Who was the biggest victor from last week's G-7 meeting in Biarritz, France? Arguably, it was China.
And they weren't even there.
What should have happened at the summit in France was a badly needed unified statement of the G-7 powers condemning Chinese forced technology transfers, cyber espionage, high tariffs, intellectual property rights, predatory tariff policies, and human rights violations within its own borders. Instead, the European leaders with an assist from the hate Trump media portrayed the U.S. as the villain behind the global slow down and the disruption to world trade. The headlines were all the same: "Global leaders lecture Trump to end the trade war." Chinese President Xi couldn't have written the script better.
Donald Trump tried to put a smiley face on the uncomfortable and unproductive meeting of the leaders of the seven leading free-market powers. But he and all Americans can be excused if we wonder, wait, these are our closest allies? Whose side are they on?
When it comes to China and the increasing economic and security threats that the Xi government pose, the Europeans have responded like modern-day Neville Chamberlain appeasers. They seem to think that coddling China will end its corrupt practices. That strategy worked well with the Soviet Union in the 1960s and '70s.
To be fair, the Trump administration has earned some of this European ire, due to his own missteps. His unwise and counterproductive steel and aluminum tariffs and the impending threat of auto tariffs - that would do severe damage to the German, French and Japanese economies - antagonize our friends. Trump should have offered an end to all these tariffs to help isolate China as the planet's biggest threat to global trade and harmony.
But the people who showed their true colors in France last weekend were the weak-kneed Euroland members. Once again their priorities are out of sync with any sense of reality.
Today the democratic-socialist European economies are flatlined. Germany with Its negative interest rates is battling to keep its head above recession waters, and many economists are forecasting "another lost decade" for the comatose Euro-Zone. Nationalist policies are taking hold precisely because of the failure of the Euro-elites - people like Angela Merkel - to raise living standards for the middle class. Maybe, they should be praising Trump for having the best economy of all the industrialized nations and learning from his rollback of taxes and regulations.
Instead, in the midst of the EU continent-wide growth drought, the issue the French, the Germans, Italians and others like the Canadians wanted to focus on was...climate change. Trump fumed rightfully so, that the Europeans used this occasion to browbeat the American president on global warming - clearly a sideshow from the illegal trade practices of China.