EU Bomb

John Bolton explains how Europe's chickens have come home to roost in this piece, appearing in the New York Post:

This ongoing turmoil over EU finances is directly traceable to basic flaws underlying “the European project.” Not only is the common currency, the euro, flawed conceptually and structurally, but the larger political dream to make “Europe” an alternative “pole” to the United States internationally was mistaken from the outset.

Europe’s political leaders have tried to make EU headquarters in Brussels into the centralized government an alternative pole requires, but average citizens of EU members have never seen this as a critical objective.

If anything, voters in nation after nation (not just longtime skeptics in Great Britain) have grown ever more dubious. Each effort by European centralizers to overcome the flaws in their design only enhances the concern that EU leaders are making decisions with little or no democratic legitimacy. The EU’s awkward compromises invariably create cumbersome, inadequate institutions, further antagonizing average Europeans.