As Glenn Reynolds has reminded us, the EU has been the major funder of the Palestinians in Gaza and is well aware that 250 million Euros-odd a year of their funding goes to buying weapons for attacking Israel.  Eleven years ago, European Union Parliament member Ilka Schroeder noted that the Europeans saw themselves as the future global power and that, in effect, their support for the Palestinians should be understood as a proxy war by the Europeans against the United States.  That sounds bizarre but the Europeans have done it before.

Decades ago the Europeans realised that their anti-business regulations made them uncompetitive with the United States.  Instead of improving themselves they decided to hobble American industry using global warming as the pretext.  Thus the baseline year for determining change in emissions of carbon dioxide is 1990.  That is the year that communism fell apart in Eastern Europe and coal consumption there plunged.  So meeting the emissions reductions the Europeans demanded of others would be a shoe-in for themselves.  Twenty years have passed since then and now the United States is also led by people who got their anti-Americanism with their mother’s milk.  The EPA is attempting to hobble American industry without any goading from the Europeans.

So Gaza should be considered as the second front in a European war on the power and influence of the United States.  The perfidious Europeans, having burnt through most of their own coal and oil and realising how parlous their position is, are now asking for a legally binding commitment guaranteeing the export of oil and gas from the United States.  Let the lights go out in Europe.  The Europeans need a cathartic event to get their house in order.

David Archibald, a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C., is the author of Twilight of Abundance: Why Life in the 21^st Century Will Be Nasty, Brutish, and Short (Regnery, 2014)