The Talarico catch by Howard Morton

There is definitely something comically about the Republican panic surrounding James Talarico. Here is a young Texas Democrat who talks about Christianity without treating it as a political weapon, about faith without turning it into a loyalty test and about government without pretending that every social problem can be solved by shouting “America” loudly enough. He is, inconveniently for the Republican establishment, exactly the sort of politician conservative America once claimed to want.

Talarico is a good Christian, a Texan, articulate, young and thoroughly comfortable discussing morality. He does not arrive wrapped in the cultural armour of the professional culture warrior. And that may be precisely why he is dangerous.

The modern Republican Party has become extraordinarily dependent on defining Christianity as a property of the political right. Its politicians routinely present themselves as defenders of faith while treating compassion, poverty, immigration, education, and the dignity of strangers as optional accessories. Talarico exposes the contradiction simply by asking what Christianity actually demands of those who claim to practise it.

That is an uncomfortable question in a movement increasingly addicted to political theatre. Donald Trump, meanwhile, has never seemed particularly interested in Christianity as a theological tradition. He is interested in Christianity as political architecture: a constituency, a symbol, a voting bloc, a vocabulary of belonging. Talarico represents something much more troublesome, a Christian who does not require Trumpism to validate his faith.

So the attacks begin. The accusations, distortions and increasingly elaborate attempts to portray Talarico as something sinister are not really about him. They are about controlling the boundaries of acceptable political Christianity. If a Democrat can speak about Jesus, morality and compassion while simultaneously challenging Republican orthodoxy, the monopoly becomes considerably harder to maintain.

This is why misinformation becomes useful. When an opponent cannot comfortably be defeated on the substance of his argument, the argument itself becomes the target. A young politician can be turned into a caricature, a sentence can be stripped of its context, a policy position can be transformed into an accusation about his character, and suddenly the public is debating an imaginary Talarico rather than the real one.

It is an old political trick, but Trump has industrialised it. There is also something deeply Texan about the irony. Texas politics has long cultivated the mythology of the independent individual: someone who speaks plainly, distrusts central authority and answers to conscience rather than fashion. Yet the Republican establishment increasingly expects precisely the opposite from its members, a remarkable discipline of obedience.

Talarico's greatest offence may therefore be that he refuses to behave according to the script. He is young enough to represent a generational change, Christian enough to challenge the Republican claim to religious ownership, Texan enough to puncture the stereotype that progressive politics is somehow alien to Texas, and rhetorically skilled enough to make the argument in public without apologising for it.

That combination is unsettling. Trump's political machine understands something important: ridicule is harmless only when nobody listens to the person being ridiculed. If the target is articulate, authentic and capable of attracting people outside the traditional partisan tribe, ridicule becomes defensive rather than dismissive. It tells the audience that the target has entered dangerous territory.

And perhaps that is the real Talarico problem. He does not need to become a Republican to understand Texas. He does not need to abandon Christianity to reject Trumpism. He does not need to shout louder than his opponents to make them nervous.

Sometimes the most threatening politician is simply the one who walks into a room carrying an inconvenient moral vocabulary and refuses to let the people who have monopolised it tell him he has no right to use it.

For Trump and his Republican allies, that is considerably more frightening than another Democrat screaming from the opposite side of the barricade. It is the possibility of a different Texas. And that is the one thing political machines fear most.

The billionaire’s far-right ATM by Jemma Norman

Amazingly, parties that spend their days denouncing global elites somehow become extraordinarily popular with global billionaires. Reform UK can rail against Westminster, Brussels, immigrants, woke institutions and the metropolitan establishment, while the cheques arrive from people whose wealth is so enormous that ordinary democracy begins to look like a quaint hobby practised by the middle classes.

Now comes another injection of questionable millions from the cryptocurrency universe, the latest reminder that the far right has discovered an extraordinarily convenient political principle: capitalism is dangerous when it belongs to foreigners, but wonderfully patriotic when it belongs to your donors.

The contradiction should be embarrassing. Instead, it has become the business model. Reform UK presents itself as the voice of the forgotten British citizen, the angry pensioner, the squeezed taxpayer, the person who believes the country has been stolen from them. Yet its political ecosystem increasingly resembles something rather different: an investment portfolio in which wealthy individuals place enormous sums on a particular version of Britain they hope will eventually reward their interests.

And hovering over this international carnival of billionaire political activism is Elon Musk, who has somehow transformed himself from technology entrepreneur into a roaming political weather system. He appears wherever the far right needs oxygen, money, publicity or a spectacularly wealthy man willing to shout into the microphone.

Musk's political interventions have developed their own peculiar grammar. He talks endlessly about freedom while boosting movements whose politics often depend upon making other people's lives less free. He presents himself as an enemy of establishment power while using his extraordinary personal influence to bend political conversations towards causes that happen to coincide remarkably well with his own ideological and commercial interests.

The remarkable thing is not that a billionaire has political opinions. Billionaires are allowed opinions, just as everyone else is. The problem begins when private wealth acquires the capacity to turn those opinions into political infrastructure.

Money does not merely buy advertisements. It buys attention. Attention becomes visibility. Visibility becomes legitimacy. Legitimacy becomes electoral momentum. And suddenly a political movement that might once have been dismissed as the angry corner of the internet is sitting in parliament, writing policy and presenting itself as the authentic national voice.

This is the strange new aristocracy of democratic politics: not hereditary dukes in velvet robes, but cryptocurrency billionaires, technology tycoons and platform owners carrying smartphones instead of swords.

The far right understands the arrangement perfectly. It offers billionaires something traditional parties increasingly struggle to provide: uncomplicated politics. No tedious conversations about inequality. No awkward questions about workers' rights. No philosophical wrestling with why concentrated wealth might itself be a problem. Instead, point towards migrants, minorities, bureaucrats, judges, environmentalists, universities or whatever other convenient enemy is available that morning.

The billionaire gets influence. The populist gets money. The voter gets another angry speech about taking the country back.

Everyone appears to win except democracy. There is, of course, nothing inherently suspicious about wealthy people donating to political parties. Democracy permits political participation, including generous political participation. But democracy becomes unhealthy when political influence begins resembling a luxury product available only to those wealthy enough to purchase it.

That is the deeper danger behind the latest millions. The question is not simply who gave the money, or how much. It is what kind of political system we are constructing when movements claiming to represent ordinary people increasingly depend upon extraordinary fortunes.

Perhaps the most revealing irony is that the far right constantly warns ordinary citizens that someone else is controlling their country. Sometimes that someone is an immigrant. Sometimes it is Brussels. Sometimes it is a university professor. And sometimes, apparently, it is a billionaire standing behind the cheque.

The politics of the covered face by Yash Irwin

The balaclava, that humble knitted garment once associated with bank robbers, burglars and exceptionally cold fishermen, has acquired a new political career. It is now apparently part of the national argument about protest.

There is a perfectly reasonable argument for restricting face coverings when they are being used to conceal identity while committing violence or intimidation. A democracy cannot seriously defend the right to demonstrate as a right to become anonymous while threatening everyone else. If someone throws a bottle at a police officer and then hides behind a mask, society has a legitimate interest in knowing who that person is.

But the difficulty begins when governments and police forces start treating anonymity itself as suspicious. The right to protest has never been merely the right to stand politely in a designated area holding a professionally printed placard while remaining perfectly identifiable to the state. Protest exists precisely because sometimes people are angry with the state. Historically, political dissent has often required anonymity, concealment and protection from retaliation. Whistle-blowers, dissidents, persecuted minorities and citizens living under hostile political conditions have not always had the luxury of showing their faces.

Britain, of all countries, should understand this distinction. It has spent centuries congratulating itself on its traditions of liberty while periodically discovering that liberty becomes inconvenient when somebody actually uses it.

The danger is not necessarily the Portsmouth restriction itself. The danger is the gradual normalisation of exceptional powers. Every new restriction arrives wrapped in reassuring language: public safety, intimidation, disorder, prevention. Nobody announces, “We are taking another small step towards a society in which protest is increasingly managed.” They announce that they are protecting everyone.

And sometimes they genuinely are. That is what makes the argument difficult. There is a difference between policing behaviour and policing appearance. Violence is behaviour. Threats are behaviour. Destruction is behaviour. Wearing a black balaclava is an appearance. The two may overlap, but they are not identical. A democracy becomes nervous when symbols start becoming evidence.

The British temptation is always to believe that if the police are given one more power, everything will become slightly more orderly. It rarely works quite like that. Powers created for the obviously dangerous have a habit of migrating towards the merely inconvenient. Today's violent extremist can become tomorrow's angry protester, and yesterday's troublesome protester can eventually become part of the political mainstream.

The face, meanwhile, remains stubbornly political. A face says: I am here, and I am prepared to be recognised. A mask says something different: I am here, but I am not prepared to give you that power over me.

Sometimes that second statement conceals a thug. Sometimes it conceals a frightened citizen. Sometimes it conceals somebody who simply does not trust the authorities. The sensible answer is therefore neither sentimental permissiveness nor authoritarian enthusiasm. Police should pursue violence aggressively, but restrictions on anonymity should be precise, temporary and demonstrably necessary. Otherwise the balaclava becomes less a security problem than a convenient metaphor.

A free society should be capable of looking beyond the face. It should also be careful about becoming so frightened of hidden faces that it forgets what democracy is supposed to protect underneath them.

Ant-sized Culinary #015 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

In the bustling undergrowth of Picante Hill, Anton the culinary ant dons his oversized toque and delivers deliciously chaotic cooking wisdom, one tiny misadventure at a time.

For more Ant-sized Culinary HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

---

The Falklands, courtesy Trump by John Kato

There are moments in international politics when history does not return so much as stumble drunkenly back into the room, knocking over the furniture and demanding to know why everyone thought it had left. Argentina’s President Javier Milei has just provided one of those moments by resurrecting the Falklands question with the confidence of a man who believes geopolitics is a motivational seminar and sovereignty can be recovered by shouting loudly enough.

His declaration that the Malvinas “are ours” was hardly unexpected. Argentine governments have claimed sovereignty over the islands for generations. What makes the latest performance more disturbing is the political weather surrounding it. Milei appears to believe that the winds have changed, and Donald Trump, characteristically, has managed to blow on them.

Trump’s suggestion that Britain might not automatically receive American support in a conflict over the islands, apparently because Britain had not been sufficiently helpful to Washington over Iran, was the sort of remark that once would have been dismissed as diplomatic nonsense. Today, it has become strategic oxygen.

Milei immediately inhaled. Britain, he declared, was declining. Argentina was flourishing. The United States was Argentina’s reliable partner. British and Israeli companies operating around the islands could face sanctions. Meanwhile, Buenos Aires is accelerating plans for an integrated military base in Tierra del Fuego.

It is difficult to imagine a more combustible mixture of nationalism, personal political theatre and great-power ambiguity.

The Falklands are not merely some remote collection of windswept islands in the South Atlantic. They are one of those historical wounds that never quite scarred over. Britain and Argentina fought a war over them in 1982, and the British victory became woven into the mythology of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. For Argentina, the defeat became another chapter in a national argument about sovereignty, humiliation and military dictatorship.

The extraordinary thing is that, after decades of relative stability, politicians are once again discovering the electoral usefulness of the wound.

Milei has plenty of domestic reasons to enjoy the theatre. Argentina remains a country undergoing painful economic transformation, with austerity, inflation and social discontent making political distraction extraordinarily convenient. Nothing unites a country quite like a foreign enemy, preferably one separated by an ocean and carrying an old imperial reputation.

But Milei's calculation becomes considerably more dangerous when Washington enters the picture. Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that alliances, in his conception of international politics, are transactional arrangements rather than enduring commitments. Countries are expected to pay, support, obey or otherwise demonstrate usefulness. The old language of solidarity between allies is replaced by the language of invoices.

That is precisely the kind of uncertainty that ambitious nationalist leaders can misread. Britain may indeed have problems. It has economic difficulties, political exhaustion, military constraints and a population understandably less enthusiastic about distant wars than governments sometimes imagine. But decline is not the same thing as helplessness, and Argentina should remember that the Falklands are populated, defended and governed as a British territory. The inhabitants have their own political preferences, which are inconveniently more important than the romantic maps of Buenos Aires.

The most absurd part of this drama is that nobody actually needs another Falklands war. Yet history has a nasty habit of returning whenever politicians convince themselves that history belongs to them. Milei says the winds of change are blowing. Perhaps they are. But winds in the South Atlantic can become storms very quickly. And if Trump has taught the world anything, it is that sometimes the most dangerous foreign-policy instrument is not a missile. It is a sentence.

The occupation’s final argument by Regan O'Sullivan

Every Israeli-Palestinian generation discovers the same injustice, gives it a new vocabulary, appoints another committee to discuss it and then watches the facts on the ground become harder to reverse. Meanwhile, the occupation continues its patient work. It does not need dramatic speeches. It needs only time.

That is why Ed Miliband’s willingness to act against extremist settler violence matters. Not because sanctions or diplomatic pressure will suddenly produce peace, but because refusing to confront the machinery of permanent occupation is itself a political decision. Silence is not neutrality when one side possesses overwhelming military, legal and administrative power and the other watches its land disappear beneath roads, fences, outposts and settlements.

The disturbing development is not merely that settler violence has increased. It is that the distinction between the violence of individuals and the policy environment that enables it has become increasingly difficult to maintain. When ministers speak openly about removing Palestinians from territory they claim, when settlement expansion is treated as routine government business, and when proposals such as the E1 development move forward despite their implications for the territorial continuity of a future Palestinian state, the question ceases to be simply one of policing extremists.

It becomes a question of state policy. Israel's supporters in Europe and North America have spent decades insisting that criticism of Israeli governments must not become hostility towards Israel itself. That distinction is not merely legitimate; it is essential. But it works both ways. Defending Israel's existence does not require defending every action of an Israeli government. Supporting Israeli security does not require accepting permanent Palestinian dispossession. And opposing anti-Semitism does not mean closing one's eyes when Palestinians are subjected to abuses that would provoke outrage elsewhere.

Indeed, those who genuinely care about Israel's long-term security should be among the loudest voices demanding an end to settlement expansion and settler impunity. A country cannot bomb its way out of a political problem created by denying another people a credible political future. Security without justice becomes an endless security operation, and an endless security operation eventually becomes the political system itself.

The two-state solution has been declared dead so many times that one begins to suspect it has developed the stubbornness of a cockroach. Yet its disappearance would represent something much more serious than the failure of another diplomatic formula. It would mean accepting a political reality in which millions of Palestinians remain permanently subordinated without sovereignty, while Israel continues to control the territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.

That is not a solution. It is a permanent conflict with better public relations. Israel's allies therefore face an uncomfortable choice. They can continue treating settlement expansion as an unfortunate disagreement between friends, issuing carefully worded statements while facts are manufactured on the ground. Or they can finally acknowledge that friendship sometimes requires saying no.

This is where Miliband's position deserves support. International pressure should not be understood as punishment for Israel but as an attempt to prevent an irreversible political disaster. If the occupation becomes permanent, the two-state idea will eventually cease to be a diplomatic objective and become a historical obituary.

And there is an even darker irony. Every settlement that makes a Palestinian state less viable is often presented as strengthening Israel. In reality, it may be strengthening the very forces that make Israel's future more dangerous: permanent confrontation, radicalisation, international isolation and the gradual destruction of the possibility of compromise.

The tragedy is that none of this is inevitable. Israel still has the capacity to choose a different direction. Its allies still possess leverage. Palestinians still deserve political freedom, security and dignity. Israelis deserve the same. The essential question is whether politics can still interrupt the geography being constructed around them.

Because once the map becomes permanent, diplomacy becomes archaeology. And by then, everyone will discover that the two-state solution was not killed in a single dramatic moment. It was buried one settlement, one eviction and one act of impunity at a time.

The politics of a headscarf by Sabine Fischer

Austria has decided that a girl of twelve may be trusted with algebra, geography, puberty and the increasingly complicated emotional weather of adolescence, but apparently not with a piece of fabric on her head. The state, in its wisdom, has therefore appointed itself guardian of her wardrobe.

The symbolism is difficult to miss. The law is defended as a measure of secularism and protection, yet it arrives with the political assistance of the far-right Freedom Party, a movement whose ideological universe has never exactly been famous for its delicate handling of minorities. That should make anyone interested in liberal democracy pause.

The problem is not whether governments have the right to regulate religious expression in public institutions. They sometimes do. The problem is what happens when the regulation is directed overwhelmingly at one religious minority and dressed up as emancipation.

Austria already bans full-face veils in public. That is one argument. A fourteen-year-old wearing a headscarf is quite another. A full-face covering can raise legitimate questions about identification and public interaction. A headscarf does not conceal a person's identity. It is visible precisely because it expresses identity.

The distinction matters. There is something profoundly uncomfortable about telling a Muslim girl that she must remove her headscarf in order to demonstrate that she is free. Freedom becomes a rather strange concept when the government exercises it on your behalf by deciding what you cannot wear.

The defenders of the law will insist that this is about children, not Muslims. Perhaps some genuinely believe that. But politics is not judged solely by intention. It is judged by consequence. If a law repeatedly lands on one religious community, places teachers in the role of clothing police and threatens families with fines, then the state has created a very particular kind of equality: everyone is equal, but some citizens are considerably more likely to receive a visit from the headmaster.

And what exactly is the teacher supposed to accomplish? Mathematics in the morning, constitutional theology before lunch?

Teachers should educate children. They should not be transformed into miniature border guards of secular identity, interrogating pupils about religious clothing and organising disciplinary meetings with parents. The classroom already has enough problems without adding a bureaucratic theology department.

There is also the constitutional question. Austria's previous attempt to impose a narrower prohibition was struck down because religious neutrality requires the state not to favour or punish particular beliefs. That principle deserves more than another legislative experiment.

Secularism is supposed to protect the state from religion and religion from the state. It is not supposed to become a religion of its own, complete with sacred clothing rules and political commandments.

Europe has spent decades insisting that Muslim immigrants must integrate. Fair enough. Integration, however, cannot mean permanent demonstrations of submission. A democratic society should be capable of saying: you may disagree with us, dress differently, worship differently and still belong here.

If a girl freely chooses to wear a headscarf, the liberal response should not be to congratulate the state for making the choice disappear. Nor should anyone romanticise the possibility of family or community pressure. Both forms of coercion deserve scrutiny.

But the answer to coercion cannot automatically be another coercive authority. Austria's real test is therefore not whether a twelve-year-old removes her headscarf. It is whether the republic can resist the temptation to turn Muslim children into political symbols.

A democratic state should be confident enough to tolerate difference. Otherwise, beneath all the talk of protecting freedom, there is only another authority telling people what freedom is supposed to look like.

Walk the talk 26#015 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

The term “talk the talk, walk the walk” is a phrase in English
that means a person should support what they say, not just with words,
but also through action. Actions speak louder than words.

For more Walk the talk, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

---

The Yemen question by Emma Schneider

The most disturbing thing about the latest hint that Yemen may possess chemical-weapons stockpiles is not necessarily what may be hidden in Yemen. It is what the allegation forces us to ask about everywhere else.

Chemical weapons were supposed to belong to history's darkest museum: mustard gas in the trenches, nerve agents in Cold War bunkers, photographs of terrified civilians fleeing invisible clouds. The world built treaties, inspectors and elaborate systems of verification precisely because civilization had decided that poison gas was a line that civilized states would not cross.

Yet here we are, in another Middle Eastern war, wondering whether chemical weapons may still be sitting somewhere in warehouses, military compounds or forgotten bunkers.

Yemen is particularly alarming because war has a habit of turning inventories into mysteries. Governments collapse. Command structures fragment. Military installations change hands. Records disappear. Intelligence becomes contradictory. Weapons once controlled by a state can become controlled by nobody or by everybody.

That is the nightmare. The international chemical-weapons regime has achieved something extraordinary. The declared stockpiles of states belonging to the global convention have been destroyed under international verification. But "declared" is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. The system depends upon states telling the truth, inspectors gaining access and governments retaining enough institutional stability to know what they possess.

War is exceptionally good at destroying all three assumptions. And Yemen is hardly alone in living at the intersection of civil conflict, regional intervention, clandestine weapons networks and collapsing state authority. Syria demonstrated how quickly chemical warfare could return from the historical basement. The recent discovery of remnants of the Assad-era programme should have reminded the world that destroying a declared arsenal is not necessarily the same thing as discovering every weapon, every precursor, every laboratory or every buried secret.

The uncomfortable question, therefore, is not simply: Does Yemen have chemical weapons? It is: How many Yemens are there?

How many countries have weapons nobody has officially declared? How many arsenals are poorly documented? How many governments possess suspicious industrial chemicals that could be diverted during a collapse? How many military depots are sitting in countries where nobody can confidently say who controls them six months from now?

The answer should concern us more than another round of diplomatic finger-pointing. Chemical weapons are particularly dangerous because their proliferation does not require a superpower. A government with a functioning bureaucracy can build an elaborate programme. A collapsing government can inherit one. A militia can seize pieces of one. A terrorist organization does not necessarily need a vast industrial complex if it can obtain the right materials and expertise.

The world therefore needs to stop treating chemical disarmament as a box that was checked in 2023. It is not finished. The real test of the international system begins when a country becomes too chaotic to police itself. Inspectors need access. Intelligence services need to share information. Chemical industries need stronger safeguards. And when governments collapse, the international community needs contingency plans for securing dangerous sites before somebody else discovers them.

Otherwise, we will continue congratulating ourselves on having eliminated the world's declared chemical arsenals while quietly accumulating an unknown number of undeclared question marks. Yemen should not become another Syria-style lesson learned only after the photographs arrive. The world has spent decades building a fence around chemical weapons. It now needs to check whether anyone has been digging tunnels underneath it.

What Poets Need #Poem by Abigail George

 

Maybe I need
to see mountains and trees

Maybe I need
to read more love poems,

instead
of sad poems,
political poems,
war poems,

And instead of writing poems about children
being born in refugee camps,

children playing with guns,
children dying to belong

Maybe I need
to fall in love
with mountains and trees

Maybe I need
to go to the sea
and immerse myself in the saltwater,

feel it against my skin

Yes, every poet
needs to be reminded

of the gentle hands
of their mother,

of their grandmother
wiping their nose

Europe’s debt trap Is called America by Zakir Hall

America has a debt problem. Europe may have an exposure problem. That distinction matters. The United States is now carrying a federal debt mountain so enormous that the numbers have become almost meaningless to ordinary human beings. Trillions upon trillions are borrowed, refinanced and rolled over, while Washington behaves as though the national credit card has no spending limit. The American political system has perfected the art of arguing about taxes and spending without seriously confronting the arithmetic underneath them.

But there is a second story, and it is one Europeans should be paying much closer attention to. Europe is deeply invested in America. European governments, banks, pension funds, insurers, investment managers and other financial institutions hold enormous quantities of American financial assets, including U.S. Treasury securities. Five EU member states alone accounted for roughly $1.72 trillion of Treasury holdings at the end of 2025, while European countries including Britain, Switzerland and Norway collectively held close to $3.1 trillion.

That does not mean European banks are simply the people who “load” America's debt. The ownership structure is considerably more complicated, and much of the European exposure is private rather than governmental. But the broader point is uncomfortable: Europe has become financially entangled with the American debt machine.

And that creates a peculiar imbalance. Washington can borrow because the world continues to regard U.S. government debt as one of the safest places to put money. Europeans buy American debt because they need liquid, relatively secure assets. American politicians therefore enjoy an extraordinary privilege: they can spend today while someone else's financial institutions help provide the capital.

It is a wonderful arrangement, particularly if you happen to be the borrower. Until confidence changes. The danger is not that America suddenly announces that it cannot pay its debts. The modern financial system does not usually collapse so theatrically. The danger is slower and more insidious: higher yields, falling bond prices, tighter liquidity and a gradual reassessment of American fiscal credibility.

And then Europe discovers that its supposedly safe American assets are not quite as safe as the political slogans suggested.

European banks already have substantial dollar-denominated balance sheets, with U.S. Treasuries and agency mortgage-backed securities forming an important part of their dollar securities holdings. A serious repricing of American debt would therefore not remain conveniently on the other side of the Atlantic.

It would travel. Through banks. Through pension funds. Through insurers. Through investment portfolios. Through currency markets. Eventually, through European taxpayers. This is why Europe's problem is not simply that America owes too much money. It is that Europe has become accustomed to America's financial dominance and has built part of its own financial security around it.

There is an almost comic contradiction here. European politicians complain about American unilateralism, American tariffs and American geopolitical unpredictability while European capital continues financing substantial quantities of American government debt.

Europe is simultaneously criticizing the casino and keeping a large amount of its savings at the roulette table. That cannot continue indefinitely. Europe should not dump American assets recklessly. That would hurt European investors as much as anyone else. Nor should Brussels fantasize about some spectacular financial revenge against Washington. Financial warfare is rarely as satisfying as politicians imagine.

The sensible response is diversification: deeper European capital markets, stronger euro-denominated safe assets and less dependence on any single foreign financial system. America's debt problem belongs first to America. But Europe's exposure to it belongs to Europe. And that may ultimately prove the more uncomfortable bill.