Power and Weakness

[onedomino]

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For those interested in understanding the increasingly divergent cultural, political, and military paths of America and the EU:

Power and Weakness
By Robert Kagan

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

It 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.

Read the remainder of this article here: http://www.policyreview.org/JUN02/kagan.html
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[musicman]

Perhaps the "hard" quality of American foreign policy has afforded Europe the LUXURY of it's complex, nuanced paralysis.

 

[wolvie20m]

Can't we all just get along? :blah2:

 

[CSM]

Very long but very good article. If one reads it in its entirety, it certainly generates some deep thinking.

 

[ScreamingEagle]

Interesting article. However, it still does not adequately answer for me the question of why Europe has become so anti-American when it is America's power that provides the very protection for them to pursue their idealistic Kantian dreamworld. Of course they fear our unilateral power but you would think they need it much more than they fear it. Isn't their anti-Americanism a bit foolish?

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.

 

[NATO AIR]

damn good article, are we fated to witness another war in europe in our time? with the fraying relations and waning influence of the US with the self-induglent and arrogant EU, could Germany or France soon be led by an out of touch fanatic?

 

[NATO AIR]

Interesting article. However, it still does not adequately answer for me the question of why Europe has become so anti-American when it is America's power that provides the very protection for them to pursue their idealistic Kantian dreamworld. Of course they fear our unilateral power but you would think they need it much more than they fear it. Isn't their anti-Americanism a bit foolish?

It is, and it will be their undoing when an Iranian or N. Korean nuclear missile strikes one of their cities.

They are perhaps jealous of what we have come to stand for under Pres. Bush(action, not rhetoric)?

 

[Avatar4321]

Since when have European socialist programs brought them prosperity? There is a reason they have double digit inflation in alot of those countries and they are focusing on tourism industries rather than actually producing or selling anything.