Imagine a continent that collectively budgets very little on its own defense, instead finding protection in a distant and democratic superpower that pays rent for the privilege of basing troops, planes, and ships to stop hooligans â sometimes, as in the case of an embarrassingly impolite Mr. Milosevic, right on Europeâs doorstop.
In return, many European elites ridicule American values, naïveté, and insularity â even as their countries have raked in billions of American dollars in trade surpluses and tourism from mostly oblivious, aw-shucks Americans. We self-absorbed, parochial yokels laughed and paid little attention to the fact that some in Europe had forsaken Christianity for this weird, emerging boutique religion of anti-Americanism.
Who could take their ankle-biting seriously? Who, after all, would give up all that they had gotten so cheaply â that dream of all spoiled teenagers: to snap at and ridicule their patient and paying parents, even as they call on them in extremis for help whenever the car stalls or the rent is short?
Yet suddenly many Europeans are not talking of âEurope,â but telling us instead: âYou Americans must be careful in lumping us all together as if there are not real differences among us.â Thank the crazed Chirac and his infantile Talleyrand for this new, more nationalist and ânon-Europeanâ identity, now growing among Europeans in the wake of the Iraqi war.
The unease with the Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis is just beginning. In the coming year alone, troves of archives â economic, political, and military â will reveal France to have been more an enemy than a friend of the United States in the present war, and that a legion of German, French, and Russian businessmen, journalists, and politicians were on the Iraqi take, or worse. The duplicity of our so-called friends will make their deceit during the Balkan fiasco look like childâs play.
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Yet polls continue to show that at least a third of Frenchmen, Belgians, and Germans donât like Americans, and another third donât trust us. Eight years of Clintonâs lip-biting and apologies du jour earned no sympathy, but did win us plenty of contempt. The problems are fundamental and transcend American presidencies.
Let us face reality at least once: We are living in the most precipitous moment of change of the last half century as we witness a tectonic shift in Europe, one that is realigning the way an entire continent operates.
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Nor are fits of continental craziness, both real and abstract, even new. Napoleon was willing to risk the lives of millions for the idea of a pan-European dream, its scary, pretentious adages not unlike those now emanating from Brussels or from the mad M. Villepin. The rise of German Nazism, Italian fascism, and continental Marxism at times turned Europeans away from the liberal tradition and drew them to darker and more authoritarian promises, with roots from Platoâs Laws to Oswald Spengler. Too many Europeans still cherish the belief that they are close to an end to war, hunger, want, and meanness â ideals inseparable from a light work week, cradle-to-grave care, protection by an uncouth American military, and a steady stream of fertile, darker, unassimilated peoples to take out their trash and clean their toilets.
The fact is that the absence of Russian divisions has meant an end to both a common threat and unity with the United States. It is not just that Europeans have forgotten two World Wars, the Berlin Airlift, Americaâs willingness to expose its cities to Soviet nuclear attack to protect the continent, or our support for German reunification. They resent even the mention of past beneficence and, if history is to be contemplated, prefer to bring up Hamburg and Dresden rather than Auschwitz.
