The European Union’s absurd Peace Day arrogance

The European Union aggravated me this morning when its executive body, the E.U. Commission, tweeted this.

My gripe here is not the pro-peace sentiment, but that the EU is not the great deliverer of peace that it claims. Its illustration demonstrates a clueless and false conception of how peace is earned, and where it is sustained. By using flowers to illustrate peace, for example, the EU Commission is trying to present peace as a natural dividend of its diplomacy. So how fitting that it should show the densest cluster of flowers in the Middle East, where there is no peace at all.

The even more important factor here is that where peace does prevail around the world, it has very little to do with the EU It has a lot more to do with two other factors. First, with the collective weight of the Western alliance — states like Australia, the U.S., the EU, and others — in applying pressure for peaceful resolutions by leveraging economic investment alongside coercive instruments such as sanctions. Second, in U.S. deterrence against adversarial aggression. This reality is manifested most obviously in the U.S. deterrence of Russia in Europe, but also in other areas like in deterring China’s threat to Taiwan — and note that the U.S. is the only Western nation that can truly deter China and Russia thanks to EU nations’ failure to invest in their own defense. Instead, like European Commission President Donald Tusk, they hide their own impotence behind thinly veiled attacks on the U.S.

In short, peace comes to the world not through EU flowers, but rather with a mix of American guns and dollars.