Dave Keating, when you were in Canada last week, did you have a sense that – Drawing closer to the EU was a way to leverage with the United States.

Yeah, I also wonder that about this associate membership thing, whether it's really a PR exercise more than it is an actual proposal.

You know, it was interesting over the past two weeks when I was talking to Canadians about this, they all had very positive ideas about the EU.

Plenty of people said, yes, we want to be an EU member.

I'm not sure they knew what that meant completely.

When I talked more about that with them, it became clear their knowledge of what the EU is was limited.

But also one thing that struck out to me is that there is a very clear-eyed idea of the threat that they are under and their level of dependence on the United States, much clearer than here in Europe, where people are not as cognizant of the threat, of the danger, or of the dependence.

I mean, in

Do you see where I'm going with that? Do you want to comment on that?

So it's really interesting.

This has proven to be the most controversial aspect of the book.

I mean, first of all, I point out that having one large common language area for the U.S. has been a huge benefit, and it's what enabled the U.S. to become the cultural superpower that it is, because it had one single market to export to.

And so people were willing to invest big money and big movies because they had that common market in America.

And then...

Those movies then ended up being exported to the rest of the world, and that extended to television and music later.

you know, that was

So what was said at this meeting then?

Well, this meeting was really about damage control after a very embarrassing couple of days for the European Union.

This was indeed a test, but I think most people do not agree with Commissioner Brunner that you heard there in the soundbite and think that the EU really failed this test for two reasons.

The chief one being that they did not show unity.

Uh, we still don't know exactly why, uh, nearly, uh, eighty thousand people crossed the border very suddenly into Ceuta.

There's a lot of suspicions that the Moroccan government was involved in that somehow.

Uh, and yet we had the other countries of the EU blaming Spain, uh, for this, uh, for reasons we can talk about a bit.

So o- one, one wonders what the reasoning is behind all this, given the fact that these countries are not, dare I say it, directly affected by what's happening.

And so when you talk to people, as you've done for 20 years in Europe, as you researched your own book and discussed these topics with people of all ages, of different nationalities inside and outside the European Union, why do they think they were so willing to adopt American culture.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that it was their own self suicide through the world wars, right? So you had world war one, which I trace in the book, how world war one decimated the European cinema sector, even though Europeans were the ones who had invented cinema.

The war shut it down and the American movie studios, which had just kind of gotten set up in their huge state in Hollywood, were able to rush in and fill that vacuum.

And there was some collusion with the State Department.

The State Department made it so they didn't have to abide by the same monopoly restrictions when they were operating in Europe.

The State Department saw a keen opportunity there.

Why do you think that was?

Mm-hmm

... has really driven me crazy.

Whether they love it or hate it, Europeans can't stop talking about America.

You open up a European newspaper, and half the news is from the United States, whether it be cultural news or political news.

Um, you know, I've gotten frustrated with Europeans who continually want to talk to me about American politics, and I say, "You know what would be better if you're frustrated with American politics and these elections that y- have so much power over you but you can't vote in? Let's talk about your politics.

Let's talk about EU politics.

Let's talk about your national politics and what you can do to make who Americans choose as the US president be less impactful on your lives." But people never wanna talk about that.

[laughs] Time flies.

But first, I wanted to ask more broadly about the European political landscape.Do you think there's something in our way of doing politics in Europe that prevents these bold, progressive figures from emerging or being celebrated?

Yeah, unfortunately, uh, the reality is that we have a European system that works against the emergence of a bold, charismatic leader like Zohran Mamdani.

It's a topic I write about in my new book, The Owned Continent.

In fact, I specifically talk about why European media had wall-to-wall coverage of Mamdani and the New York City mayoral race, and it's impossible to even conceive of that happening for a mayoral race in Paris, in Berlin, in London, et cetera.

I mean, the problem is we are working with a fundamentally broken European Union, uh, whose structures do not allow for strong politicians to rise, and the reason for that is the European Council.

That is the upper chamber of the EU's legislature.

It is something like the US Senate in the United States, or more aptly, the Bundesrat in Germany, made up of representatives of each of the member states.

Is it simply that we don't have that over here?

Uh, what's happened today?

Well, this is a ver- really significant breakthrough because this is an issue that's actually beguiled governments after Brexit and before Brexit.

It's interesting that the government seems to be casting this as some kind of solution to a Brexit problem because it's actually going to a situation that didn't exist before Brexit.

Before Brexit, there was a hard border, uh, between Gibraltar and Spain.

You had to show an ID card.

What changed after Brexit is that you had to show a full passport, and they had to show, they have to do full scans but it takes a little longer.

But this actually takes, makes that border crossing much easier than it's ever been, than it's been for decades.

Um, some people in this country are pitching this as a sort of Brexit betrayal, although a friend of mine who was an arch Brexiteer but goes to Gibraltar quite a lot is texting me this evening to say, "This is fantastic news." (laughs) I, I don't know whether this is one of those things where the, the, the pro-Brexit press are going to bill it as a betrayal when it actually is nothing of the sort.