(AND JEWS):

Politicians With Guts (Robert Kagan, January 31, 2003, Washingon Post)

I live in Brussels, famed "capital of Europe," and have traveled across the continent over the past year, speaking with intellectuals, journalists, foreign policy analysts and government officials at the endless merry-go-round of highbrow European conferences. The settings couldn't be nicer; the food and wine couldn't be better; the conversations couldn't be more polite. And the suspicion, fear and loathing of the United States couldn't be thicker. In London, where Tony Blair has to go to work every day, one finds Britain's finest minds propounding, in sophisticated language and melodious Oxbridge accents, the conspiracy theories of Pat Buchanan concerning the "neoconservative" (read: Jewish) hijacking of American foreign policy. Britain's most gifted scholars sift through American writings about Europe searching for signs of derogatory "sexual imagery." In Paris, all the talk is of oil and "imperialism" (and Jews). In Madrid, it's oil, imperialism, past American support for Franco (and Jews). At a conference I recently attended in Barcelona, an esteemed Spanish intellectual earnestly asked why, if the United States wants to topple vicious dictatorships that manufacture weapons of mass destruction, it is not also invading Israel.

Yes, I know, there are Americans who ask such questions, too. We have our Buchanans and our Gore Vidals. But here's what Americans need to understand: In Europe, this paranoid, conspiratorial anti-Americanism is not a far-left or far-right phenomenon. It's the mainstream view. When Gerhard Schroeder campaigns on an anti-American platform in Germany, he's not just "mobilizing his base" or reaching out to fringe Greens and Socialists. He's talking to the man and woman on the street, left, right and center. When Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin publicly humiliate Colin Powell, they're playing to the gallery. The "European street" is more anti-American than ever before. Even in the 1960s at the height of the anti-Vietnam War protests or in the early 1980s at the height of the "nuclear freeze" movement, European anti-Americanism was always more than counterbalanced by European anti-communism. Most Europeans believed the real problem was the Red Army and Soviet totalitarianism, not Nixon or Reagan, and the United States, whatever its flaws, was defending them from those twin evils. When Helmut Kohl, Margaret Thatcher and even Francois Mitterrand stood with Reagan in the waning years of the Cold War, theirs was a courageous and vitally important but not a politically risky stand.

Not so today for Messrs. Blair, Aznar and Berlusconi or for Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish prime minister. For leaders in Western Europe, more so than for their Central and Eastern European colleagues, standing with Bush in the present Iraq crisis is political poison, at least in the short run. With the Soviet and communist threats safely behind them and the Balkan crises settled, most Western Europeans either don't remember, don't choose to remember or perhaps even resent America's long record of strategic "generosity" toward them. Certainly they do not feel a scintilla of generosity toward the United States. Instead, as keen observers such as Christopher Caldwell have noted, anti-Americanism has become the organizing theme for all European grievances about their world. And just as Arab leaders channel domestic unhappiness with their rule into anti-Americanism as a kind of
safety valve for discontent, so, in perhaps more subtle ways, do European leaders.

Do you suppose Bill Clinton is capable of the level of reflection that would cause him to look at Tony Blair and say: I too could have been somebody? Posted by Orrin Judd at January 31, 2003 12:54 AM