Mark Steyn explores the latest Washington, D.C., controversy.

Setting aside any “national security” concerns arising from letting The Atlantic‘s Russia-hoaxer Jeffrey Goldberg in on the Administration’s Houthi-bombing call, I doubt that any creature more sentient than an amoeba can have been surprised to learn that US cabinet members “loathe” European “freeloading”. If you’re paying attention, you’ll know that total contempt for the Euros appears to be entirely bipartisan. Are you shocked by Hegseth dismissing the Continent as “pathetic”? Well, you should have been around in the Obama era, when Victoria Nuland, She-Wolf of the Donbass, was rather pithier:

F**k the EU!

Or in the Bush era, when Ms Nuland’s house-husband Robert Kagan summed up the relationship as:

Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus.

Or a generation earlier, in the first Bush era. From General Norman Schwarzkopf, who certainly wore the uniform better than Admiral Levine, even if in terms of accomplishing strategic goals in the national interest it didn’t ultimately make much difference:Going to war without the French is like going hunting without an accordion.

I hasten to add that, when it comes to expeditionary soldiering in faraway countries of which we know little, I take neither side and nor should you. Pace Mr Kagan’s butch-boy banter, US victory in war is slipping beyond living memory. Pace Stormin’ Norman, American inability to use forty per cent of the planet’s military budget to any strategic purpose is now so deeply ingrained that I’m seriously minded to try hunting with an accordion.

So forget foreign warmongering. … [T]he entire west (America included) is now so demographically enfeebled, economically kaput and culturally self-loathing that it is no longer about Take Your Child-Bride To Work Day in Jalalabad or making a world safe for non-binary Houthis; it is about saving ourselves – and in that respect the old sneers still have some relevance.

In the last two months the forty-seventh presidency has shown such tremendous energy in the executive that illegal crossings of the southern border are down ninety-four per cent.