Give the EU the boot

OPINION:

Western Europeans love to cluck their collective tongue and roll their eyes at America for our patriotism, conservatism and traditional religious values, but what they love even more is enjoying the fruits of our labor without contributing to them.

Most members of NATO refuse to pay their agreed-upon share to the organization’s budget because they know America will pick up the military slack.

A much guiltier offender of this trans-Atlantic exploitation than NATO is the European Union, an organization founded 30 years ago to create peace and harmony in Europe but which instead seems hell-bent on destroying the continent. The EU is still clinging to the discredited far-left notions of diversity, equity and inclusion and environmental, social and governance. EU bureaucrats want to force not only European-based companies to obey these authoritarian measures but the U.S. as well, dragging down America with them.

This kind of behavior is all too common from power-hungry administrators in Brussels, where traditional imperialism has been replaced by 21st-century social engineering. Bureaucrats have replaced warlords, “though very few will admit it,” as Robert Kaplan writes in “The Return of Marco Polo’s World,” as multinational groups such as NATO, the EU and the World Economic Forum are attempts to replace, to greater and lesser extents, the function of empire.

In September, more than 20 Republican state attorneys general sent a letter exhorting President Trump to reject demands from the EU that U.S. companies incorporate these far-left policies into their decision-making.

The Republican attorneys general want the president to reject two primary directives. The first is a corporate sustainability reporting directive that includes disclosure requirements that would consume enormous resources while giving ammunition to activists for frivolous lawsuits. The second is a corporate sustainability directive, which provides for aggressive enforcement mechanisms that would bring international business to a freeze in the name of vague, undefinable and ultimately unimportant climate regulations.

“Its purpose is to disincentivize fossil fuels, investment, and economic growth, and to put bureaucrats in Brussels in charge of policies directing American operations,” the letter reads. “This cannot stand. You have successfully fought similar European Union regulations in the past, and American companies need you to champion them again.”

The leading attorneys general on the letter were Florida’s James Uthmeier and West Virginia’s John McCuskey. Others included Marty J. Jackley of South Dakota, Ken Paxton of Texas, Derek Brown of Utah, Keith G. Kautz of Wyoming, Steve Marshall of Alabama, Liz Murrill of Louisiana, Stephen J. Cox of Alaska and Lynn Fitch of Mississippi.

We salute them for taking a stand on this issue. Likewise, we are sanguine that the president will support their request. The EU has given the rest of the world, and much of Europe, zero reason to hope that it can correct course on its radical ideas. If it doesn’t, it will learn the lesson the hard way.

The political/economic alliance between post-World War II America and Western Europe has created the most prosperous, safe and stable period in human history. However, it increasingly seems less like a partnership and more like exploitation, with America’s power and generosity being taken advantage of by Western Europe (and, if we’re being honest, most of Canada, except for Alberta).

Western Europe needs us more than we need them, while Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia would love to enjoy the economic relationship with which we have spoiled Western Europe over the past 80 years. The EU resents us when we point out that our hard work makes the quality of life possible, but Americans now resent that fact much more.

• Jared Whitley has worked in the U.S. Senate, White House and defense industry. He has an MBA from Hult International Business School in Dubai.