Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to a couple of Europhiles coming to you from Italy. Lake Garda, specifically located two hours from La Serenissima Venezia and one hour from Europe's most romantic balcony in Verona. My name is Bailey Alexander, and I'm here with Francis to discuss cultural realities. And today we continue as Europe fights for its soul. Oh, the drama, the Sturman Drang, and dare I say, the Schuldenfreude. So many Americans are feeling towards our beloved continent, but we don't care, nor do they, now that I think about it. And we have lived and traveled throughout this cultural powerhouse of a continent, working alongside some of the tribes, learning, absorbing the various cultural realities. So where to start, Francis? I was thinking Romania, because you worked there for many years, you built a company, and this is really quite a flashpoint. So, hey, what say you about the people and Romania right now?
[00:01:02] Speaker B: Well, Romania is indeed a flashpoint, Bailey. The issue is, as JD Vance has very accurately stated, interference in their elections is coming from the European Union, much more so than from Russia. At least that's what it looks like if you're trying to be objective, looking at it from a distance. They have a guy, his name is Kalyn Giorgescu.
He is a nationalist.
He believes in Romania. First, he's a little bit like the Donald Trump of Romania. He doesn't want to support Ukraine. He is in favor of re establishing links with Russia and buying gas and getting rid of the sanctions and so forth and so on. He's been very upfront about that. And, you know, in the interests of their economy, it would probably be a good thing also in the interest of their safety, not to have American bases and American weapons pointed at Russia. They're on the front line. They're not actually bordered with Russia, but they are bordered with Ukraine and Moldova.
And they don't feel too comfortable being a Black Sea country as well, having all this military stuff on their doorstep. So he's got a lot of popular support.
He had about 28% in the first round of the elections, which put him in the lead. When they ran the elections, I think it was in November. And then all of a sudden, the then president Klaus Johannes basically annulled the election results with the support of the courts because they said, oh, maybe there was TikTok or maybe there was some Russ pro Kalyn Giorgescu comments floating around social media. And then they rescheduled the election for May, and now they have banned Callan Georgescu from actually running in those rescheduled elections in the Meantime, his support's gone up to about 45% of the country. The second place guy is around 20%. And the second place guy thinks it's a disgrace for Callan Georgescu not to be allowed to run because it's anti democratic. So there's a lot of furore going on in Romania. And one has to remember that Romania was the East Bloc country that actually had a violent revolution in order to free itself from Ceausescu, because they don't like being denied their democracy. Right. The police and military services ended up siding with the people back then and not deciding to get aggressive with their people. Romania has tremendous social cohesion. It's like Italy was maybe 40 years ago. Family is very, very important.
Everybody cares about their neighbors.
It's a tremendously cohesive place. And it is like that because of the Communist legacy. They didn't have anything, so they relied on each other. And it's a very dangerous thing to mess with their democracy because they will fight and actually stand up against any threats to it. And right now it looks people are talking potential new revolution in Romania. Now, maybe that's exaggerated, maybe not, but it's certainly a very volatile situation.
And in our view, they should really let the guy run, and then if they can, defeat him at the ballot box, all well and good, but actually banning him from running is one of the least democratic things imaginable. So they should really not do that. And that's what they're doing currently. And no one knows what's going to happen.
[00:05:09] Speaker A: It really is. We're just really right in the middle of it. Right. It's. It's a turbulent era. So let's move over to Macron. Macron, the French will never allow the Germans to rise again militarily, but they're really trying to put on this united front that they're going to put forth, this military, this army. What do you think is behind how some of these guys are positioning themselves?
[00:05:35] Speaker B: Look, it's ridiculous. Essentially, the globalists, shall we call them, which include Macron, the European Union and Merz in Germany, they're all trying to push this narrative that Europe is a single thing thing, and we should run it. And we should spend an incredible amount of money to beef up the military and it should get. France says it should be run by France, and Germany says it should be run by Germany. And they're all basically talking and talking. The truth is that France has no power to determine whether the Germans can rebuild their military or not. That is up to the Germans, the French, or Macron, in particular, is trying to push a narrative where he is the savior of Europe, and he's trying to pretend that he has a mandate to actually represent Europe on the international stage. And because he's representing all of Europe, his opinion matters because Europe is a large place. The truth, however, is that he doesn't even represent France. He doesn't have a majority in his parliament, and therefore he can't spend money without getting approval from his parliament, which means he has to actually negotiate with the other parties who don't like him all that much in order to get even 2 cents. So it's just talk at present from Macron. And the French people are not supportive of going massively into debt and sending their troops to fight in Ukraine because they sensibly recognize that French expeditionary force capability is probably, let's be generous, they might be able to field 30,000 people if they really tried hard. France does have an independent military. It does have its independent logistics. It could deploy a force. But 30,000 people is nothing. When the Russians have 700,000 in Ukraine, there's no way that 30,000 are going to make a difference. And the French haven't fought a real war in a long time. And the Russians have been fighting one every day for the last three years. So it's a foregone conclusion. If they do send them, they're going to be at least in a lot of trouble, if not going to get wiped out. So the French people are like, why do we need to do that? There's no reason for us to die for Ukraine. And they're protesting on the streets of Paris right now against Macron and his militaristic plans.
The European Union is taking a position on defense because they feel that America is no longer reliable.
So what they're saying is, we're going to relax the financial rules to allow countries to incur deficit spending if spending is being made for defense. Now, that they can do, right? The European fiscal rules have been set by the European Union in order to protect the euro. And if they choose to relax those rules, countries can go into debt to finance defense, but the actual decision of whether to do that or not belongs to the country. Italy, for example, is unlikely. They're going to spend some more money on defense, but they're not going to quadruple their defense budget just because the European Union says they can.
Bologna's government would never survive that, because both her coalition partners and the people don't want to spend the money on bullets, right? They want to spend the money on Social services and things that matter to the Italian people. The same in Germany.
Merz has talked a lot about how he's going to do this and he's going to do that, but he's not even the chancellor yet, so he needs to form a coalition. He very deviously tried to pass a bill that would allow him to access those funds before the new parliament is sitting. So he was relying on the old parliamentarians, who have not been reelected, in order to pass that bill. And it failed because the Greens basically balked at it. And so he doesn't even have the votes in the old parliament, let alone the new one, to make that happen. So, you know, it's a lot of talk, a lot of noise. What did Shakespeare say? Much noise and thunder signifying nothing.
That's what's going on. They're all panicking. The globalists are running around, and Europe is in a.
A time of change. We don't know what's going to happen. We don't know how it's going to work out, but we know it's changing. And things that used to be reliable and that we could count on are no longer so reliable, like the American support. And it's interesting to see what happens.
[00:10:33] Speaker A: Do you think that some of this turmoil, some of this reaction from the EU leaders is coming from the fact that Trump may or may not close down NATO? Now, some people are saying he's not saying anything of the sort, but other people suggest that NATO is like a slush fund. So if you look at Musk and Trump going after the US Aid, a lot of people look at NATO as a US Aid, as a slush fund. Do you have any thoughts on that?
[00:11:05] Speaker B: NATO is an anachronism, in my view. NATO was formed in order to counter Soviet expansion under Stalin and his subsequent leaders of the Soviet Union.
And it succeeded. Right? The Soviet Union fell, the Berlin Wall came down. Everybody thought there would be a huge peace dividend and NATO should have disbanded at the same time as the war. So pact, when all the Eastern Europeans became independent and even the Soviet Union broke AP SSRs such as Kazakhstan, the Baltic states that used to be part of the Soviet Union, and they all declared independence, including Ukraine. So, you know, yay, NATO won, okay? Since then, America kept it together primarily so it could use it as a fig leaf for its military expansion and opportunities overseas. You know, oh, my gosh, let's make NATO go into Afghanistan. Let's make NATO do stuff in the Middle East. Let's make NATO do stuff here, there and everywhere. It was never designed to do that. It was a pure defensive pact designed to protect member states from invasion from the east.
Invasion, as in somebody coming to Italian soil and. Or, you know, let's be generous, German soil or Danish soil. That's what it was for. And it's been essentially turned into something that it was never intended to be. And that is problematic, for example, for Italy, because Italy has in its constitution that it's not allowed to declare war unless it's supporting its NATO partners under Article 5. That's actually constitutional. So when NATO decides to go into places like Afghanistan, Italy is not allowed to participate, even if it wants to. So. And Italy is just one country, but there are other countries who have similar restrictions on use of force overseas. The idea was we signed up because we wanted to have a pact that would allow us all to defend each other, and it's turned into something completely different. And the expansion of NATO eastward, which was driven in large part by American foreign policy under the bushes and under, you know, the Democrats, it basically drove a lot of this and in some respects could be considered to be a contributing factor to the war that is going on at the moment. So NATO is really done. And if Trump does kill it, he will save a lot of money because the United States is bankrolling it, and he can then spend his money at home fixing all his problems and. Or in other theaters, such as Africa or Middle east or China or other places that are not the European theater. And he's right that the Europeans have freeloaded on the back of the US for their defense for some time. And if they really want defense or consider it to be essential, they should step up and pay for it themselves. So that's all true. Now, having said that, the European budgets are not designed and have never been designed to support excessive military spending. And military spending isn't really the be all and end all, because even though America claims that the amount that you spend as a percentage of your GDP is a significant figure, Russia has the second most powerful military in the world, arguably maybe even the first, and they spend one tenth as much as the Europeans currently do on defense. So maybe we should spend things a little wiser rather than just spend things for the sake of spending things. And that doesn't seem to have occurred to anybody in Europe yet.
Which means that your supposition that it's a slush fund is probably true. Somebody is pushing for this expenditure because somebody is making money. And if it was really about defense, they would spend it very differently. And the number of Percentage of your GDP is an irrelevant percentage compared to the effectiveness of where are you spending the money, how are you spending it, and is it good for defending your countries? So, you know, there's a big lot of questions in that. It's a big furball. And Europe is completely blindsided by the American attitude and they haven't figured out what their response is going to be yet. So there's a lot of noise and little, little real concrete something you can grab and analyze to determine what's really happening.
[00:16:01] Speaker A: I think one would argue this is in Trump's mind, at least from what we can garner, is that he's ready for the reset he's done with Europe. He will deal with them on a bilateral basis, which is fine, certainly fine by Italy. But Germany and France really don't want to be figuratively, if not literally taken off the world stage. I mean, Trump wants to focus on Putin, he wants to focus on doing business with Putin, he wants to focus on the Antarctic, he wants to focus, he probably wants to focus on Putin helping him solve the Middle East. Myriad of issues going on over there. Obviously, Putin has played a part, has he not, in the past?
[00:16:47] Speaker B: Well, your language is interesting, Bailey, because you talk about Trump and you're right to talk about Trump, because Trump wants to do this. You don't say the USA wants to do this because you know that there's a large number of people in the USA who disagree with Trump and therefore you can't speak about the country as a whole. You're talking about the president and his administration and what he's trying to do. In the same way, you say France doesn't want this and Germany doesn't want that. Look, Merkel, not Merkel, but Merz and Macron don't want those things. But France is on the verge of getting, kicking him out. He doesn't have control of his own parliament. And, you know, if you had to take a popularity poll, people in France who agree with Macron's position, there would be quite few compared to the other side. And merits isn't even Chancellor yet, so. And it's maybe he won't be Chancellor, given his serious number of missteps that he's making. Instead of focusing on building the coalition that he needs, he's running around doing all sorts of shit that is making him even more unpopular than he was before before. So at the end of the day, those two individuals are still trying to drive the globalist train, but they haven't realized that somebody has decoupled the carriages and they're basically racing along the track and nothing's following them. Right. So, you know, eventually they'll figure it out and they'll have to go back with their tail between their legs to find out where what happened to all the carriages, and then they'll figure out what they're going to do. But at the moment, it's still very chaotic and it's very premature to speak about the policy of the individual countries. Right. I would say that Giorgia Meloni is firmly in charge of Italy. Her popularity is growing. She was popularly elected. She's not likely to lose her seat anytime soon. So you could take some extrapolation from her positions as to what Italy's positions are, although you have to take that with a grain of salt because she has coalition partners who disagree with some of her things. And if the disagreement gets too large, there'll be new elections. So, you know, you have to take things comme CI comme sa as they come. Let's figure out what's going on. But one thing is for sure, Europe is not over. A lot of people are talking about Europe is over. And first of all, there is no Europe. Europe is a continent. It's full of wonderful cultural diversity, as we all know and we've spoken about on our podcast several times. We have differences of every kind, shape and whatever. We have a lot of different cultures and old cultures, cultures that have been there for thousands of years, the Greeks, the Italians, to some extent. You know, Europe has been the cradle of culture and democracy and civilization for a long time, and it's going to continue to survive afterwards. The. The shape of it may change and the direction, the importance is going to change, much like it has in the States over the election recently. Sure, Europe can change, but it's not over. Right. Europe will always be there long after we're gone. So that's my 2 cents on the topic.
[00:20:02] Speaker A: Well, when you look at, When I. When you think of Merits and Macron, and then of course, you think of Starmer, which I never consider the uk we think of Starmer, I don't much. But more importantly, I don't think of the UK as part of Europe, and I'm certainly not alone in that. There's a very tiny bridge that connects it to Paris. And beyond that, not much. But my point is that this drama has been so interesting to watch unfold. Like I said, Merits and Macron, and some of the players are just posturing in such a way, and yet Meloni is trying to find her way. You and I Live in Italy. And we're surprised at how well Italy is doing. I mean, part of its style in general, stay under the radar. You know, they, like I said, the day after the war broke out, they quietly went down south and secured contracts for the TransMed pipeline. Our gas has not increased. They just received a $40 billion investment from the UAE. And of course, there's Starlink. Now you've brought up some issues about Starlink because obviously Maloney has a close working relationship with, with Musk. Maybe they're looking at Starlink. That Starlink is under review, right?
[00:21:18] Speaker B: Because yeah, I mean, you're talking about national security, okay, which is an overused term because like in America everything is national security. But in Italy, you know, some things are national security, right. If you're military, it depends on a communications network that can be switched off by a foreign billionaire at any time when he wishes, then it's not a very good thing for your national security. Right. So, you know, you need to control. The French are very wise about this. They have, they have done this for, for decades. The French, unlike the British and, and several others, they've always built their own military equipment. They don't want to be dependent on anybody else for their defense. Right. They have their own planes, they have their own tanks, they have their own stuff. And Italy, it buys a fair amount of foreign equipment, but also makes quite a few of its own equipment, the Ariete tanks and the Centauros. And Leonardo is one of the biggest aviation players.
So we do make our own, and we are making our own F35s under license from the U.S.
but you know, if, if we're dependent on command and control on a system that could be flipped off with a switch by somebody sitting outside of Italy, that's a, that's a concern. And Maloney, despite having very close links with Musk and you know, Starlink is building a factory in Italy to produce stuff. It's great, wonderful. You don't want to actually sign a contract that puts your military in hawk to Elon. And they only have to look at Ukraine and the threat that Musk has of being able to switch off their communications right when they're in the middle of a war to realize why it's a really bad idea to rely on private enterprise to fill these mission critical roles in society. Defense is a national thing. It's not a thing that you buy from somebody else.
[00:23:30] Speaker A: So what about the other countries? What about what, what's going on with India and Brazil and the brics? Do you have any Anything to say about that?
[00:23:38] Speaker B: Yeah, India is great. Its economy is growing.
The brics are doing very well. They have very cheap resources. They buy their gas and so forth from Russia, and they're building their economy, doing well. India in particular, is. Is the world's largest democracy, and they have had a policy of not being told what to do by anyone for the longest time.
Their foreign minister, Jashankar is very experienced. He's a little bit like Lavrov, and he goes around and they always question him, why don't you set up sanctions against this? And why have you done this and why are you doing that? Don't you realize you're supporting the war? He said, listen, I'm managing stuff for India. India first, as Trump would say, you know, I'm going to continue to do stuff for India. If Trump can bring a deal that basically is bigger and better for India than the brics India is forced to choose, then, you know, great. But it had better be better than the brics. If it's worse than the brics, India is going to stay with the brics. Why wouldn't they? They're looking out for over a billion people in their own economy.
They're doing much better than they used to be doing. I mean, I went over there a few times last year, year before, and it's changed tremendously in the last 10 years.
They've modernized, they've cleaned the place up.
It looks completely different. It's a place that's going places.
It's all happening in India. Same in China. I haven't been there, but I read a lot about it, and I see the reports. China is also doing really well. They do have some demographic issues with their aging population. India doesn't. But in the end, their governments have been totally focused on doing what. What Trump is now trying to do, which is putting their country and their countrymen first and doing the things that are. That they can to improve the lives of their citizens.
Europe is really swimming. The last time I was in China was maybe 10 or 15 years ago now, but, you know, I was in India last year. So it's a.
[00:26:00] Speaker A: So I heard they're trying to make.
[00:26:01] Speaker B: A train that goes a thousand kilometers an hour. Yeah, to do that, you probably need to go into maglev technology.
The Chinese are doing little things, but the problem with that is it needs to be super reliable because it's difficult to keep the. That working. So.
[00:26:21] Speaker A: So what are your thoughts about the uk?
[00:26:23] Speaker B: Well, UK is.
I don't know. They don't know what they're doing. Unfortunately, the UK is in bad shape. They have essentially over the decades destroyed their manufacturing capability. So they have a services based economy which is based on essentially looking after other people's money, mostly in London. They have a huge disparity of wealth between London and the rest of the country. If they were part of Europe, London would be by far the richest region in Europe and the rest of the country is amongst the poorest in all of Europe. It's poorer than Poland, it's poorer than Romania. I mean, they've been overtaken by those countries outside of London. So, you know, they have issues with the imbalance, they've got issues with their currency, they have issues with overspending, they're spending very, very poorly on the military and their military situation is pretty awful.
And you know, they talk like they are military power, but they really don't have the wherewithal to take on Russia, even though they talk like they do. So Starmer is also doing a lot of things that he promised not to do when he got elected. And there's quite a bit of unrest in the uk similar to what's going on in Romania, with riots on the streets.
The threat now for Starmer is coming from Nigel Farage and the Reform Party, which seems to have taken over a lot of the ex Tory voters. So I, I think at the next election it should be interesting to see whether or not reform becomes a major party and either wins the election or becomes the official opposition. So that's interesting. Another interesting thing is that they are just the worst spying nation in the world, right? Apple has just switched off encryption for their machines because the UK government wanted a backdoor into the encryption worldwide so that they could spy on everybody and read everybody's private information. And Apple refused because it's none of the UK and nobody's business in the UK what people in the rest of the world do with their data and information.
So what they did was they just switched it off for us for UK customers to avoid fines from the UK government for not providing this back door that they were asking for. And that has led to serious discontent amongst the UK people. They, they don't like being spied on, even though their government just doesn't have any rules there whatsoever. So, you know, it's, it's in a situation where they don't really have constitutional protections against this sort of thing because they're one of the few countries in the world that doesn't have constitution. So they have to rely on Parliament. And when Parliament is voting for these Things it begins to look a lot like what JD Vance says it looks like, which is elect elected dictatorship.
And that's a problem for the Americans and it's a problem for the British citizens, if only they would realize it. And the rest of the world just doesn't care anymore. So, you know, whatever they do, do it, do it on your island and just stay out of everybody's hair.
[00:30:01] Speaker A: Do you remember when we lived in Paris? We lived in Paris from 2006 to 2009. And you were in London, you were meeting a friend of yours named Mike, and you guys were going to take a road trip from London to Paris on your motorcycles and you went through a. What did you do? You were at a mall or something. And do you remember in the, in the kiddie section they had these fake videos?
[00:30:26] Speaker B: Yeah. So we went on a motorcycle ride from London to. We're actually heading towards Malta and we stopped in Paris. But in England, when we, when we got to the waiting area for the, for the tunnel, there is a children's park, you know, with swings and seesaws and other stuff. And they had fake traffic cameras in, in the park, sort of observing the park. They weren't real cameras.
[00:31:00] Speaker A: They were installed, but it was training.
[00:31:02] Speaker B: Them, they're training the children to understand that there's cameras everywhere. London has more cameras per square meter than any other place, you know, and it's so that the police can watch the muggers and the rapists from every angle possible from their little control rooms because they don't have any actual people on the. To prevent the crime, but they sure have pictures of the crime. No matter what you. It hasn't stopped the crimes from happening, but they have pictures of everything and they use it to identify, you know, they've got software that can identify people. So if you attend a meeting or a rally or something, then the police are going to put you on a list somewhere and it's. It's like North Korea in some ways.
[00:31:52] Speaker A: What is a different state of mind and really what it, what it showcases, what it highlights are the different cultural realities. And we care a great deal about cultural realities because we've experienced a lot of them. And you know, once you stop projecting and start absorbing, it's. It's quite a trip. Okay, I think it's time to wrap up and thank you so much for listening. Of course, I'd like to mention my book. It's called Personal Legends of Piemonte. And I'm happy to announce I'll have a book signing in Rome in the eternal city on April 10th at the almost Corner Bookshop. And if you're brushing up on your Italian and getting ready for a trip to Italy, Personal Legends is written in both English and Italian together. The first half is in English and the second is in Italian. So you can not only read about people fulfilling their destiny, you can learn a little Italian. So hey, please check out my website on BaileyAlexander.com for further information. Book signings, giveaways, little films, and oh so much more. So hey, thank you so much for listening and ciao for now. River D'Arci.
