[link|http://www.ceip.org/files/Publications/2002-06-02-PolicyReview.asp?p=11&from=pubdate|Robert Kagan's take]

Excerpts:

A better explanation of Europe's greater tolerance for threats is, once again, Europe's relative weakness. Tolerance is also very much a realistic response in that Europe, precisely because it is weak, actually faces fewer threats than the far more powerful United States.

The psychology of weakness is easy enough to understand. A man armed only with a knife may decide that a bear prowling the forest is a tolerable danger, inasmuch as the alternative - hunting the bear armed only with a knife - is actually riskier than lying low and hoping the bear never attacks. The same man armed with a rifle, however, will likely make a different calculation of what constitutes a tolerable risk. Why should he risk being mauled to death if he doesn't need to?

...The current situation abounds in ironies. Europe's rejection of power politics, its devaluing of military force as a tool of international relations, have depended on the presence of American military forces on European soil. Europe's new Kantian order could flourish only under the umbrella of American power exercised according to the rules of the old Hobbesian order. American power made it possible for Europeans to believe that power was no longer important. And now, in the final irony, the fact that United States military power has solved the European problem, especially the "German problem," allows Europeans today to believe that American military power, and the "strategic culture" that has created and sustained it, are outmoded and dangerous.

Most Europeans do not see the great paradox: that their passage into post-history has depended on the United States not making the same passage. Because Europe has neither the will nor the ability to guard its own paradise and keep it from being overrun, spiritually as well as physically, by a world that has yet to accept the rule of "moral consciousness," it has become dependent on America's willingness to use its military might to deter or defeat those around the world who still believe in power politics.


[link|http://www.theamericanenterprise.org/taedec02a.htm|Karl Zinsmeister] has a different emphasis:

Excerpts:

Americans must be clear-eyed about this. When we had differences with European governments in the past, it was usually some exceptional matter which could be negotiated away. Given today's foaming desire of European unionists to form a superstate to compete with the U.S., splits will be less accidental in the future, and harder to rub away. "It would be a misreading of Europe's political elites to see anti-American complaints as isolated gripes which can be overcome, one by one, through patient dialogue," warned Michael Gove, a perceptive editorialist for London's Times, when I visited his office. "Europe is not begging to differ in particulars, but beginning to diverge in fundamentals."

The philosophical differences between Europe and the U.S. are reflected and magnified in three critical structural breaks: 1) Europe has surrendered much of its economic dynamism. 2) Europe has lost its stomach for military action, substituting an exaggerated confidence in diplomacy. And, 3) Europe is on a path to population collapse...

To American eyes, the most striking aspect of the European Union is its undemocratic nature. The E.U. apparatus is exceedingly closed and secretive. Relatively few of the confederation's important decisions are currently made by democratically accountable officials. On front after front, bureaucratic mandarins are deciding how everyday Europeans will live (see our feature article on page 36).

Many Europeans, in a way Americans find impossible to understand, are willing to let their elites lead them by the nose. There is a kind of peasant mentality under which their "betters" are allowed to make the important national judgments for them. "Europe's leaders see themselves as wise parents, and their citizens as children," explains journalist and Briton Clive Crook. "In France, Germany, and the institutions of the European Union, elites take major political decisions and impose them on the voters without consulting them," summarizes John O'Sullivan. "Political elites feel that the people have no right to obstruct the realization of the European dream."

I say:

Europe is like the rebellious moody kid that's working dead end jobs, and playing in a grunge band that's going nowhere, and quotes Das Kapital for no particular reason, and is an ostentatious vegetarian, and hates his parents, and still lives with his hated parents even though he's pushing thirty. And his room is filthy. If Europe were my kid I'd kick him out.

But Europe isn't our kid. Europe is our senile uncle. England is America's mother, and she's not what she used to be. But Uncle Europe is simply a mess. All this soft socialism is just an unconscious yearning for life in an institution.

By your way of - for lack of a better term - thinking, anybody who applies antibiotics ruthlessly and with malice aforethought to poor defenseless plague bacteria is engaging in power politics.

The trouble with your sort is you understand neither power nor politics. Nor responsibility, for that matter. I think it's because all these are corollaries of the notion of cause and effect, which also seems beyond the grasp of these souls.

I for one do not believe in letting nature run its course in all circumstances.