In 2009, the European debt crisis revealed that the European Union, unlike the United States, is not a united republic composed of somewhat independent nation-states.  Instead, it was, as it had been since Roman times, a collection of warring tribes that occasionally made common cause.  Somehow, though, the E.U. stuck together. In 2015, when Angela Merkel opened the E.U. to floods of Muslim refugees from the Middle East and Africa, the E.U. took another hit to its unity.  The core Western nations reluctantly accommodated the onslaught, but the Central European countries, remembering centuries of Islamic rule, ignored the E.U.'s open border mandates and closed their borders to the Muslim invaders. In 2016, British citizens had enough and voted to pull out of the E.U.  On January 31, 2020, even as COVID-19 was following the path the migrants paved in 2015, Britain finally left the E.U.  The E.U. bureaucrats in Brussels sneered...(Read Full Post)