Can Europe Step Up?
If Europeans see the Trumpian moment as an opportunity, the question is what they will do with it—and how it will affect the United States.
BRUSSELS—It’s become an article of faith that the U.S. is withdrawing from the world, and a reflex to blame Donald Trump for it. It’s also largely fictitious. Some 34,000 U.S. troops are in the Gulf, at least 14,000 in Afghanistan, 70,000 or so in North East Asia, and roughly 62,000 in Europe. Many of those numbers are growing under his presidency, alongside the list of countries in which the U.S. wages counterterrorism military operations. The picture President Trump presented in his State of the Union was not, in fairness, that of a detached America. It was of a chest-thumping America that wishes to free itself of the shackles supposedly hindering an already aggressive war on . It was of a
