There is an annoying kind of dishonesty that passes, in elitist circles, for diplomacy. For at least three decades, European governments practiced it to perfection. They attended summits, issued public statements, committed themselves to targets they never intended to meet, and relied on the assumption that Washington would cover the gap between their stated goals and their actual decisions.
What ended this status quo was not a policy shift but a linguistic shock. President Donald Trump said, in plain language, what NATO’s reports had been saying in bureaucratic prose for decades: Europe was not paying its way. The substance was not new. The language was: blunt, undiplomatic, occasionally rude, and maddening. But consider what that language actually did: it made the unsayable, sayable.
