The US and Europe

[johnc]

http://www.policyreview.org/JUN02/kagan.html

 

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.

[Michael]

Interesting article. I was going to post the following in the “torture†thread, but this one is more appropriate.

 

 

As a naturalized American citizen who has lived here for 24 years but whose native culture is very different, my perception is that America has largely been spared the horrors of war and destruction in modern history. So when 9/11 happened, it was viewed as an apocalyptic event, a completely unprecedented tragedy which changed all the rules, and which was viewed as a requisite wake-up call for America to gird for a new reality. While Europeans were also horrified by this tragedy, they did not react in such an apocalyptic sense. Let me try to examine why.

 

It’s inconceivable for Americans to lose millions of civilians to carpet bombing, starvation, genocide, and all the other evils of “total warâ€. Pearl Harbor, 9/11, Gettysburg – how do these compare to the Battle of Britain, to the battle of Stalingrad, to the seize of Leningrad, to the destruction of Warsaw? Not to belittle the deaths in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but one must recognize the relative magnitude of the suffering and destruction. Europe has been hit so hard by warfare, that Europeans have come to collectively believe that essentially ANYTHING is preferable to war. Americans, on the other hand, tend to believe that war is just another part of the saying, “the price of liberty is eternal vigilanceâ€.

 

So whereas most Americans probably believe that America is at war, and that it rightly should be at war – literally a war, and not just a metaphorical war such as the “war on drugs†or “war on povertyâ€, Europeans find the war-talk to be ill-placed hyperbole.