Christian values in America are not Christian values in Europe.

[YellowStars]

Christian values in America are not Christian values in Europe
YellowStars blog
Posted by ESLaPorte
30 May 2006
http://yellow-stars.com/blog/2006/05/christian_values_in_america_ar.html

During the European People's Party convention in Rome in March, several of
the 500 delegates met with the Holy Father. Beyond putting "God" in the
European Constitution, the Holy Father wanted the conservatives to represent
Christian values in a cultural climate in Europe that, like America, appears
to want to exclude religious values from the political arena. The exclusion
of real Christian values for false "Christian values" in politics is at the
heart of America's ill culture and neglect of the poor and the underclass.
Europeans - please avoid becoming like America - and fight any attempt to
make Europe like America!

First, what my fellow Christian Democrats in Europe should realize is that
"Christian politics" in America are not Christian politics in Europe. What
is "conservative" in America is not equal to "conservative" in Europe.
Conservative, Christian values for most of Europe (and other regions, like
Latin America) advocate such things as social justice and Christian business
ethnics. "Family values" for Christian Democrats means ensuring that all
families enjoy economic security, even if the government must step in to
ensure that families and their children have access to good jobs and a
decent future. In America, the focus of "family values" are on preventing
gay marriage and fighting pornography.

While I oppose gay marriage and pornography, there are just some issues that
are of greater concern that if John and Jim get married. For example, some
children in America cannot afford basic school supplies, as well as go to
school hungry in the morning. I see no major "family values" advocates
fighting for a better, more secure future for poor and underclass children.
"Family values," such as ensuring a decent life and future for American
kids, needs to be redefined as and advocated. These "family values" are real
Christian values and something that all people, Muslims including, can agree
on.

The Holy Father also stated the "Christians and Muslims can be privileged
partners." An interfaith, working relationship like this need not
compromise religious freedom of any religious group. This privileged
partnership between Christians and Muslims is possible in Europe, as
Christian Democrats embrace the idea of human dignity of all persons, rich
and poor, and of non-Christian religions. This grows out of the realization
that all people have the ability to develop God given gifts. In American
"Christian politics," there is no discussion of human dignity and the
fundamental rights of personal development of God given abilities. This is
part of the reason why common dialog between peoples and the inclusion of
all groups of people to participation in society is more of a reality in
Europe that in America.

In fact, in America the humanity of all kinds of people, religious
minorities, racial minorities, the criminally convicted, the physically and
mentally handicapped, the chemically addicted, prison inmates, as well as
the poor and underclass, are devalued, degraded and socially excluded. The
lives of these fellow human beings are of no value and therefore its is OK
to abuse and forget them.In Europe, the European Union, especially in the
UK, there are meaningful social exclusion to social inclusion policies and
programs that help get socially excluded persons into social participation.
Social inclusion policies are one of the many reasons why Europe has less
crime that America. In this, Europe already has lots of Christian values...

Social inclusion policies are a result of the legacy of Christian Democratic
activism in Europe are a demonstration of meaningful and real Christian and
family values. While the notion of Jim and John getting married should be
opposed, in the end, there are just some issues that need our attention more
(such as a secure future for families and their children). So, its is my
wish that in pursuit of family values my fellow Christian Democrats in
Europe will place human dignity and human needs before non critical
priorities and hot air issues. In the end, I call upon my fellow Christian
Democrats in Europe and elsewhere to both a "privileged partners"
relationship with Muslims and others and to stick to social issues that are
of greater meaning and substance.

[LaBlueGirl]

YellowStars wrote:

> Christian values in America are not Christian values in Europe
> YellowStars blog
> Posted by ESLaPorte
> 30 May 2006
> http://yellow-stars.com/blog/2006/05/christian_values_in_america_ar.html
>
> During the European People's Party convention in Rome in March, several of
> the 500 delegates met with the Holy Father. Beyond putting "God" in the
> European Constitution, the Holy Father wanted the conservatives to
> represent Christian values in a cultural climate in Europe that, like
> America, appears to want to exclude religious values from the political
> arena. The exclusion of real Christian values for false "Christian values"
> in politics is at the heart of America's ill culture and neglect of the
> poor and the underclass. Europeans - please avoid becoming like America -
> and fight any attempt to make Europe like America!

It has little to do with xian values in general. In America, xianity is so
much a part of the culture, it is sometimes difficult to separate Church
and State. Which is what should be done in the first place.
This is not communism or facism, and there is not religion for the entire
country.

>
> First, what my fellow Christian Democrats in Europe should realize is that
> "Christian politics" in America are not Christian politics in Europe. What
> is "conservative" in America is not equal to "conservative" in Europe.
> Conservative, Christian values for most of Europe (and other regions, like
> Latin America) advocate such things as social justice and Christian
> business ethnics. "Family values" for Christian Democrats means ensuring
> that all families enjoy economic security, even if the government must
> step in to ensure that families and their children have access to good
> jobs and a decent future. In America, the focus of "family values" are on
> preventing gay marriage and fighting pornography.

Yeup. Because xianity is twisted out of true from the extreme wings of our
political parties.
On the right, we have the neo-cons, on the left the polar opposite.

>
> While I oppose gay marriage and pornography, there are just some issues
> that are of greater concern that if John and Jim get married. For example,
> some children in America cannot afford basic school supplies, as well as
> go to school hungry in the morning. I see no major "family values"
> advocates fighting for a better, more secure future for poor and
> underclass children.

Tell that to the govt. who allows oil companies to make a record of over 3
bilion US dollars in profit and not have to donate parts of it to anything
other than political parties or have an increase in taxes. Not one red cent
goes to any of the Gulf states, and N.O. public schools are *crap*.

Tell that to the govt. who gives harsher sentences on crimes of the poor
while the white collar criminals get off at Club Fed.

Tell that to a govt. more concerned with xianity and it's role in our nation
as opposed to introducing legislation to curb poverty, abuse of the welfare
system and crime among other things.

Tell that to a govt. who is in league with big pharma and doesn't give a
crap about the elderly, infirmed or poor.

> "Family values," such as ensuring a decent life and
> future for American kids, needs to be redefined as and advocated. These
> "family values" are real Christian values and something that all people,
> Muslims including, can agree on.

They are more than just xian values. They should be the values of every
family.
I have no problem sacrificing for my son to have a good education and a
better future.
Now if only more families would take the time out to educate their children
properly, discipline them properly and take a greater interest in not only
their well-being but schooling, too.

>
>
> The Holy Father also stated the "Christians and Muslims can be privileged
> partners." An interfaith, working relationship like this need not
> compromise religious freedom of any religious group. This privileged
> partnership between Christians and Muslims is possible in Europe, as
> Christian Democrats embrace the idea of human dignity of all persons, rich
> and poor, and of non-Christian religions. This grows out of the
> realization
> that all people have the ability to develop God given gifts. In American
> "Christian politics," there is no discussion of human dignity and the
> fundamental rights of personal development of God given abilities.

Separation of Church and state.

> This is
> part of the reason why common dialog between peoples and the inclusion of
> all groups of people to participation in society is more of a reality in
> Europe that in America.

No, we take our religion as a community effort and not something injected
into our culture by the govt.

How do you think we can have such a large community of Muslims, different
branches of xianity and other forms of religion all cohabitating
peacefully?

Because we are all Americans. We are African-Americans, Muslim-Americans,
Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian-Americans.
And we all don't worship the same gods, either.

>
> In fact, in America the humanity of all kinds of people, religious
> minorities, racial minorities, the criminally convicted, the physically
> and mentally handicapped, the chemically addicted, prison inmates, as well
> as the poor and underclass, are devalued, degraded and socially excluded.

How so? Care to expand this line of reasoning?

> The lives of these fellow human beings are of no value

Not true, we are consumers and we have money, if you want to look at it from
an overly-simplistic point of view.

> and therefore its
> is OK to abuse and forget them.In Europe, the European Union, especially
> in the UK, there are meaningful social exclusion to social inclusion
> policies and programs that help get socially excluded persons into social
> participation.

We have that too, except our is littered with paperwork and strict criteria
to be met. Many don't qualify. It is the price to be paid for less taxation
and a corrupt govt who caters to big business.

> Social inclusion policies are one of the many reasons why
> Europe has less crime that America. In this, Europe already has lots of
> Christian values...

Yeah, but we have less religious disputes (disputes between people of
varying faiths).

>
> Social inclusion policies are a result of the legacy of Christian
> Democratic activism in Europe are a demonstration of meaningful and real
> Christian and family values.

Sure, but not the only demonstration.

> While the notion of Jim and John getting
> married should be opposed,

In your opinion.

> in the end, there are just some issues that
> need our attention more (such as a secure future for families and their
> children). So, its is my wish that in pursuit of family values my fellow
> Christian Democrats in Europe will place human dignity and human needs
> before non critical priorities and hot air issues. In the end, I call upon
> my fellow Christian Democrats in Europe and elsewhere to both a
> "privileged partners" relationship with Muslims and others and to stick to
> social issues that are of greater meaning and substance.

I can agree with this, but you shouldn't exclude other groups, religious or
otherwise, in your call to arms.

And for the record, I am an American expat living in Belgium.

--
Beware of the flying kangaroos. Do not torment them or feed them anything
but Fosters and chaotes. There are three donkeys and one kangaroo, best be
careful, witchypoo.

[vjp...@at.biostrategist.dot.dot.com]

Only one in five Europeans works for profit, the opposite ratio
from the USA. Urban Vermin in Madhutden, though, who love Europeans,
only work for profit one of seven. Germany has an 11% unemployment,
because it thinks it is a good thing not to work.

- = -
Vasos-Peter John Panagiotopoulos II, Reagan Mozart Pindus BioStrategist
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/vjp2/vasos.htm
---{Nothing herein constitutes advice. Everything fully disclaimed.}---
[Ignore webs which don't work with http://lynx.browser.org/]
[Regulation begets corruption] [Urb Sprawl confounds terror]
[Homeland Security means private firearms not lazy obstructive guards]

[vjp...@at.biostrategist.dot.dot.com]

The "values" you expound are called "romanticism" and directly spawned
both Hitlerism and Nazism. You should read more Aristotle and Burke
and not Hegel and Plato. All four, though, were, well, European.

[vjp...@at.biostrategist.dot.dot.com]

Power and Weakness

By Robert Kagan

[4]I t is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a
common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world. On
the all-important question of power -- the efficacy of power, the
morality of power, the desirability of power -- American and European
perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to
put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a
self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation
and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace
and relative prosperity, the realization of Kant¢s "Perpetual Peace."
The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising
power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and
rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and
promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of
military might. That is why on major strategic and international
questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus:
They agree on little and understand one another less and less. And
this state of affairs is not transitory -- the product of one American
election or one catastrophic event. The reasons for the transatlantic
divide are deep, long in development, and likely to endure. When it
comes to setting national priorities, determining threats, defining
challenges, and fashioning and implementing foreign and defense
policies, the United States and Europe have parted ways.

It is easier to see the contrast as an American living in Europe.
Europeans are more conscious of the growing differences, perhaps
because they fear them more. European intellectuals are nearly
unanimous in the conviction that Americans and Europeans no longer
share a common "strategic culture." The European caricature at its
most extreme depicts an America dominated by a "culture of death," its
warlike temperament the natural product of a violent society where
every man has a gun and the death penalty reigns. But even those who
do not make this crude link agree there are profound differences in
the way the United States and Europe conduct foreign policy.

The United States, they argue, resorts to force more quickly and,
compared with Europe, is less patient with diplomacy. Americans
generally see the world divided between good and evil, between friends
and enemies, while Europeans see a more complex picture. When
confronting real or potential adversaries, Americans generally favor
policies of coercion rather than persuasion, emphasizing punitive
sanctions over inducements to better behavior, the stick over the
carrot. Americans tend to seek finality in international affairs: They
want problems solved, threats eliminated. And, of course, Americans
increasingly tend toward unilateralism in international affairs. They
are less inclined to act through international institutions such as
the United Nations, less inclined to work cooperatively with other
nations to pursue common goals, more skeptical about international
law, and more willing to operate outside its strictures when they deem
it necessary, or even merely useful.^[5]1

Europeans insist they approach problems with greater nuance and
sophistication. They try to influence others through subtlety and
indirection. They are more tolerant of failure, more patient when
solutions don¢t come quickly. They generally favor peaceful responses
to problems, preferring negotiation, diplomacy, and persuasion to
coercion. They are quicker to appeal to international law,
international conventions, and international opinion to adjudicate
disputes. They try to use commercial and economic ties to bind nations
together. They often emphasize process over result, believing that
ultimately process can become substance.

This European dual portrait is a caricature, of course, with its share
of exaggerations and oversimplifications. One cannot generalize about
Europeans: Britons may have a more "American" view of power than many
of their fellow Europeans on the continent. And there are differing
perspectives within nations on both sides of the Atlantic. In the
U.S., Democrats often seem more "European" than Republicans; Secretary
of State Colin Powell may appear more "European" than Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Many Americans, especially among the
intellectual elite, are as uncomfortable with the "hard" quality of
American foreign policy as any European; and some Europeans value
power as much as any American.

Nevertheless, the caricatures do capture an essential truth: The
United States and Europe are fundamentally different today. Powell and
Rumsfeld have more in common than do Powell and Hubert Vedrine or even
Jack Straw. When it comes to the use of force, mainstream American
Democrats have more in common with Republicans than they do with most
European Socialists and Social Democrats. During the 1990s even
American liberals were more willing to resort to force and were more
Manichean in their perception of the world than most of their European
counterparts. The Clinton administration bombed Iraq, as well as
Afghanistan and Sudan. European governments, it is safe to say, would
not have done so. Whether they would have bombed even Belgrade in
1999, had the U.S. not forced their hand, is an interesting
question.^[6]2

What is the source of these differing strategic perspectives? The
question has received too little attention in recent years, either
because foreign policy intellectuals and policymakers on both sides of
the Atlantic have denied the existence of a genuine difference or
because those who have pointed to the difference, especially in
Europe, have been more interested in assailing the United States than
in understanding why the United States acts as it does --or, for that
matter, why Europe acts as it does. It is past time to move beyond the
denial and the insults and to face the problem head-on.

Despite what many Europeans and some Americans believe, these
differences in strategic culture do not spring naturally from the
national characters of Americans and Europeans. After all, what
Europeans now consider their more peaceful strategic culture is,
historically speaking, quite new. It represents an evolution away from
the very different strategic culture that dominated Europe for
hundreds of years and at least until World War I. The European
governments -- and peoples -- who enthusiastically launched themselves
into that continental war believed in machtpolitik. While the roots of
the present European worldview, like the roots of the European Union
itself, can be traced back to the Enlightenment, Europe¢s great-power
politics for the past 300 years did not follow the visionary designs
of the philosophes and the physiocrats.

As for the United States, there is nothing timeless about the present
heavy reliance on force as a tool of international relations, nor
about the tilt toward unilateralism and away from a devotion to
international law. Americans are children of the Enlightenment, too,
and in the early years of the republic were more faithful apostles of
its creed. America¢s eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
statesmen sounded much like the European statesmen of today, extolling
the virtues of commerce as the soothing balm of international strife
and appealing to international law and international opinion over
brute force. The young United States wielded power against weaker
peoples on the North American continent, but when it came to dealing
with the European giants, it claimed to abjure power and assailed as
atavistic the power politics of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
European empires.

Two centuries later, Americans and Europeans have traded places -- and
perspectives. Partly this is because in those 200 years, but
especially in recent decades, the power equation has shifted
dramatically: When the United States was weak, it practiced the
strategies of indirection, the strategies of weakness; now that the
United States is powerful, it behaves as powerful nations do. When the
European great powers were strong, they believed in strength and
martial glory. Now, they see the world through the eyes of weaker
powers. These very different points of view, weak versus strong, have
naturally produced differing strategic judgments, differing
assessments of threats and of the proper means of addressing threats,
and even differing calculations of interest.

But this is only part of the answer. For along with these natural
consequences of the transatlantic power gap, there has also opened a
broad ideological gap. Europe, because of its unique historical
experience of the past half-century -- culminating in the past decade
with the creation of the European Union -- has developed a set of
ideals and principles regarding the utility and morality of power
different from the ideals and principles of Americans, who have not
shared that experience. If the strategic chasm between the United
States and Europe appears greater than ever today, and grows still
wider at a worrying pace, it is because these material and ideological
differences reinforce one another. The divisive trend they together
produce may be impossible to reverse.

The power gap: perception and reality

[7]E urope has been militarily weak for a long time, but until fairly
recently its weakness had been obscured. World War II all but
destroyed European nations as global powers, and their postwar
inability to project sufficient force overseas to maintain colonial
empires in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East forced them to retreat on
a massive scale after more than five centuries of imperial dominance
-- perhaps the most significant retrenchment of global influence in
human history. For a half-century after World War II, however, this
weakness was masked by the unique geopolitical circumstances of the
Cold War. Dwarfed by the two superpowers on its flanks, a weakened
Europe nevertheless served as the central strategic theater of the
worldwide struggle between communism and democratic capitalism. Its
sole but vital strategic mission was to defend its own territory
against any Soviet offensive, at least until the Americans arrived.
Although shorn of most traditional measures of great-power status,
Europe remained the geopolitical pivot, and this, along with lingering
habits of world leadership, allowed Europeans to retain international
influence well beyond what their sheer military capabilities might
have afforded.

Europe lost this strategic centrality after the Cold War ended, but it
took a few more years for the lingering mirage of European global
power to fade. During the 1990s, war in the Balkans kept both
Europeans and Americans focused on the strategic importance of the
continent and on the continuing relevance of nato. The enlargement of
nato to include former Warsaw Pact nations and the consolidation of
the Cold War victory kept Europe in the forefront of the strategic
discussion.

Then there was the early promise of the "new Europe." By bonding
together into a single political and economic unit -- the historic
accomplishment of the Maastricht treaty in 1992 -- many hoped to
recapture Europe¢s old greatness but in a new political form. "Europe"
would be the next superpower, not only economically and politically,
but also militarily. It would handle crises on the European continent,
such as the ethnic conflicts in the Balkans, and it would re-emerge as
a global player. In the 1990s Europeans could confidently assert that
the power of a unified Europe would restore, finally, the global
"multipolarity" that had been destroyed by the Cold War and its
aftermath. And most Americans, with mixed emotions, agreed that
superpower Europe was the future. Harvard University¢s Samuel P.
Huntington predicted that the coalescing of the European Union would
be "the single most important move" in a worldwide reaction against
American hegemony and would produce a "truly multipolar" twenty-first
century.^[8]3

But European pretensions and American apprehensions proved unfounded.
The 1990s witnessed not the rise of a European superpower but the
decline of Europe into relative weakness. The Balkan conflict at the
beginning of the decade revealed European military incapacity and
political disarray; the Kosovo conflict at decade¢s end exposed a
transatlantic gap in military technology and the ability to wage
modern warfare that would only widen in subsequent years. Outside of
Europe, the disparity by the close of the 1990s was even more starkly
apparent as it became clear that the ability of European powers,
individually or collectively, to project decisive force into regions
of conflict beyond the continent was negligible. Europeans could
provide peacekeeping forces in the Balkans -- indeed, they could and
eventually did provide the vast bulk of those forces in Bosnia and
Kosovo. But they lacked the wherewithal to introduce and sustain a
fighting force in potentially hostile territory, even in Europe. Under
the best of circumstances, the European role was limited to filling
out peacekeeping forces after the United States had, largely on its
own, carried out the decisive phases of a military mission and
stabilized the situation. As some Europeans put it, the real division
of labor consisted of the United States "making the dinner" and the
Europeans "doing the dishes."

This inadequacy should have come as no surprise, since these were the
limitations that had forced Europe to retract its global influence in
the first place. Those Americans and Europeans who proposed that
Europe expand its strategic role beyond the continent set an
unreasonable goal. During the Cold War, Europe¢s strategic role had
been to defend itself. It was unrealistic to expect a return to
international great-power status, unless European peoples were willing
to shift significant resources from social programs to military
programs.

Clearly they were not. Not only were Europeans unwilling to pay to
project force beyond Europe. After the Cold War, they would not pay
for sufficient force to conduct even minor military actions on the
continent without American help. Nor did it seem to matter whether
European publics were being asked to spend money to strengthen nato or
an independent European foreign and defense policy. Their answer was
the same. Rather than viewing the collapse of the Soviet Union as an
opportunity to flex global muscles, Europeans took it as an
opportunity to cash in on a sizable peace dividend. Average European
defense budgets gradually fell below 2 percent of gdp. Despite talk of
establishing Europe as a global superpower, therefore, European
military capabilities steadily fell behind those of the United States
throughout the 1990s.

The end of the Cold War had a very different effect on the other side
of the Atlantic. For although Americans looked for a peace dividend,
too, and defense budgets declined or remained flat during most of the
1990s, defense spending still remained above 3 percent of gdp. Fast on
the heels of the Soviet empire¢s demise came Iraq¢s invasion of Kuwait
and the largest American military action in a quarter-century.
Thereafter American administrations cut the Cold War force, but not as
dramatically as might have been expected. By historical standards,
America¢s military power and particularly its ability to project that
power to all corners of the globe remained unprecedented.

Meanwhile, the very fact of the Soviet empire¢s collapse vastly
increased America¢s strength relative to the rest of the world. The
sizable American military arsenal, once barely sufficient to balance
Soviet power, was now deployed in a world without a single formidable
adversary. This "unipolar moment" had an entirely natural and
predictable consequence: It made the United States more willing to use
force abroad. With the check of Soviet power removed, the United
States was free to intervene practically wherever and whenever it
chose -- a fact reflected in the proliferation of overseas military
interventions that began during the first Bush administration with the
invasion of Panama in 1989, the Persian Gulf War in 1991, and the
humanitarian intervention in Somalia in 1992, continuing during the
Clinton years with interventions in Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. While
American politicians talked of pulling back from the world, the
reality was an America intervening abroad more frequently than it had
throughout most of the Cold War. Thanks to new technologies, the
United States was also freer to use force around the world in more
limited ways through air and missile strikes, which it did with
increasing frequency.

How could this growing transatlantic power gap fail to create a
difference in strategic perceptions? Even during the Cold War,
American military predominance and Europe¢s relative weakness had
produced important and sometimes serious disagreements. Gaullism,
Ostpolitik, and the various movements for European independence and
unity were manifestations not only of a European desire for honor and
freedom of action. They also reflected a European conviction that
America¢s approach to the Cold War was too confrontational, too
militaristic, and too dangerous. Europeans believed they knew better
how to deal with the Soviets: through engagement and seduction,
through commercial and political ties, through patience and
forbearance. It was a legitimate view, shared by many Americans. But
it also reflected Europe¢s weakness relative to the United States, the
fewer military options at Europe¢s disposal, and its greater
vulnerability to a powerful Soviet Union. It may have reflected, too,
Europe¢s memory of continental war. Americans, when they were not
themselves engaged in the subtleties of detente, viewed the European
approach as a form of appeasement, a return to the fearful mentality
of the 1930s. But appeasement is never a dirty word to those whose
genuine weakness offers few appealing alternatives. For them, it is a
policy of sophistication.

The end of the Cold War, by widening the power gap, exacerbated the
disagreements. Although transatlantic tensions are now widely assumed
to have begun with the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 2001,
they were already evident during the Clinton administration and may
even be traced back to the administration of George H.W. Bush. By
1992, mutual recriminations were rife over Bosnia, where the United
States refused to act and Europe could not act. It was during the
Clinton years that Europeans began complaining about being lectured by
the "hectoring hegemon." This was also the period in which Vedrine
coined the term hyperpuissance to describe an American behemoth too
worryingly powerful to be designated merely a superpower. (Perhaps he
was responding to then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright¢s
insistence that the United States was the world¢s "indispensable
nation.") It was also during the 1990s that the transatlantic
disagreement over American plans for missile defense emerged and many
Europeans began grumbling about the American propensity to choose
force and punishment over diplomacy and persuasion.

The Clinton administration, meanwhile, though relatively timid and
restrained itself, grew angry and impatient with European timidity,
especially the unwillingness to confront Saddam Hussein. The split in
the alliance over Iraq didn¢t begin with the 2000 election but in
1997, when the Clinton administration tried to increase the pressure
on Baghdad and found itself at odds with France and (to a lesser
extent) Great Britain in the United Nations Security Council. Even the
war in Kosovo was marked by nervousness among some allies --
especially Italy, Greece, and Germany -- that the United States was
too uncompromisingly militaristic in its approach. And while Europeans
and Americans ultimately stood together in the confrontation with
Belgrade, the Kosovo war produced in Europe less satisfaction at the
successful prosecution of the war than unease at America¢s apparent
omnipotence. That apprehension would only increase in the wake of
American military action after September 11, 2001.

The psychology of power and weakness

[9]T oday¢s transatlantic problem, in short, is not a George Bush
problem. It is a power problem. American military strength has
produced a propensity to use that strength. Europe¢s military weakness
has produced a perfectly understandable aversion to the exercise of
military power. Indeed, it has produced a powerful European interest
in inhabiting a world where strength doesn¢t matter, where
international law and international institutions predominate, where
unilateral action by powerful nations is forbidden, where all nations
regardless of their strength have equal rights and are equally
protected by commonly agreed-upon international rules of behavior.
Europeans have a deep interest in devaluing and eventually eradicating
the brutal laws of an anarchic, Hobbesian world where power is the
ultimate determinant of national security and success.

This is no reproach. It is what weaker powers have wanted from time
immemorial. It was what Americans wanted in the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, when the brutality of a European system of power
politics run by the global giants of France, Britain, and Russia left
Americans constantly vulnerable to imperial thrashing. It was what the
other small powers of Europe wanted in those years, too, only to be
sneered at by Bourbon kings and other powerful monarchs, who spoke
instead of raison d¢etat. The great proponent of international law on
the high seas in the eighteenth century was the United States; the
great opponent was Britain¢s navy, the "Mistress of the Seas." In an
anarchic world, small powers always fear they will be victims. Great
powers, on the other hand, often fear rules that may constrain them
more than they fear the anarchy in which their power brings security
and prosperity.

This natural and historic disagreement between the stronger and the
weaker manifests itself in today¢s transatlantic dispute over the
question of unilateralism. Europeans generally believe their objection
to American unilateralism is proof of their greater commitment to
certain ideals concerning world order. They are less willing to
acknowledge that their hostility to unilateralism is also
self-interested. Europeans fear American unilateralism. They fear it
perpetuates a Hobbesian world in which they may become increasingly
vulnerable. The United States may be a relatively benign hegemon, but
insofar as its actions delay the arrival of a world order more
conducive to the safety of weaker powers, it is objectively dangerous.

This is one reason why in recent years a principal objective of
European foreign policy has become, as one European observer puts it,
the "multilateralising" of the United States.^[10]4 It is not that
Europeans are teaming up against the American hegemon, as Huntington
and many realist theorists would have it, by creating a countervailing
power. After all, Europeans are not increasing their power. Their
tactics, like their goal, are the tactics of the weak. They hope to
constrain American power without wielding power themselves. In what
may be the ultimate feat of subtlety and indirection, they want to
control the behemoth by appealing to its conscience.

It is a sound strategy, as far as it goes. The United States is a
behemoth with a conscience. It is not Louis xiv¢s France or George
iii¢s England. Americans do not argue, even to themselves, that their
actions may be justified by raison d¢etat. Americans have never
accepted the principles of Europe¢s old order, never embraced the
Machiavellian perspective. The United States is a liberal, progressive
society through and through, and to the extent that Americans believe
in power, they believe it must be a means of advancing the principles
of a liberal civilization and a liberal world order. Americans even
share Europe¢s aspirations for a more orderly world system based not
on power but on rules -- after all, they were striving for such a
world when Europeans were still extolling the laws of machtpolitik.

But while these common ideals and aspirations shape foreign policies
on both sides of the Atlantic, they cannot completely negate the very
different perspectives from which Europeans and Americans view the
world and the role of power in international affairs. Europeans oppose
unilateralism in part because they have no capacity for unilateralism.
Polls consistently show that Americans support multilateral action in
principle -- they even support acting under the rubric of the United
Nations -- but the fact remains that the United States can act
unilaterally, and has done so many times with reasonable success. For
Europeans, the appeal to multilateralism and international law has a
real practical payoff and little cost. For Americans, who stand to
lose at least some freedom of action, support for universal rules of
behavior really is a matter of idealism.

Even when Americans and Europeans can agree on the kind of world order
they would strive to build, however, they increasingly disagree about
what constitutes a threat to that international endeavor. Indeed,
Europeans and Americans differ most these days in their evaluation of
what constitutes a tolerable versus an intolerable threat. This, too,
is consistent with the disparity of power.

Europeans often argue that Americans have an unreasonable demand for
"perfect" security, the product of living for centuries shielded
behind two oceans.^[11]5 Europeans claim they know what it is like to
live with danger, to exist side-by-side with evil, since they¢ve done
it for centuries. Hence their greater tolerance for such threats as
may be posed by Saddam Hussein¢s Iraq or the ayatollahs¢ Iran.
Americans, they claim, make far too much of the dangers these regimes
pose.

Even before September 11, this argument rang a bit hollow. The United
States in its formative decades lived in a state of substantial
insecurity, surrounded by hostile European empires, at constant risk
of being torn apart by centrifugal forces that were encouraged by
threats from without: National insecurity formed the core of
Washington¢s Farewell Address. As for the Europeans¢ supposed
tolerance for insecurity and evil, it can be overstated. For the
better part of three centuries, European Catholics and Protestants
more often preferred to kill than to tolerate each other; nor have the
past two centuries shown all that much mutual tolerance between
Frenchmen and Germans.

Some Europeans argue that precisely because Europe has suffered so
much, it has a higher tolerance for suffering than America and
therefore a higher tolerance for threats. More likely the opposite is
true. The memory of their horrendous suffering in World War I made the
British and French publics more fearful of Nazi Germany, not more
tolerant, and this attitude contributed significantly to the
appeasement of the 1930s.

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?

This perfectly normal human psychology is helping to drive a wedge
between the United States and Europe today. Europeans have concluded,
reasonably enough, that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein is more
tolerable for them than the risk of removing him. But Americans, being
stronger, have reasonably enough developed a lower threshold of
tolerance for Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction, especially
after September 11. Europeans like to say that Americans are obsessed
with fixing problems, but it is generally true that those with a
greater capacity to fix problems are more likely to try to fix them
than those who have no such capability. Americans can imagine
successfully invading Iraq and toppling Saddam, and therefore more
than 70 percent of Americans apparently favor such action. Europeans,
not surprisingly, find the prospect both unimaginable and frightening.

The incapacity to respond to threats leads not only to tolerance but
sometimes to denial. It¢s normal to try to put out of one¢s mind that
which one can do nothing about. According to one student of European
opinion, even the very focus on "threats" differentiates American
policymakers from their European counterparts. Americans, writes
Steven Everts, talk about foreign "threats" such as "the proliferation
of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and ¡rogue states.¢" But
Europeans look at "challenges," such as "ethnic conflict, migration,
organized crime, poverty and environmental degradation." As Everts
notes, however, the key difference is less a matter of culture and
philosophy than of capability. Europeans "are most worried about
issues . . . that have a greater chance of being solved by political
engagement and huge sums of money." In other words, Europeans focus on
issues -- "challenges" -- where European strengths come into play but
not on those "threats" where European weakness makes solutions
elusive. If Europe¢s strategic culture today places less value on
power and military strength and more value on such soft-power tools as
economics and trade, isn¢t it partly because Europe is militarily weak
and economically strong? Americans are quicker to acknowledge the
existence of threats, even to perceive them where others may not see
any, because they can conceive of doing something to meet those
threats.

The differing threat perceptions in the United States and Europe are
not just matters of psychology, however. They are also grounded in a
practical reality that is another product of the disparity of power.
For Iraq and other "rogue" states objectively do not pose the same
level of threat to Europeans as they do to the United States. There
is, first of all, the American security guarantee that Europeans enjoy
and have enjoyed for six decades, ever since the United States took
upon itself the burden of maintaining order in far-flung regions of
the world -- from the Korean Peninsula to the Persian Gulf -- from
which European power had largely withdrawn. Europeans generally
believe, whether or not they admit it to themselves, that were Iraq
ever to emerge as a real and present danger, as opposed to merely a
potential danger, then the United States would do something about it
-- as it did in 1991. If during the Cold War Europe by necessity made
a major contribution to its own defense, today Europeans enjoy an
unparalleled measure of "free security" because most of the likely
threats are in regions outside Europe, where only the United States
can project effective force. In a very practical sense -- that is,
when it comes to actual strategic planning -- neither Iraq nor Iran
nor North Korea nor any other "rogue" state in the world is primarily
a European problem. Nor, certainly, is China. Both Europeans and
Americans agree that these are primarily American problems.

This is why Saddam Hussein is not as great a threat to Europe as he is
to the United States. He would be a greater threat to the United
States even were the Americans and Europeans in complete agreement on
Iraq policy, because it is the logical consequence of the
transatlantic disparity of power. The task of containing Saddam
Hussein belongs primarily to the United States, not to Europe, and
everyone agrees on this^[12]6 -- including Saddam, which is why he
considers the United States, not Europe, his principal adversary. In
the Persian Gulf, in the Middle East, and in most other regions of the
world (including Europe), the United States plays the role of ultimate
enforcer. "You are so powerful," Europeans often say to Americans. "So
why do you feel so threatened?" But it is precisely America¢s great
power that makes it the primary target, and often the only target.
Europeans are understandably content that it should remain so.

Americans are "cowboys," Europeans love to say. And there is truth in
this. The United States does act as an international sheriff,
self-appointed perhaps but widely welcomed nevertheless, trying to
enforce some peace and justice in what Americans see as a lawless
world where outlaws need to be deterred or destroyed, and often
through the muzzle of a gun. Europe, by this old West analogy, is more
like a saloonkeeper. Outlaws shoot sheriffs, not saloonkeepers. In
fact, from the saloonkeeper¢s point of view, the sheriff trying to
impose order by force can sometimes be more threatening than the
outlaws who, at least for the time being, may just want a drink.

When Europeans took to the streets by the millions after September 11,
most Americans believed it was out of a sense of shared danger and
common interest: The Europeans knew they could be next. But Europeans
by and large did not feel that way and still don¢t. Europeans do not
really believe they are next. They may be secondary targets -- because
they are allied with the U.S. -- but they are not the primary target,
because they no longer play the imperial role in the Middle East that
might have engendered the same antagonism against them as is aimed at
the United States. When Europeans wept and waved American flags after
September 11, it was out of genuine human sympathy, sorrow, and
affection for Americans. For better or for worse, European displays of
solidarity were a product more of fellow-feeling than self-interest.

The origins of modern European foreign policy

[13]I mportant as the power gap may be in shaping the respective
strategic cultures of the United States and Europe, it is only one
part of the story. Europe in the past half-century has developed a
genuinely different perspective on the role of power in international
relations, a perspective that springs directly from its unique
historical experience since the end of World War II. It is a
perspective that Americans do not share and cannot share, inasmuch as
the formative historical experiences on their side of the Atlantic
have not been the same.

Consider again the qualities that make up the European strategic
culture: the emphasis on negotiation, diplomacy, and commercial ties,
on international law over the use of force, on seduction over
coercion, on multilateralism over unilateralism. It is true that these
are not traditionally European approaches to international relations
when viewed from a long historical perspective. But they are a product
of more recent European history. The modern European strategic culture
represents a conscious rejection of the European past, a rejection of
the evils of European machtpolitik. It is a reflection of Europeans¢
ardent and understandable desire never to return to that past. Who
knows better than Europeans the dangers that arise from unbridled
power politics, from an excessive reliance on military force, from
policies produced by national egoism and ambition, even from balance
of power and raison d¢etat? As German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer
put it in a speech outlining his vision of the European future at
Humboldt University in Berlin (May 12, 2000), "The core of the concept
of Europe after 1945 was and still is a rejection of the European
balance-of-power principle and the hegemonic ambitions of individual
states that had emerged following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648."
The European Union is itself the product of an awful century of
European warfare.

Of course, it was the "hegemonic ambitions" of one nation in
particular that European integration was meant to contain. And it is
the integration and taming of Germany that is the great accomplishment
of Europe -- viewed historically, perhaps the greatest feat of
international politics ever achieved. Some Europeans recall, as
Fischer does, the central role played by the United States in solving
the "German problem." Fewer like to recall that the military
destruction of Nazi Germany was the prerequisite for the European
peace that followed. Most Europeans believe that it was the
transformation of European politics, the deliberate abandonment and
rejection of centuries of machtpolitik, that in the end made possible
the "new order." The Europeans, who invented power politics, turned
themselves into born-again idealists by an act of will, leaving behind
them what Fischer called "the old system of balance with its continued
national orientation, constraints of coalition, traditional
interest-led politics and the permanent danger of nationalist
ideologies and confrontations."

Fischer stands near one end of the spectrum of European idealism. But
this is not really a right-left issue in Europe. Fischer¢s principal
contention -- that Europe has moved beyond the old system of power
politics and discovered a new system for preserving peace in
international relations -- is widely shared across Europe. As senior
British diplomat Robert Cooper recently wrote in the Observer (April
7, 2002), Europe today lives in a "postmodern system" that does not
rest on a balance of power but on "the rejection of force" and on
"self-enforced rules of behavior." In the "postmodern world," writes
Cooper, "raison d¢etat and the amorality of Machiavelli¢s theories of
statecraft . . . have been replaced by a moral consciousness" in
international affairs.

American realists might scoff at this idealism. George F. Kennan
assumed only his naive fellow Americans succumbed to such "Wilsonian"
legalistic and moralistic fancies, not those war-tested, historically
minded European Machiavels. But, really, why shouldn¢t Europeans be
idealistic about international affairs, at least as they are conducted
in Europe¢s "postmodern system"? Within the confines of Europe, the
age-old laws of international relations have been repealed. Europeans
have stepped out of the Hobbesian world of anarchy into the Kantian
world of perpetual peace. European life during the more than five
decades since the end of World War II has been shaped not by the
brutal laws of power politics but by the unfolding of a geopolitical
fantasy, a miracle of world-historical importance: The German lion has
laid down with the French lamb. The conflict that ravaged Europe ever
since the violent birth of Germany in the nineteenth century has been
put to rest.

The means by which this miracle has been achieved have understandably
acquired something of a sacred mystique for Europeans, especially
since the end of the Cold War. Diplomacy, negotiations, patience, the
forging of economic ties, political engagement, the use of inducements
rather than sanctions, the taking of small steps and tempering
ambitions for success -- these were the tools of Franco-German
rapprochement and hence the tools that made European integration
possible. Integration was not to be based on military deterrence or
the balance of power. Quite the contrary. The miracle came from the
rejection of military power and of its utility as an instrument of
international affairs -- at least within the confines of Europe.
During the Cold War, few Europeans doubted the need for military power
to deter the Soviet Union. But within Europe the rules were different.

Collective security was provided from without, meanwhile, by the deus
ex machina of the United States operating through the military
structures of nato. Within this wall of security, Europeans pursued
their new order, freed from the brutal laws and even the mentality of
power politics. This evolution from the old to the new began in Europe
during the Cold War. But the end of the Cold War, by removing even the
external danger of the Soviet Union, allowed Europe¢s new order, and
its new idealism, to blossom fully. Freed from the requirements of any
military deterrence, internal or external, Europeans became still more
confident that their way of settling international problems now had
universal application.

"The genius of the founding fathers," European Commission President
Romano Prodi commented in a speech at the Institute d¢Etudes
Politiques in Paris (May 29, 2001), "lay in translating extremely high
political ambitions . . . into a series of more specific, almost
technical decisions. This indirect approach made further action
possible. Rapprochement took place gradually. From confrontation we
moved to willingness to cooperate in the economic sphere and then on
to integration." This is what many Europeans believe they have to
offer the world: not power, but the transcendence of power. The
"essence" of the European Union, writes Everts, is "all about
subjecting inter-state relations to the rule of law," and Europe¢s
experience of successful multilateral governance has in turn produced
an ambition to convert the world. Europe "has a role to play in world
¡governance,¢" says Prodi, a role based on replicating the European
experience on a global scale. In Europe "the rule of law has replaced
the crude interplay of power . . . power politics have lost their
influence." And by "making a success of integration we are
demonstrating to the world that it is possible to create a method for
peace."

No doubt there are Britons, Germans, French, and others who would
frown on such exuberant idealism. But many Europeans, including many
in positions of power, routinely apply Europe¢s experience to the rest
of the world. For is not the general European critique of the American
approach to "rogue" regimes based on this special European insight?
Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya -- these states may be dangerous and
unpleasant, even evil. But might not an "indirect approach" work
again, as it did in Europe? Might it not be possible once more to move
from confrontation to rapprochement, beginning with cooperation in the
economic sphere and then moving on to peaceful integration? Could not
the formula that worked in Europe work again with Iran or even Iraq? A
great many Europeans insist that it can.

The transmission of the European miracle to the rest of the world has
become Europe¢s new mission civilisatrice. Just as Americans have
always believed that they had discovered the secret to human happiness
and wished to export it to the rest of the world, so the Europeans
have a new mission born of their own discovery of perpetual peace.

Thus we arrive at what may be the most important reason for the
divergence in views between Europe and the United States. America¢s
power, and its willingness to exercise that power -- unilaterally if
necessary -- represents a threat to Europe¢s new sense of mission.
Perhaps the greatest threat. American policymakers find it hard to
believe, but leading officials and politicians in Europe worry more
about how the United States might handle or mishandle the problem of
Iraq -- by undertaking unilateral and extralegal military action --
than they worry about Iraq itself and Saddam Hussein¢s weapons of mass
destruction. And while it is true that they fear such action might
destabilize the Middle East and lead to the unnecessary loss of life,
there is a deeper concern.^[14]7 Such American action represents an
assault on the essence of "postmodern" Europe. It is an assault on
Europe¢s new ideals, a denial of their universal validity, much as the
monarchies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe were an
assault on American republican ideals. Americans ought to be the first
to understand that a threat to one¢s beliefs can be as frightening as
a threat to one¢s physical security.

As Americans have for two centuries, Europeans speak with great
confidence of the superiority of their global understanding, the
wisdom they have to offer other nations about conflict resolution, and
their way of addressing international problems. But just as in the
first decade of the American republic, there is a hint of insecurity
in the European claim to "success," an evident need to have their
success affirmed and their views accepted by other nations,
particularly by the mighty United States. After all, to deny the
validity of the new European idealism is to raise profound doubts
about the viability of the European project. If international problems
cannot, in fact, be settled the European way, wouldn¢t that suggest
that Europe itself may eventually fall short of a solution, with all
the horrors this implies?

And, of course, it is precisely this fear that still hangs over
Europeans, even as Europe moves forward. Europeans, and particularly
the French and Germans, are not entirely sure that the problem once
known as the "German problem" really has been solved. As their various
and often very different proposals for the future constitution of
Europe suggest, the French are still not confident they can trust the
Germans, and the Germans are still not sure they can trust themselves.
This fear can at times hinder progress toward deeper integration, but
it also propels the European project forward despite innumerable
obstacles. The European project must succeed, for how else to overcome
what Fischer, in his Humboldt University speech, called "the risks and
temptations objectively inherent in Germany¢s dimensions and central
situation"? Those historic German "temptations" play at the back of
many a European mind. And every time Europe contemplates the use of
military force, or is forced to do so by the United States, there is
no avoiding at least momentary consideration of what effect such a
military action might have on the "German question."

Perhaps it is not just coincidence that the amazing progress toward
European integration in recent years has been accompanied not by the
emergence of a European superpower but, on the contrary, by a
diminishing of European military capabilities relative to the United
States. Turning Europe into a global superpower capable of balancing
the power of the United States may have been one of the original
selling points of the European Union -- an independent European
foreign and defense policy was supposed to be one of the most
important byproducts of European integration. But, in truth, the
ambition for European "power" is something of an anachronism. It is an
atavistic impulse, inconsistent with the ideals of postmodern Europe,
whose very existence depends on the rejection of power politics.
Whatever its architects may have intended, European integration has
proved to be the enemy of European military power and, indeed, of an
important European global role.

This phenomenon has manifested itself not only in flat or declining
European defense budgets, but in other ways, too, even in the realm of
"soft" power. European leaders talk of Europe¢s essential role in the
world. Prodi yearns "to make our voice heard, to make our actions
count." And it is true that Europeans spend a great deal of money on
foreign aid -- more per capita, they like to point out, than does the
United States. Europeans engage in overseas military missions, so long
as the missions are mostly limited to peacekeeping. But while the eu
periodically dips its fingers into troubled international waters in
the Middle East or the Korean Peninsula, the truth is that eu foreign
policy is probably the most anemic of all the products of European
integration. As Charles Grant, a sympathetic observer of the eu,
recently noted, few European leaders "are giving it much time or
energy."^[15]8 eu foreign policy initiatives tend to be short-lived
and are rarely backed by sustained agreement on the part of the
various European powers. That is one reason they are so easily
rebuffed, as was the case in late March when Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon blocked eu foreign policy chief Javier Solana from
meeting with Yasser Arafat (only to turn around the next day and allow
a much lower-ranking American negotiator to meet with the Palestinian
leader).

It is obvious, moreover, that issues outside of Europe don¢t attract
nearly as much interest among Europeans as purely European issues do.
This has surprised and frustrated Americans on all sides of the
political and strategic debate: Recall the profound disappointment of
American liberals when Europeans failed to mount an effective protest
against Bush¢s withdrawal from the abm treaty. But given the enormous
and difficult agenda of integration, this European tendency to look
inward is understandable. eu enlargement, the revision of the common
economic and agricultural policies, the question of national
sovereignty versus supranational governance, the so-called democracy
deficit, the jostling of the large European powers, the
dissatisfaction of the smaller powers, the establishment of a new
European constitution -- all of these present serious and unavoidable
challenges. The difficulties of moving forward might seem insuperable
were it not for the progress the project of European integration has
already demonstrated.

American policies that are unwelcome on substance -- on a missile
defense system and the abm treaty, belligerence toward Iraq, support
for Israel -- are all the more unwelcome because for Europe, they are
a distraction. Europeans often point to American insularity and
parochialism. But Europeans themselves have turned intensely
introspective. As Dominique Moisi noted in the Financial Times (March
11, 2002), the recent French presidential campaign saw "no reference .
. . to the events of September 11 and their far-reaching
consequences." No one asked, "What should be the role of France and
Europe in the new configuration of forces created after September 11?
How should France reappraise its military budget and doctrine to take
account of the need to maintain some kind of parity between Europe and
the United States, or at least between France and the uk?" The Middle
East conflict became an issue in the campaign because of France¢s
large Arab and Muslim population, as the high vote for Le Pen
demonstrated. But Le Pen is not a foreign policy hawk. And as Moisi
noted, "for most French voters in 2002, security has little to do with
abstract and distant geopolitics. Rather, it is a question of which
politician can best protect them from the crime and violence plaguing
the streets and suburbs of their cities."

Can Europe change course and assume a larger role on the world stage?
There has been no shortage of European leaders urging it to do so. Nor
is the weakness of eu foreign policy today necessarily proof that it
must be weak tomorrow, given the eu¢s record of overcoming weaknesses
in other areas. And yet the political will to demand more power for
Europe appears to be lacking, and for the very good reason that Europe
does not see a mission for itself that requires power. Its mission is
to oppose power. It is revealing that the argument most often advanced
by Europeans for augmenting their military strength these days is not
that it will allow Europe to expand its strategic purview. It is
merely to rein in and "multilateralize" the United States. "America,"
writes the pro-American British scholar Timothy Garton Ash in the New
York Times (April 9, 2002), "has too much power for anyone¢s good,
including its own." Therefore Europe must amass power, but for no
other reason than to save the world and the United States from the
dangers inherent in the present lopsided situation.

Whether that particular mission is a worthy one or not, it seems
unlikely to rouse European passions. Even Vedrine has stopped talking
about counterbalancing the United States. Now he shrugs and declares
there "is no reason for the Europeans to match a country that can
fight four wars at once." It was one thing for Europe in the 1990s to
increase its collective expenditures on defense from $150 billion per
year to $180 billion when the United States was spending $280 billion
per year. But now the United States is heading toward spending as much
as $500 billion per year, and Europe has not the slightest intention
of keeping up. European analysts lament the continent¢s "strategic
irrelevance." nato Secretary General George Robertson has taken to
calling Europe a "military pygmy" in an effort to shame Europeans into
spending more and doing so more wisely. But who honestly believes
Europeans will fundamentally change their way of doing business? They
have many reasons not to.

The U.S. response

[16]I n thinking about the divergence of their own views and
Europeans¢, Americans must not lose sight of the main point: The new
Europe is indeed a blessed miracle and a reason for enormous
celebration -- on both sides of the Atlantic. For Europeans, it is the
realization of a long and improbable dream: a continent free from
nationalist strife and blood feuds, from military competition and arms
races. War between the major European powers is almost unimaginable.
After centuries of misery, not only for Europeans but also for those
pulled into their conflicts -- as Americans were twice in the past
century -- the new Europe really has emerged as a paradise. It is
something to be cherished and guarded, not least by Americans, who
have shed blood on Europe¢s soil and would shed more should the new
Europe ever fail.

Nor should we forget that the Europe of today is very much the product
of American foreign policy stretching back over six decades. European
integration was an American project, too, after World War II. And so,
recall, was European weakness. When the Cold War dawned, Americans
such as Dean Acheson hoped to create in Europe a powerful partner
against the Soviet Union. But that was not the only American vision of
Europe underlying U.S. policies during the twentieth century.
Predating it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt¢s vision of a Europe that
had been rendered, in effect, strategically irrelevant. As the
historian John Lamberton Harper has put it, he wanted "to bring about
a radical reduction in the weight of Europe" and thereby make possible
"the retirement of Europe from world politics."^[17]9

Americans who came of age during the Cold War have always thought of
Europe almost exclusively in Achesonian terms -- as the essential
bulwark of freedom in the struggle against Soviet tyranny. But
Americans of Roosevelt¢s era had a different view. In the late 1930s
the common conviction of Americans was that "the European system was
basically rotten, that war was endemic on that continent, and the
Europeans had only themselves to blame for their plight."^[18]10 By
the early 1940s Europe appeared to be nothing more than the overheated
incubator of world wars that cost America dearly. During World War II
Americans like Roosevelt, looking backward rather than forward,
believed no greater service could be performed than to take Europe out
of the global strategic picture once and for all. "After Germany is
disarmed," fdr pointedly asked, "what is the reason for France having
a big military establishment?" Charles DeGaulle found such questions
"disquieting for Europe and for France." Even though the United States
pursued Acheson¢s vision during the Cold War, there was always a part
of American policy that reflected Roosevelt¢s vision, too. Eisenhower
undermining Britain and France at Suez was only the most blatant of
many American efforts to cut Europe down to size and reduce its
already weakened global influence.

But the more important American contribution to Europe¢s current
world-apart status stemmed not from anti-European but from
pro-European impulses. It was a commitment to Europe, not hostility to
Europe, that led the United States in the immediate postwar years to
keep troops on the continent and to create nato. The presence of
American forces as a security guarantee in Europe was, as it was
intended to be, the critical ingredient to begin the process of
European integration.

Europe¢s evolution to its present state occurred under the mantle of
the U.S. security guarantee and could not have occurred without it.
Not only did the United States for almost half a century supply a
shield against such external threats as the Soviet Union and such
internal threats as may have been posed by ethnic conflict in places
like the Balkans. More important, the United States was the key to the
solution of the German problem and perhaps still is. Germany¢s
Fischer, in the Humboldt University speech, noted two "historic
decisions" that made the new Europe possible: "the usa¢s decision to
stay in Europe" and "France¢s and Germany¢s commitment to the
principle of integration, beginning with economic links." But of
course the latter could never have occurred without the former.
France¢s willingness to risk the reintegration of Germany into Europe
-- and France was, to say the least, highly dubious -- depended on the
promise of continued American involvement in Europe as a guarantee
against any resurgence of German militarism. Nor were postwar Germans
unaware that their own future in Europe depended on the calming
presence of the American military.

The United States, in short, solved the Kantian paradox for the
Europeans. Kant had argued that the only solution to the immoral
horrors of the Hobbesian world was the creation of a world government.
But he also feared that the "state of universal peace" made possible
by world government would be an even greater threat to human freedom
than the Hobbesian international order, inasmuch as such a government,
with its monopoly of power, would become "the most horrible
despotism."^[19]11 How nations could achieve perpetual peace without
destroying human freedom was a problem Kant could not solve. But for
Europe the problem was solved by the United States. By providing
security from outside, the United States has rendered it unnecessary
for Europe¢s supranational government to provide it. Europeans did not
need power to achieve peace and they do not need power to preserve it.

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.

Some Europeans do understand the conundrum. Some Britons, not
surprisingly, understand it best. Thus Robert Cooper writes of the
need to address the hard truth that although "within the postmodern
world [i.e., the Europe of today], there are no security threats in
the traditional sense," nevertheless, throughout the rest of the world
-- what Cooper calls the "modern and pre-modern zones" -- threats
abound. If the postmodern world does not protect itself, it can be
destroyed. But how does Europe protect itself without discarding the
very ideals and principles that undergird its pacific system?

"The challenge to the postmodern world," Cooper argues, "is to get
used to the idea of double standards." Among themselves, Europeans may
"operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security." But when
dealing with the world outside Europe, "we need to revert to the
rougher methods of an earlier era -- force, preemptive attack,
deception, whatever is necessary." This is Cooper¢s principle for
safeguarding society: "Among ourselves, we keep the law but when we
are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle."

Cooper¢s argument is directed at Europe, and it is appropriately
coupled with a call for Europeans to cease neglecting their defenses,
"both physical and psychological." But what Cooper really describes is
not Europe¢s future but America¢s present. For it is the United States
that has had the difficult task of navigating between these two
worlds, trying to abide by, defend, and further the laws of advanced
civilized society while simultaneously employing military force
against those who refuse to abide by those rules. The United States is
already operating according to Cooper¢s double standard, and for the
very reasons he suggests. American leaders, too, believe that global
security and a liberal order -- as well as Europe¢s "postmodern"
paradise -- cannot long survive unless the United States does use its
power in the dangerous, Hobbesian world that still flourishes outside
Europe.

What this means is that although the United States has played the
critical role in bringing Europe into this Kantian paradise, and still
plays a key role in making that paradise possible, it cannot enter
this paradise itself. It mans the walls but cannot walk through the
gate. The United States, with all its vast power, remains stuck in
history, left to deal with the Saddams and the ayatollahs, the Kim
Jong Ils and the Jiang Zemins, leaving the happy benefits to others.

An acceptable division?

[20]I s this situation tolerable for the United States? In many ways,
it is. Contrary to what many believe, the United States can shoulder
the burden of maintaining global security without much help from
Europe. The United States spends a little over 3 percent of its gdp on
defense today. Were Americans to increase that to 4 percent -- meaning
a defense budget in excess of $500 billion per year -- it would still
represent a smaller percentage of national wealth than Americans spent
on defense throughout most of the past half-century. Even Paul
Kennedy, who invented the term "imperial overstretch" in the late
1980s (when the United States was spending around 7 percent of its gdp
on defense), believes the United States can sustain its current
military spending levels and its current global dominance far into the
future. Can the United States handle the rest of the world without
much help from Europe? The answer is that it already does. The United
States has maintained strategic stability in Asia with no help from
Europe. In the Gulf War, European help was token; so it has been more
recently in Afghanistan, where Europeans are once again "doing the
dishes"; and so it would be in an invasion of Iraq to unseat Saddam.
Europe has had little to offer the United States in strategic military
terms since the end of the Cold War -- except, of course, that most
valuable of strategic assets, a Europe at peace.

The United States can manage, therefore, at least in material terms.
Nor can one argue that the American people are unwilling to shoulder
this global burden, since they have done so for a decade already.
After September 11, they seem willing to continue doing so for a long
time to come. Americans apparently feel no resentment at not being
able to enter a "postmodern" utopia. There is no evidence most
Americans desire to. Partly because they are so powerful, they take
pride in their nation¢s military power and their nation¢s special role
in the world.

Americans have no experience that would lead them to embrace fully the
ideals and principles that now animate Europe. Indeed, Americans
derive their understanding of the world from a very different set of
experiences. In the first half of the twentieth century, Americans had
a flirtation with a certain kind of internationalist idealism.
Wilson¢s "war to end all wars" was followed a decade later by an
American secretary of state putting his signature to a treaty
outlawing war. fdr in the 1930s put his faith in non-aggression pacts
and asked merely that Hitler promise not to attack a list of countries
Roosevelt presented to him. But then came Munich and Pearl Harbor, and
then, after a fleeting moment of renewed idealism, the plunge into the
Cold War. The "lesson of Munich" came to dominate American strategic
thought, and although it was supplanted for a time by the "lesson of
Vietnam," today it remains the dominant paradigm. While a small
segment of the American elite still yearns for "global governance" and
eschews military force, Americans from Madeleine Albright to Donald
Rumsfeld, from Brent Scowcroft to Anthony Lake, still remember Munich,
figuratively if not literally. And for younger generations of
Americans who do not remember Munich or Pearl Harbor, there is now
September 11. After September 11, even many American globalizers
demand blood.

Americans are idealists, but they have no experience of promoting
ideals successfully without power. Certainly, they have no experience
of successful supranational governance; little to make them place
their faith in international law and international institutions, much
as they might wish to; and even less to let them travel, with the
Europeans, beyond power. Americans, as good children of the
Enlightenment, still believe in the perfectibility of man, and they
retain hope for the perfectibility of the world. But they remain
realists in the limited sense that they still believe in the necessity
of power in a world that remains far from perfection. Such law as
there may be to regulate international behavior, they believe, exists
because a power like the United States defends it by force of arms. In
other words, just as Europeans claim, Americans can still sometimes
see themselves in heroic terms -- as Gary Cooper at high noon. They
will defend the townspeople, whether the townspeople want them to or
not.

The problem lies neither in American will or capability, then, but
precisely in the inherent moral tension of the current international
situation. As is so often the case in human affairs, the real question
is one of intangibles -- of fears, passions, and beliefs. The problem
is that the United States must sometimes play by the rules of a
Hobbesian world, even though in doing so it violates European norms.
It must refuse to abide by certain international conventions that may
constrain its ability to fight effectively in Robert Cooper¢s jungle.
It must support arms control, but not always for itself. It must live
by a double standard. And it must sometimes act unilaterally, not out
of a passion for unilateralism but, given a weak Europe that has moved
beyond power, because the United States has no choice but to act
unilaterally.

Few Europeans admit, as Cooper does implicitly, that such American
behavior may redound to the greater benefit of the civilized world,
that American power, even employed under a double standard, may be the
best means of advancing human progress -- and perhaps the only means.
Instead, many Europeans today have come to consider the United States
itself to be the outlaw, a rogue colossus. Europeans have complained
about President Bush¢s "unilateralism," but they are coming to the
deeper realization that the problem is not Bush or any American
president. It is systemic. And it is incurable.

Given that the United States is unlikely to reduce its power and that
Europe is unlikely to increase more than marginally its own power or
the will to use what power it has, the future seems certain to be one
of increased transatlantic tension. The danger -- if it is a danger --
is that the United States and Europe will become positively estranged.
Europeans will become more shrill in their attacks on the United
States. The United States will become less inclined to listen, or
perhaps even to care. The day could come, if it has not already, when
Americans will no more heed the pronouncements of the eu than they do
the pronouncements of asean or the Andean Pact.

To those of us who came of age in the Cold War, the strategic
decoupling of Europe and the United States seems frightening.
DeGaulle, when confronted by fdr¢s vision of a world where Europe was
irrelevant, recoiled and suggested that this vision "risked
endangering the Western world." If Western Europe was to be considered
a "secondary matter" by the United States, would not fdr only "weaken
the very cause he meant to serve -- that of civilization?" Western
Europe, DeGaulle insisted, was "essential to the West. Nothing can
replace the value, the power, the shining example of the ancient
peoples." Typically, DeGaulle insisted this was "true of France above
all." But leaving aside French amour propre, did not DeGaulle have a
point? If Americans were to decide that Europe was no more than an
irritating irrelevancy, would American society gradually become
unmoored from what we now call the West? It is not a risk to be taken
lightly, on either side of the Atlantic.

So what is to be done? The obvious answer is that Europe should follow
the course that Cooper, Ash, Robertson, and others recommend and build
up its military capabilities, even if only marginally. There is not
much ground for hope that this will happen. But, then, who knows?
Maybe concern about America¢s overweening power really will create
some energy in Europe. Perhaps the atavistic impulses that still swirl
in the hearts of Germans, Britons, and Frenchmen -- the memory of
power, international influence, and national ambition -- can still be
played upon. Some Britons still remember empire; some Frenchmen still
yearn for la gloire; some Germans still want their place in the sun.
These urges are now mostly channeled into the grand European project,
but they could find more traditional expression. Whether this is to be
hoped for or feared is another question. It would be better still if
Europeans could move beyond fear and anger at the rogue colossus and
remember, again, the vital necessity of having a strong America -- for
the world and especially for Europe.

Americans can help. It is true that the Bush administration came into
office with a chip on its shoulder. It was hostile to the new Europe
-- as to a lesser extent was the Clinton administration -- seeing it
not so much as an ally but as an albatross. Even after September 11,
when the Europeans offered their very limited military capabilities in
the fight in Afghanistan, the United States resisted, fearing that
European cooperation was a ruse to tie America down. The Bush
administration viewed nato¢s historic decision to aid the United
States under Article V less as a boon than as a booby trap. An
opportunity to draw Europe into common battle out in the Hobbesian
world, even in a minor role, was thereby unnecessarily lost.

Americans are powerful enough that they need not fear Europeans, even
when bearing gifts. Rather than viewing the United States as a
Gulliver tied down by Lilliputian threads, American leaders should
realize that they are hardly constrained at all, that Europe is not
really capable of constraining the United States. If the United States
could move past the anxiety engendered by this inaccurate sense of
constraint, it could begin to show more understanding for the
sensibilities of others, a little generosity of spirit. It could pay
its respects to multilateralism and the rule of law and try to build
some international political capital for those moments when
multilateralism is impossible and unilateral action unavoidable. It
could, in short, take more care to show what the founders called a
"decent respect for the opinion of mankind."

These are small steps, and they will not address the deep problems
that beset the transatlantic relationship today. But, after all, it is
more than a cliche that the United States and Europe share a set of
common Western beliefs. Their aspirations for humanity are much the
same, even if their vast disparity of power has now put them in very
different places. Perhaps it is not too naively optimistic to believe
that a little common understanding could still go a long way.
_________________________________________________________________

Notes

^[21]1One representative French observer describes "a U.S. mindset"
that "tends to emphasize military, technical and unilateral solutions
to international problems, possibly at the expense of co-operative and
political ones." See Gilles Andreani, "The Disarray of U.S.
Non-Proliferation Policy," Survival (Winter 1999-2000).

^[22]2The case of Bosnia in the early 1990s stands out as an instance
where some Europeans, chiefly British Prime Minister Tony Blair, were
at times more forceful in advocating military action than first the
Bush and then the Clinton administration. (Blair was also an early
advocate of using air power and even ground troops in the Kosovo
crisis.) And Europeans had forces on the ground in Bosnia when the
United States did not, although in a un peacekeeping role that proved
ineffective when challenged.

^[23]3Samuel P. Huntington, "The Lonely Superpower," Foreign Affairs
(March-April 1999).

^[24]4Steven Everts, "Unilateral America, Lightweight Europe?:
Managing Divergence in Transatlantic Foreign Policy," Centre for
European Reform working paper (February 2001).

^[25]5For that matter, this is also the view commonly found in
American textbooks.

^[26]6Notwithstanding the British contribution of patrols of the
"no-fly zone."

^[27]7The common American argument that European policy toward Iraq
and Iran is dictated by financial considerations is only partly right.
Are Europeans greedier than Americans? Do American corporations not
influence American policy in Asia and Latin America, as well as in the
Middle East? The difference is that American strategic judgments
sometimes conflict with and override financial interests. For the
reasons suggested in this essay, that conflict is much less common for
Europeans.

^[28]8Charles Grant, "A European View of ESDP," Centre for European
Policy Studies working paper (April 2001).

^[29]9John Lamberton Harper, American Visions of Europe: Franklin D.
Roosevelt, George F. Kennan, and Dean G. Acheson (Cambridge University
Press, 1996), 3. The following discussion of the differing American
perspectives on Europe owes much to Harper¢s fine book.

^[30]10William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Challenge to
Isolation, 1937-1940 (Harper Bros., 1952), 14.

^[31]11See Thomas L. Pangle and Peter J. Ahrensdorf, Justice Among
Nations: On the Moral Basis of Power and Peace (University Press of
Kansas, 1999), 200-201.

[vjp...@at.biostrategist.dot.dot.com]

New Europe! Old Europe is a toilet bowl!