Trump’s EU Ambassador: Trump Will Only Make Trade Deals With Nations, Not the EU

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, February 6, 2017:

Ted Malloch, President Donald Trump’s proposed ambassador to the European Union, made it clear on Sunday that the administration’s goal is to destroy the European Union. During an interview on BBC on Sunday, Malloch warned that the EU is in for a rude awakening: Whether the EU powers-that-be like it or not, Trump will only deal with countries on a nation-by-nation basis. That would effectively end the supposed underlying reason for the EU.

Malloch said, “Trump won’t cow down to the powers that be. He’ll speak his mind even if it gets him in trouble or held in disregard for others. It used to be called honesty but in the age of baby talk and political correctness, and mostly bullshit, it’s now regarded as dishonesty.”

EU leaders and media supporters have seen this coming since November. Patrick Wintour, the diplomatic editor for the liberal British paper The Guardian, spelled it out last Friday:

In European eyes, figures like Malloch and Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, do not really want to end the US leadership role in Europe.

They want, in the view of the European Council president, Donald Tusk, to destroy the EU, and are … intent in doing so….

This is not a policy of non-interference. The policy is to help oversee the break-up of the EU, using the bully pulpit of the presidency and the Breitbart website to do all they can to cheer on the populist forces across Europe. Victories for nationalist parties in the Netherlands, France, Germany and Italy this year would ensure the EU’s implosion, and as such are to be encouraged.

Previous pronouncements from Malloch have confirmed that intent. In January Malloch told BBC News, “I had a previous career in a diplomatic post where I helped bring down the Soviet Union. So maybe there’s another union that needs a little taming.” Malloch was a vocal supporter of Brexit, and has predicted that the euro would collapse. He expressed his hope that all members of the European Union would hold similar referendums.

In January Malloch, in an interview on BBC One’s This Week, said that Donald Trump doesn’t like the idea of EU’s “integration”: “[He] doesn’t like an organization that is supranational, that is unelected, where the bureaucrats run amok, and is not frankly a proper democracy.”

Malloch can be best described as the insiders’ “maverick,” supporting various efforts but not buying into the ideology. He has served — he calls himself a Sherpa — on the executive board of the World Economic Forum, which hosts the Davos meeting of elites in Switzerland every year. He has held an ambassadorial position in the UN. He headed up the consulting division of Wharton-Chase Econometrics. He worked at the international banking firm Salomon Brothers. He served in senior policy positions with the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, as well as in the U.S. State Department. He is a research professor at Yale.

He’s even expressed support for the EU in the past, but usually with a qualifying disclaimer: The EU is a “very important arrangement that was largely brought about by American contributions.… For some long decades it’s been absolutely critical to the trans-Atlantic alliance and to US-Europe relations.” But he added, “I do believe it has more and more become a supranational organization with political ambitions that probably don’t fit with all of its member states’ ambitions.”

He has spoken critically of some of the EU’s top people, including European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker. Juncker, said Malloch, “was a very adequate mayor, I think, of some city in Luxembourg, and maybe he should go back and do that again.”

This has not surprisingly generated genuine concern among those top people. The liberal leader of the European Parliament, Guy Verofstadt, and the head of the European People’s Party, Manfred Weber, sent a letter to Juncker last week demanding that the EU not grant “credentials” to Malloch if Trump does in fact name him as his ambassador to the organization. The letter cited Malloch’s “outrageous malevolence against the values that define this European Union. We are strongly convinced that people seeing as their mission to disrupt or dissolve the European Union should not be accredited as official representatives to the EU.”

Nervousness bordering on panic has forced the New York Times to weigh in against Trump as Malloch’s potential employer. Steven Erlanger of the Times launched a broadside against the president: “Mr. Trump has expressed disdain for other multilateral institutions such as the European Union, His praise has been reserved for populists and strongmen, like Nigel Farage, the former leader of the U.K. Independence Party, President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and, of course, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.” Erlanger added:

Some European leaders are urging their counterparts to recognize that Mr. Trump may represent a truly dire challenge, one that threatens to upend not only the 70-year European project of integration and security, but just about everything they stand for, including liberal democracy itself.

Mark Leonard, the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, added:

Trump is the first American president since the E.U. was created not to be in favor of deeper European integration. Not only that, he’s against it and sees the destruction of the European Union as in America’s interest.

European [leaders] see Trump as the biggest threat to global order and the European ideal of how the world should be organized. The U.S. has been a crucial part of the ballast meant to be upholding the global order … in face of challenges….

But rather than acting as a check on these [challenges], Trump seems to be amplifying them, and that’s pretty terrifying.

By negotiating with the EU’s member states individually — nation-by-nation — Trump and his ambassador-to-be, Ted Malloch, hope to cut the legs out from under the primary foundational assumption that has falsely and fraudulently supported the EU’s raison d’être: that the union could obtain for them better economic performance than individually. It would end the real reason for the EU: an economic union leading inevitably to a political one as a step toward a One World Government.