amazon, eBay, etc., etc.  Cal Tech, Stanford, University of Washington, Berkeley, UCLA, etc., etc.  Global fashion and culture are heavily determined by us coasties. We are the present and the future, very far removed from the values and problems of the Rust and Bible Belts, whom we have subsidized for years (see the federal tax discussion below).

Our food production carries “delicious” to every corner of the land. We have our own oil and natural gas, with access to more from our super-friendly nations north and south. We’ve led the fight to improve and sustain our environment and to keep our financial institutions honest and from harming us from excessive greed. We cherish tourism and the global trade that motivates our business sector and uses our airports and harbors to capacity. It’s how we earn our living. We aren’t built on international threats and bullying; we don’t want gun laws from a bygone era when we were mostly farmers living far apart. If those aren’t your values, “great”… but please don’t impose them on us. Those are the basics in California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii, reflecting our deepest respect for our fellow mankind and our planet… God’s gift to us, however you define your faith.

And we get a pretty raw tax deal from the rest of the country too. California (population 39 million), for example, only gets back 78 cents for every dollar we pay in federal taxes. Washington State (population 7.1 million) gets back 88 cents, Oregon (population 4 million) 98 cents. Our tax dollars wind up supporting other states. Okay, Hawaii takes about 12% more from the feds than it pays in taxes, but that is still a pretty small number given its population (1.4 million). According to The Atlantic (5/5/14), Mississippi “gets back about $3 in federal spending for every dollar they send to the federal treasury in taxes. Alabama and Louisiana are close behind… South Carolina: The Palmetto State receives $7.87 back from Washington for every $1 its citizens pay in federal tax.” Bible Belt welfare. California alone would be the sixth largest economy on earth if we were a separate nation. Add Washington, Oregon and Hawaii and…

Until you understand that any attack on recent immigrants is an intolerable attack on the essence of California, you can never understand why there are lots and lots of Californians (perhaps a majority) who see Donald Trump as having declared war on us. Our neighbors, families, friends, co-workers and local businesses are a mix of all sorts of religions, cultures and races. We don’t tolerate these differences, we thrive with them.

We eat well, invent and create like no other part of the country and ride the cutting edge of the future because of that diversity. It is who we are. Allow unbridled industrial effluents to pollute our air and water, release financial institutions from requirements of transparency and honesty, build a wall to tear our world into shreds, break-up families, threaten and clearly discriminate against religious, gender or ethnic groups and you declare your undying hatred of who we are, the whole damned West Coast (including Hawaii), especially California.

To see this clearly, you have to understand how California’s “recent immigrants” differ from the “immigrants of the last two centuries” of most of the rest of the United States; we need to look at hard demographics. The United States as a whole is 64% non-Hispanic white, 12.6% black and 16.3% Hispanic, with that latter statistic very heavily-weighted by California. Our religious make-up is reflected in the above map from Wikipedia, and that yellow-gold Evangelical/Baptist bloc is anything but subtle. While California has its fair share of Evangelicals – we actually do believe in freedom but not the tyranny of religion – we are a much broader mix (more on this below).

Here are California’s statistics: White (non-Hispanic) 42.3%, Hispanic 37.6% (Largest groups are Mexican, Salvadoran, & Guatemalan), Asian 14.9% (largest groups are ethnic Filipino, Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, Korean & Japanese), and African American 7.2%. We are 32% Protestant, 28% Roman Catholic (heavily Hispanic), 27% not religious (much higher in Washington and Oregon), 2% each practice Judaism or Hinduism, and 1% each are Muslim or Mormon. But in sheer numbers, California contains even more of America’s diversity.

According to Wikipedia using US Census data: “California has the most Roman Catholics in the United States, ahead of New York State, as well as large Protestant, non-religious, Jewish, and Muslim populations. It also has the largest Mormon population outside of Utah. The state also has a large American Jewish community, the largest in the western U.S., mainly concentrated in Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, San Francisco, Oakland,Sacramento and Palm Springs. It also has large Muslim communities in west Los Angeles, San Diego, Beverly Hills, Orange County, Santa Clara County, and the Modesto area.”

So let me put this to those who think that Donald Trump’s vision of America needs to be shared by all of us. The West Coast will never share those values or that perception. And if it is essential for Trumpists to live in a country where that vision is the national image, then let those parts of America who strongly disagree leave Trumpists to their alternative fact mythology. Out here on the Left Coast, we do not need to be made “great again.” We like who we are right now.

Need to change our values and who we are? By force if necessary? Then let us coasties leave the dis-United States of America. Let us form our own new nation that really will be based on those American constitutional values we do hold dear. There may be others – from New England down to Virginia or Northern Illinois and parts of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, maybe New Mexico and Colorado – who may want to join us or create their own new countries. You Trumpists can teach creationism, deny science, control women’s bodies, pollute your rivers, streams and aquifers, practice legal racial or religious discrimination, but we want no part of that. Before we start shooting at each other, however, please “rest of America,” let my people go! Peacefully. And no, Donald, we really don’t want to be controlled into your vision of America.

I’m Peter Dekom, and either we need to get back to the promises inherent in our constitution or it is time for the rest of America to let there be a separation of blue from red without violence.

The Biggest Canaries in the Global Coal Mine

If you are an evolution skeptic, you can skip this first two paragraphs of this blog and move down to the third paragraph. But for those who adhere to that Darwinian view, human beings are actually primates. According to SmithsonianMag.com, “[Humans] share more DNA with lemurs, monkeys and apes than they do with other mammals. Genetic research of the last few decades suggests that humans and all living primates evolved from a common ancestor that split from the rest of the mammals at least 65 million years ago. But even before DNA analyses, scientists knew humans belong in the primate order. Carl Linnaeus classified humans with monkeys, apes and other primates in his 18th-century taxonomic system. Even the ancient Greeks recognized similarities between people and primates. Today, anthropologists recognize several physical and behavioral traits that tie humans to primates.”

So you’d think that if there were a trend towards the massive extinction of most primates around the world, even if that might not yet apply to human beings, this just might signal a warning for Earth’s entire ecosystem, including for our own survival. It would tell you that there are factors all around us making life increasingly untenable for a related species, and as much as well may like furry little monkeys, lemurs and bigger apes because they are cute, the ability to survive is a pretty direct and immediate indication of planetary degradation that, sooner or later, will knock on our door as well.

So let’s look at the state of life for our fellow primates. “A future without primates outside of humans seems unthinkable, but an extensive review of ape, monkey, tarsier, lemur and loris populations finds that 60 percent of all primates are now threatened with extinction, and about 75 percent are declining in numbers.

“The review, the most comprehensive of its kind to date and published in Science Advances, paints a dire future for our closest biological relatives. Their only hope hangs on global conservation becoming an immediate priority, the international team of authors says.

“‘It is possible that some primates will go extinct in our lifetimes if we don't increase our efforts dramatically,’ Russell Mittermeier, a primatologist who is the president of Conservation International, told Seeker from a Madagascar airport.

“Madagascar is one of just four countries—with Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo being the other three—that host two-thirds of all species of primates. Mittermeier, who is also the chair of the IUCN/SSC Primate Specialist Group, explained that ‘primates are largely tropical rainforest animals,’ and these countries have such habitat, although these once-lush landscapes are shrinking across the planet.

“A species of monkey might have already gone extinct during your lifetime: Miss Waldron's red colobus monkey. It was reportedly last seen in 1978… Paul Garber, who co-led the new study with Alejandro Estrada, said, ‘Several species of lemurs, monkeys and apes—such as the ring-tailed lemur, Udzunga red colobus monkey, Yunnan snub-nosed monkey, white-headed langur and Grauer's gorilla—are down to a population of a few thousand individuals.’ Garber added, ‘In the case of the Hainan gibbon, a species of ape in China, there are fewer than 30 animals left.’” Seeker.com, January 18^th 

Meanwhile, an overpopulated (person-wise) earth – 7.4 billion (expected to be 8.5 billion by 2030 and 9.6 billion by 2050) – which is experiencing the hottest average global temperatures in recorded history, is reeling from dramatic changes in our environment. The concomitant growing need for food and housing, the exploration for fossil fuels, lumber and minerals, has pressed humanity to dig, chop, blow-up, over-fish and deforest everywhere. What damage man has failed to inflict directly by tearing up the land and sea, he has done indirectly by the unrivaled emission of greenhouse gasses that have pushed temperatures upwards resulting in new deserts (floods elsewhere), driving millions of farmers from their sustenance and livelihoods.

These disenfranchised farmers, particularly in Syria and Iraq, have become the backbone of global terrorism against the richer countries in the West. They have also launched mega-waves of masses of migrants – with survival and not terrorism on their minds – moving from the Middle East to Europe and across Africa as farms wither and blow away in the dust. They define the current and expanding clashes of civilization that we see all around the Earth. They also define the right-wing backlash against immigrants (and non-Judeo-Christians) that has enveloped not only the United States but most of Europe.

So that extinction of non-human primates apparently is also happening to humans at many levels. Nature may need us to turn against each other, to foment more wars and murderous criminality, simply to cull the human herd. Famine, plague, pestilence and war… working in homicidal harmony to stop our unsustainable assault on the environment.  It does seem to be all around us. And no matter how much humans can create mythology – that we are not responsible for these horrors, that the environment is a gift to humankind from God to exploit without bounds – nature is not bound to follow mythology. She seems to be content with the laws of physics. The hoax is on us.

I’m Peter Dekom, and that knocking on our environmental door sounds increasingly like an attempt to break that door down completely… and we really do not want to see what is waiting for us on the other side.

In No One We Trust; Our New Flawed Democracy

The Intelligence Unit of the Economist provides global analytical research intended to help corporate and governmental leaders make informed decisions. Of late, they have become concerned with the degradation in democratic values around the world. Their 2016 Democracy Index – in an article entitled The Revenge of the Deplorables, created well before Donald Trump assumed the presidency – presents some sobering statistics on how democracies are faring the our modern world. Here are some of its key findings.

“According to the 2016 Democracy Index almost one-half of the world’s countries can be considered to be democracies of some sort, but the number of ‘full democracies’ has declined from 20 in 2015 to 19 in 2016. The US has been downgraded from a ‘full democracy’ to a ‘flawed democracy’ because of a further erosion of trust in government and elected officials there. [See the above chart]

“The ‘democratic recession’ worsened in 2016, when no region experienced an improvement in its average score and almost twice as many countries (72) recorded a decline in their total score as recorded an improvement (38). Eastern Europe experienced the most severe regression…

“Popular trust in government, elected representatives and political parties have fallen to extremely low levels in the US… This has been a long-term trend and one that preceded the election of Mr. Trump as US president in November 2016. By tapping a deep strain of political disaffection with the functioning of democracy, Mr. Trump became a beneficiary of the low esteem in which US voters hold their government, elected representatives, and political parties, but he was not responsible for a problem that has had a long gestation.”

To understand the thrust of the above analysis, the January 25^th AOL.com provides this summary: “A cumulative score below 8.0 drops a country out of the ‘full democracy’ ranks and into those of ‘flawed democracies,’ where the US now keeps company with countries that include Italy, Botswana, Sri Lanka, and Mexico.

“Dragging the country's score down was its rating in the ‘functioning of government’ (7.14) and ‘political participation’ (7.22) categories… The EIU cites multiple ‘long-standing reasons’ for the decline in the country's government function ranking, including ‘ideological entrenchment of congressional representatives’ leading to ‘bitter partisanship.’

“‘The upshot is a stronger emphasis on ideological purity and less appetite for compromise, which reinforces a lack of confidence in Congress among voters. Nevertheless, respect for the constitution and democratic values are deeply entrenched as a result of centuries of democratic practice. For urgent and crucial decisions majorities can normally be obtained, but solutions to long-term problems often fall victim to deadlock.’”

The rise of “strongmen” – many elected under a constitutionally-defined process in purported democracies – and the wild “economic miracle” success (with a few bumps along the way) of non-democratic China (the PRC) have created a new model of the “ideal form of government” in the minds of billions around the world. The U.S. has become dysfunctional, its congress deadlocked, its federal deficit astronomical, its voting laws manipulated and increasingly exclusionary, income inequality polarized as never before, and its economic future muddled as its middle class rapidly contracts downward.

Once held high in the eyes of aspirants in the developed world, the perception of America has dwindled into that of a corrupt bully that has supported (and seems to be on the verge of resurrecting) torture against its enemies. We can add to that a new government that raises white Christian traditionalists to become our new shot callers, banning Muslims, Mexicans, generally people of color and poor people from all over the world. Our new strongman pledges to make us… what else… strong (great?) again by retreating into the past – the America of the era before the Soviet Union fell (the 1950s through the 1080s) and undoing what technology and an over-connected world have done since.

We have never been so fractured, at each other’s throats and mistrusting in our government at any time since our Civil War. We are no longer a shining light of democracy to the rest of the world, which nevertheless seems to be following in our populist footsteps. Almost no one in our country seems to care about middle ground or compromise; gray seems to have been purged from our body politic. It’s black or white. We’re not even trying to reach across the aisle. Democracy is no longer cherished.

If we don’t care about trying to make our democracy work, to try and find that traditional horse-traded compromise in the middle, if we insist on only black or white but never gray (aka “my way or the highway”), who exactly in this great land really believes that we can hold together and survive as the greatest economic and political power on earth? And if we genuinely no longer want to be together anymore, exactly how do we implement the break-up? Sorry Democrats, Republicans and Trumpists, but there really is a middle ground if we were just willing to find it. And if we don’t…

I’m Peter Dekom, and we better love it, cherish it, fight to make it work or lose the United States of America for good.

Infrastructure Cuban Style

By Mark Cuban

Dekom: We are $2 trillion behind in deferred maintenance with an archaic and under-performing infrastructure that is literally falling apart. Water systems that leak billions and billions of gallons of valuable water, highways ravaged over time with insufficient capacity to handle existing traffic, dams threatening to crack and release tidal waves of water, levees about to fail, bridges about to collapse or continue to drop steel and concrete on those underneath, etc., etc.

But a man I truly enjoy – Mark Cuban, and he’s got more energy than a nuclear power plant –wants to make sure we understand we also need to build and rebuild our infrastructure for the future, not just based on past assumptions. Cuban, serial entrepreneur and owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, blogger, and celebrity is more than slightly opinionated. He is focused on ensuring an American competitive edge which he feels is slipping away. I asked him if he’d be a guest contributor to this blog, and he suggested I use something from his own blog [12/18/16]. Shamelessly, I have. Here is what Mark has to say, and as expected, he presents a view that is uniquely his own:

I happen to be a fan of the government investing money into what is commonly called infrastructure projects.  I strongly believe that any reasonable businessperson, even one who works for the government, should be able to invest money at 1% interest rates and get a better than 2% return on taxpayer money. But I think it’s time to rethink how we spend a big chunk of that money.

If it were me spending the money, I would take 100 billion of the proposed $ 1 Trillion dollars [by Trump] in infrastructure investment and invest it in Robotics.

I would invest it in the companies that do R&D, software, and design for robots and every other facet of the Robotics Industry.

Unfortunately, none of the companies that actually make the robotics are based here in the USA. That’s a problem that needs to be solved.  We need to help develop domestic companies much like we did the electric car and wind and solar industries.  Even if it means trying to help pick winners.

We have to win the robotics race.  We are not even close right now.

A new report says China is spending far more on Robotics than we are. China, Korea, EU are offering billions in credits to support their robotics industry.  We spend about $100mm. That ain’t gonna work.

The good news, if there is any, is that according to the report China is only spending $ 3B dollars a year on robotics.   We need to quickly pass them by.

Why is this so important?  Because technological change always accelerates. It never stagnates over time. Which means we are going to face the fact that if nothing in the States changes, we will find ourselves dependent on other countries for almost everything that can and will be manufactured in a quickly approaching future.

We have to face the fact that countries are going to lose jobs to robotics.  The only question that needs to be answered is which country will create and own the best robotic technology and have the infrastructure necessary to enable it.

Right now it’s not the USA and that needs to change.

Our “infrastructure” spending should look forwards, not backwards so that we can be the robotics hub of the world.

He’s Mark Cuban, and in addition to fixing what really is broken, the United States has to figure out how to get back into technology-development leadership slot or forget about even having a future. Thank you Mark.

Going It Alone

Chinese policy planners are a both elated and somewhat terrified in their new role as heir apparent to becoming the most globally-involved nation on earth. As the Trump administration questions our contribution-to-value-received of NATO, the United Nations and various mutual defense and trade treaties around the world, China (and to lesser extent, Russia) are being provided with golden opportunities to step in to fill the void we are leaving behind. The People’s Republic of China is building infrastructure all over the developing world, entering into commodities output agreements everywhere, and looking to build a Pacific Rim trade alliance – clearly excluding the United States – to replace the Trans Pacific Partnership that the United States once pushed until Mr. Trump killed American involvement.

You have to wonder if China is looking at Mexico as an amazing opportunity. If the United States increasingly treats our southern border nation as a problem rather than one of the longest friendly borders on earth, are we forcing Mexico to align with China? Does China pick up the slack from economic loss as the US tries to figure out how to get Mexico “to pay for that wall”? What does China get in return? A right to dock her fleets, open bases, or ???? in Mexico? Cheaper commodities that Americans will have to pay dearly to replace?

We know that Muslim militant jihadist fundamentalists are cheering at the rather obvious anti-Muslim policies emanating from American leaders. As the broad American strokes seem to sweep Muslims into a broad and singular category, we are literally pushing moderate and modern Muslims into the same category with dangerous militant radicals. In addition to creating some of the best recruitment materials that jihadists have seen since the imagery from Iraqi Abu Ghraib prison, we are increasingly aligning the interests of the radicals who want to destroy us with Muslims who just want to live normal lives. There is even a growing disincentive for Muslim moderates even to try and work with us to identify jihadists, since even talking to a Western government focuses unwanted attention on them.

Yeah, but look at Europe! The Netherlands is a hotbed of anti-immigrant feelings. Just like us. So are so many eastern European nations. Then there’s Trump-lite, the UK’s Theresa May working on implementing Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, and the rise of anti-immigrant sentiments in France, reflected in the presidential election battle between anti-immigrant Trumpist Marie Le Pen and conservative François Fillon. I guess I should also mention the local fall from grace by Germany’s Angela Merkel, trying to distance herself as much as possible from her own pro-Syrian refugee policies (which she is still forced to defend). But there are a lot of Muslims living in Europe these days, many scions of several generations of European citizenship. Surely, the new world of Trump’s America is not losing its deep connectivity to Europe?

Perhaps, if you believe the statements from Donald Tusk, President of the European Council. “The European Council (French: Conseil européen), charged with defining the EU's overall political direction and priorities, is the institution of the European Union (EU) that comprises the heads of state or government of the member states, along with the President of the European Council and the President of the European Commission. The High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy also takes part in its meetings. Established as an informal summit in 1975, the European Council was formalised as an institution in 2009 upon the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon.” Wikipedia. Oh, that European Council.

In an open letter sent to European leaders on January 31^st, Tusk suggested that the United States was no longer a dependable ally in a world sparked by Russian aggression, Chinese expansionism and global terrorism. Setting the agenda for a meeting of EU leaders in Malta, his words suggest an increasingly unbridgeable rift between the United States and the mainstay of the European Union. Troubled by Trump’s unfathomable rapprochement with Putin’s Russia and his unwillingness to commit to supporting the bastions of traditional alliances against Western foes, Tusk’s words went a lot farther:

“For the first time in our history, in an increasingly multipolar external world, so many are becoming openly anti-European, or Eurosceptic at best… Particularly the change in Washington puts the European Union in a difficult situation; with the new administration seeming to put into question the last 70 years of American foreign policy…

“An increasingly, let us call it, assertive China, especially on the seas… Russia’s aggressive policy toward Ukraine and its neighbors, wars, terror and anarchy in the Middle East and in Africa, with radical Islam playing a major role, as well as worrying declarations by the new American administration all make our future highly unpredictable.” Tusk cannot dictate policy; his letter is only advisory, but clearly his words resonated with the pro-EU leaders who remain at the helm in Europe… at least so far.

Tusk noted the massive linkage between mutual investment between the United States and Europe, but also reminded European leaders that Germany’s Merkel felt force to remind Donald Trump of the Geneva Conventions requirements to protect refugees. Defending against a Trump administration charge of German currency manipulations, Merkel also admonished her allies not to be too ready to make economic concessions to Washington: “Because of that we will not influence the behavior of the E.C.B. [European Central Bank.] And as a result, I cannot and do not want to change the situation as it is.”

The post-letter debate in the EU Parliament on February 1^st wasn’t pretty. While Brexit proponent and UK representative to that Parliament, Nigel Farage, was a lone voice in support of Donald Trump’s travel ban and “America first” trade and treaty policy, speaker after speaker made it very clear that Donald Trump’s immigration policy was likely to make stopping terrorism that much more difficult and that working out a normalized new trade agreement with the U.S. was going to be exceptionally challenging. The majority of voices also suggested that the EU needed to let go of its expectations of cooperation with the United States over intelligence and mutual defense. It was obvious that Europe was expecting a linear and growing deterioration of relations with a former ally.

What really came through Tusk’s missive, the subsequent EU Parliamentary debate, and sentiments being expressed across the entire EU, is the seeming move of the United States from its status as a European ally to a possible status as a potential foe, a position that is hard to believe. “Much of the frustration Mr. Tusk displayed in his letter stemmed from what Guntram B. Wolff, director of Bruegel, a research organization in Brussels, said was Mr. Trump’s ‘de facto supporting’ of populist forces that could further upend the European order.

“Far-right populist challengers in France, Germany and the Netherlands have adopted some of his anti-establishment rhetoric in their own campaigns… Still, Mr. Wolff said it was unwise to enter into a war of words with the Trump administration. ‘We need to uphold our values here, but does it mean that we need now a declaration where we put the United States on the same level as ISIS?’ he said. ‘No, I don’t think so. I don’t think it that would be helpful in any way.’” New York Times, January 31^st.

In short, Trump’s support of political populists in Europe is seen as a rather direct challenge to that continent’s incumbent leaders, but if that populism rises to the fore, perhaps Mr. Trump’s efforts will pay off… if you accept that result as positive. What Tusk is clearly asking European leaders to do is to circle the wagons against these new American policies, to hang together and stand tall and united against American attempts to rewrite trade and mutual defense agreements to favor the United States at the expense of Europe.

Whatever happens, it probably will get a lot nastier before we settle into… well whatever we settle into. What we really need to know is that the United States cannot unilaterally dictate the end result of its renegotiation of international agreements. When an apple cart is upset, there are always lost apples and no one ever reloads the cart as it was loaded in the first place.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the configuration of global leadership changed, perhaps forever, on November 8, 2016, but we are now going to have to live in that world.