Donald Trump

Trump is all about revenge. Just ask James Comey and others who failed to jump when the master called.

Secretary of Defence/War Pete Hegseth echoes the presidential instincts, and he has made it clear that the president is angry that Europeans did not fly to his aid in Iran when he wanted in the way that he wanted.

Hegseth added that if Europeans fail to support American operations, then they cannot assume that America will continue stationing tens of thousands of troops on their soil.

Hegseth’s threat follows the comment from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that the forthcoming NATO heads of government summit in Ankara on July 6-7 could be the “most consequential” in the Alliance’s history.

Put together, it is easy to conclude that the president might be planning to use the summit to announce long-anticipated significant withdrawals of US troops in Europe.

There are more than 62,000 US troops based in Europe. They do more than provide a first line of defence against conventional attack from the East. They are 62,000 free-spending Yanks who support tens of thousands of jobs. Many local economies are dependent on American troops.

And that is how Hegseth and Trump view the presence of US forces in Europe. Primarily in transactional terms involving  the expenditure of US dollars outside American borders.

There is, however, much, much more involved in their presence. US troops in Europe have enabled America to project military and political power on a global scale. That projection has in turned produced trillions of dollars for the American GDP.

The 10,000 American airmen in England’s East Anglia are the backbone of the unsinkable aircraft carrier off the coast of Europe. The US base at Naples is the command centre for its Mediterranean fleet. Ramstein Airbase in Germany is a major medical evacuation centre as well as the command headquarters for operations in Africa and the Middle East.

Trump’s instinct is for revenge. But like many instincts, it is self-defeating.

The atemoya

An obscure tropical fruit has become the latest proxy in the Cold War between Taiwan and China. The atemoya, a sweet hybrid of the sugar apple and cherimoya, is at the centre of an economic and political battle that has little to do with agriculture and everything to do with sovereignty.

The atemoya originated in Florida in 1908 as a cross between the sugar apple and the cherimoya. Heart-shaped it has a pale-green skin with knobbly segments and poisonous black seeds.

But it is the inside that counts. The meat of the fruit has been described as a mixture of pineapple, pear, strawberry, vanilla and coconut. One agronomist referred to it as “the pina colada of the fruit world.”

Even better than the fruit’s taste is the price that it commands. The average export price of the atemoya is $3.16 a kilo and a single fruit can weigh over a kilo.

Some of the world’s best growing conditions for the atemoya can be found in Taiwan’s  Taitung County, a mountainous agricultural region. Before 2021, farmers made an exceptionally good living out of exporting 80-90 percent of their atemoya crop to mainland China. Then disaster struck.

Beijing suddenly banned all imports of the “green gold” of the fruit world, claiming that it had become infected with the Pacific mealybug. Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) denounced the claim as a politically motivated protest.

Taiwan’s atemoya growers faced financial ruin and just barely survived the crisis with a combination of government subsidies and a diversification into the Japanese and South Korean markets and processed foods.