The costs of Trump’s contempt are starting to show

I was recently in Shenzhen, the heart of China’s industrial machine, talking to one of that country’s legendary businessmen. I asked him about the Iran war and his response surprised me. “For us, Trump’s attack on Iran is less consequential than his threat to attack Greenland,” he told me. “When he did that, to America’s oldest allies, I knew that Europe would not follow America’s approach to China.”

In the United States, President Donald Trump’s periodic insults hurled toward Europe tend to get treated as routine tantrums, part of the reality TV show that is now the White House. But in Europe, the accumulation of abuse has reached a tipping point. “The war in Iran ... has forced Europe to grow a spine,” Daniel DePetris recently wrote in the U.K. edition of The Spectator, a conservative and (usually) ardently pro-American magazine. “European leaders are no longer interested in dropping to their knees and groveling to stay on Trump’s good side.”

To read the full article, please click here.