Why Bother With Europe?
Mark Steyn attempted to answer that question yesterday in his inimitable way. And the gist of his answer seems to be, "for the hell of it."
[I]n the broader sense vis-à-vis Europe, the [Bush] Administration is changing the tone precisely because it understands there can be no substance. And, if there's no substance that can be changed, what's to quarrel about? International relations are like ex-girlfriends: if you're still deluding yourself you can get her back, every encounter will perforce be fraught and turbulent; once you realise that's never gonna happen, you can meet for a quick decaf latte every six – make that 10 – months and do the whole hey-isn't-it-terrific-the-way-we're-able-to-be-such-great-friends routine because you couldn't care less. You can even make a few pleasant noises about her new romance (the so-called European Constitution) secure in the knowledge he's a total loser.
I can't speak from personal experience on this aphorism, as I married the first and only girlfriend I ever dated. And frankly, if put into it, I would think I wouldn't want to see my one-time beau's face ever again.
That's what puzzles me about the Administration's efforts to "reach out" to Old Europe. The whole thing is nothing more than diplo-diddling. We're not going to change their minds about Iraq and arming Red China and de-nuking Iran and getting Syria out of Lebanon and otherwise making foreign policy actually relevant to the world on which we all live, and they're certainly not going to sway Dubya, either. The President keeps talking about "transatlantic unity" and yet the EU continues on its adversarial path against us and our interests, all in a misguided effort to "counterbalance" America out of a plaintive effort to remain relevant in an arena of great-power politics that their post-military enfeeblement has caused to pass them by and leave them behind.
Put another way, bullets are a prerequisite to ballots, and the EUnuchs have little real interest in either, other than selling gobs of the former to hostile powers who will use them against us.
So what makes "the backwater that would rule the world" worth a presidential visit?
Preserving NATO, perhaps, as a "counterbalance" to the EU?
[T]he "collective security" blather is completely bogus. In the column I wrote on September 11, 2001, I mentioned en passant that among the day's consequences would be the end of NATO - "a military alliance for countries that no longer in any recognisable sense have militaries". I can't remember why I mentioned Europe and NATO in that 9/11 column. It seems an odd thing to be thinking about as the towers were falling.
But it was clear, even then, that the day's events would test the Atlantic relationship and equally clear that it would fail that test. Later that week, for the first time in its history, NATO invoked its famous Article Five - the one about how an attack on one member is an attack on all. But, even as the press release was rolling off the photocopier, most of the "allies" in this post-modern alliance were insisting that the declaration didn't mean anything. "We are not at war," said Belgium. Norway and Germany announced that there would be no deployment of their forces.
Has that sorry attitude improved since then? Nope.
Remember last year's much trumpeted NATO summit in Turkey? This was the one at which everyone was excited at how the "alliance" had agreed to expand its role in Afghanistan beyond Kabul to the country's somewhat overly autonomous "autonomous regions".
What this turned out to mean on closer examination was that, after the secretary-general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, put the squeeze on Nato's 26 members, they reluctantly put up an extra 600 troops and three helicopters for Afghanistan. That averages out at 23.08 troops per country, plus almost a ninth of a helicopter apiece. As it transpired, the three Black Hawks all came from one country - Turkey - and they've already gone back. And Afghanistan is supposed to be the good war, the one Continental officials all claim to have supported, if mostly retrospectively and for the purposes of justifying their "principled moral opposition" to Iraq.
So, then, is it a case of cultivating the marginally lesser of two obnoxious evils? Ah, now we're getting warm:
NATO will not be around circa 2015 - which is why the Americans are talking it up right now. An organisation that represents the fading residual military will of mostly post-military nations is marginally less harmful than the EU, which is the embodiment of their pacifist delusions.
Or perhaps it's an attempt to forestall as long as possible the rise of "Eurabia":
America and Europe both face security threats. But the difference is America's are external, and require hard choices in tough neighbourhoods around the world, while the EU's are internal and, as they see it, unlikely to be lessened by the sight of European soldiers joining the Great Satan in liberating, say, Syria. That's not exactly going to help keep the lid on the noisier Continental mosques.
It comes, in other words, back to the question of culture. When you deChristianize a society, it will not remain an empty vessel for long. Since "nature abhors a vacuum," sooner or later something else will come along and fill it up. And in Europe's "post-modern" case, that something is an unstoppable tide of Muslim immigrants that is, ironically, accomplishing what the initial Islamic hordes of the seventh and eighth centuries never did: the conquest of Christian Europe. It essentially closes the circle on the Crusades, when you stop and think about it.
I'd wager President Bush has thought about it quite a bit. But I wonder if even he truly realizes that the ultimate purpose of his Continental junket is not so much to speechify or pose with other leaders for the paparazzi or "climb into the old soup-and-fish, make small talk with Mme Chirac and raise a glass of champagne to the enduring friendship of our peoples," but to serve as pall bearer and eulogist for the birthplace of a Western civilization of which his own country is looking more and more like the last outpost.
[I]n the broader sense vis-à-vis Europe, the [Bush] Administration is changing the tone precisely because it understands there can be no substance. And, if there's no substance that can be changed, what's to quarrel about? International relations are like ex-girlfriends: if you're still deluding yourself you can get her back, every encounter will perforce be fraught and turbulent; once you realise that's never gonna happen, you can meet for a quick decaf latte every six – make that 10 – months and do the whole hey-isn't-it-terrific-the-way-we're-able-to-be-such-great-friends routine because you couldn't care less. You can even make a few pleasant noises about her new romance (the so-called European Constitution) secure in the knowledge he's a total loser.
I can't speak from personal experience on this aphorism, as I married the first and only girlfriend I ever dated. And frankly, if put into it, I would think I wouldn't want to see my one-time beau's face ever again.
That's what puzzles me about the Administration's efforts to "reach out" to Old Europe. The whole thing is nothing more than diplo-diddling. We're not going to change their minds about Iraq and arming Red China and de-nuking Iran and getting Syria out of Lebanon and otherwise making foreign policy actually relevant to the world on which we all live, and they're certainly not going to sway Dubya, either. The President keeps talking about "transatlantic unity" and yet the EU continues on its adversarial path against us and our interests, all in a misguided effort to "counterbalance" America out of a plaintive effort to remain relevant in an arena of great-power politics that their post-military enfeeblement has caused to pass them by and leave them behind.
Put another way, bullets are a prerequisite to ballots, and the EUnuchs have little real interest in either, other than selling gobs of the former to hostile powers who will use them against us.
So what makes "the backwater that would rule the world" worth a presidential visit?
Preserving NATO, perhaps, as a "counterbalance" to the EU?
[T]he "collective security" blather is completely bogus. In the column I wrote on September 11, 2001, I mentioned en passant that among the day's consequences would be the end of NATO - "a military alliance for countries that no longer in any recognisable sense have militaries". I can't remember why I mentioned Europe and NATO in that 9/11 column. It seems an odd thing to be thinking about as the towers were falling.
But it was clear, even then, that the day's events would test the Atlantic relationship and equally clear that it would fail that test. Later that week, for the first time in its history, NATO invoked its famous Article Five - the one about how an attack on one member is an attack on all. But, even as the press release was rolling off the photocopier, most of the "allies" in this post-modern alliance were insisting that the declaration didn't mean anything. "We are not at war," said Belgium. Norway and Germany announced that there would be no deployment of their forces.
Has that sorry attitude improved since then? Nope.
Remember last year's much trumpeted NATO summit in Turkey? This was the one at which everyone was excited at how the "alliance" had agreed to expand its role in Afghanistan beyond Kabul to the country's somewhat overly autonomous "autonomous regions".
What this turned out to mean on closer examination was that, after the secretary-general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, put the squeeze on Nato's 26 members, they reluctantly put up an extra 600 troops and three helicopters for Afghanistan. That averages out at 23.08 troops per country, plus almost a ninth of a helicopter apiece. As it transpired, the three Black Hawks all came from one country - Turkey - and they've already gone back. And Afghanistan is supposed to be the good war, the one Continental officials all claim to have supported, if mostly retrospectively and for the purposes of justifying their "principled moral opposition" to Iraq.
So, then, is it a case of cultivating the marginally lesser of two obnoxious evils? Ah, now we're getting warm:
NATO will not be around circa 2015 - which is why the Americans are talking it up right now. An organisation that represents the fading residual military will of mostly post-military nations is marginally less harmful than the EU, which is the embodiment of their pacifist delusions.
Or perhaps it's an attempt to forestall as long as possible the rise of "Eurabia":
America and Europe both face security threats. But the difference is America's are external, and require hard choices in tough neighbourhoods around the world, while the EU's are internal and, as they see it, unlikely to be lessened by the sight of European soldiers joining the Great Satan in liberating, say, Syria. That's not exactly going to help keep the lid on the noisier Continental mosques.
It comes, in other words, back to the question of culture. When you deChristianize a society, it will not remain an empty vessel for long. Since "nature abhors a vacuum," sooner or later something else will come along and fill it up. And in Europe's "post-modern" case, that something is an unstoppable tide of Muslim immigrants that is, ironically, accomplishing what the initial Islamic hordes of the seventh and eighth centuries never did: the conquest of Christian Europe. It essentially closes the circle on the Crusades, when you stop and think about it.
I'd wager President Bush has thought about it quite a bit. But I wonder if even he truly realizes that the ultimate purpose of his Continental junket is not so much to speechify or pose with other leaders for the paparazzi or "climb into the old soup-and-fish, make small talk with Mme Chirac and raise a glass of champagne to the enduring friendship of our peoples," but to serve as pall bearer and eulogist for the birthplace of a Western civilization of which his own country is looking more and more like the last outpost.
posted by JASmius at 9:18 AM
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