America regularly embarrasses itself with the ambassadors we appoint to our closest allies. In other countries, such postings go to highly respected foreign-service officers. For us, it’s simply a pay off for campaign bundlers. Given that history, you’d have thought everyone would be delighted with Trump’s apparent choice of Ted Malloch for ambassador to the European Union.
Malloch has impeccable credentials. Suave and distinguished, he’s a professor at a respected British business school and a former Oxford visiting fellow and Yale professor. He’s written 14 books and was a high-ranking official of the UN Economic Commission for Europe and president of the CNN World Economic Development Congress.
He’s even served on the executive board of the World Economic Forum that hosts the Davos meetings, and for cosmopolitan elites that’s as close to being God’s anointed as you can come.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I learned EU officials have been signaling that they might consider Malloch persona non grata. In other words, they might assert their right to veto the appointment.
Mind you, that’s been done before. In 2008, Evo Morales’ Bolivia declared Ambassador Philip Goldberg persona non grata, and in a show of solidarity Hugo Chavez then declared Ambassador Patrick Duddy persona non grata in Venezuela. In 1952, the USSR declared Ambassador George Kennan persona non grata.
If you get my drift, such declarations are the sort of thing typically done by undemocratic governments. But then the EU isn’t much of a democracy, is it? Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the EU’s European Commission, candidly expresses his belief that a membership in a common Europe trumps the democratic wishes of voters in EU member states.
Faced with national referenda about the proposed European constitution, he has said, “of course there will be transfers of sovereignty. But would I be intelligent to draw the attention of public opinion to this fact?” When the euro was introduced, he said, “If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don’t understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.”
That’s not how democratically elected leaders talk, in public at least, but then Juncker has never been popularly elected by anyone except the voters of Luxembourg. European representatives are chosen in elections no one pays much attention to, and sit in a European parliament that’s a magnet for faceless bureaucrats, gadflies and out-and-out kooks. There are 751 parliament members, far too many for democratic deliberation, and as a body they vote as instructed on the EU leadership. That’s how Juncker got his job.
So what’s the problem with Malloch? Very simple: He’s a Trump supporter who would articulate the new administration’s vision.
He signed a pro-Trump letter I organized for scholars and writers, and like Trump he thinks that bilateral trade agreements are superior to multilateral ones. That means he’s all for a UK-US trade deal, after Brexit is worked out, and would be open to similar arrangements with other EU members should they choose to leave the European Union.
That’s not what Juncker and his EU colleagues want, obviously. Instead, they’d prefer an ambassador who’ll go native and represent the EU to America, rather than one who represents America and its new administration to the EU.
What they want is someone like Ambassador Joseph Davies, who became an apologist for the Soviet Union and whose “Mission to Moscow,” first a book and then a film, whitewashed all the horrors of Stalin’s Russia.
That’s not Malloch, and it’s driving EU leaders nuts. What they realize is that the European Union is over-large and poised to be crushed by its own weight.
Brexit is a compound word composed of “Britain” and “exit,” but you can pretty easily imagine similar words composed of the first two letters of every EU member state, plus “exit.” And were that to happen we’d offer each country a bilateral trade deal.
That wouldn’t bother Malloch. He told BBC News, “I had in a previous career a diplomatic post where I helped bring down the Soviet Union. So maybe there’s another union that needs a little taming.”
F.H. Buckley is a professor at Scalia Law School. His most recent book was “The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America.”
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