U.S. Establishment Underestimates European Integration (Uniting by promoting anti-Americanism)

There is no longer supposed to be an American establishment. It is popularly believed to have died away circa 1965 though a few elderly WASPs can still be seen sunk in leather armchairs in New York clubs lamenting the state of the world.

Such impressions are, however, misleading. It is in the nature of establishments that they are fully recognized and accurately classified only in retrospect. While the old WASP establishment was still a functioning conspiracy along the East Coast, everyone was publicly maintaining that unlike Britain (where the establishment is known by the slightly derisory term "the Great and the Good") the United States had no class system, and every voice carried equal weight. Today's establishment is no longer solidly WASP. But it is no less an establishment for all that.

Last week, this new American establishment came out of hibernation and was sighted at one of its familiar habitats — the Council of Foreign Relations in New York city. There it emitted its familiar mating cry — a report on U.S.-European relations.

The committee that issued the report had the names that are almost compulsory on such documents. Its chairmen were Henry Kissinger and Harvard President Lawrence Summers. Other members included such stalwarts of official Atlanticism as Brent Scowcroft from the first Bush National Security Council, former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Amato, former U.S. ambassador to NATO Reginald Bartholemew, and President Jimmy Carter's defense secretary, Harold Brown. But the absorptive and latitudinarian character of the establishment was indicated by the fact that its younger members included such rebellious intellects as Robert Kagan (who popularized the argument that Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus) and Charles Kupchan of Georgetown University, the council, and the Clinton administration.

It should first be admitted that U.S.-European relations are extremely important. A united Western alliance would shape world institutions and rising powers such as China in line with values and practices rooted in liberty and democracy. Indeed this is happening — as China seeks to enter institutions such as the G-7 and the World Trade Organization. A disunited West, however, would be a temptation for such powers to play Europe and America against each other in an attempt to overturn the international status quo.

Quote:

Some of the council's proposals might soften the edges of this anti-Americanism — for instance, asking Europe to accept the principle of preventive war in return for Washington's agreement to keep it as a solution of last resort. But the underlying problem, as the council itself concedes, is that European elites are defining their new identity in opposition to the United States. We need to understand that deep-seated anti-Americanism as we once had to understand fascism and communism. And that will take time as well as other resources.

Same old s(tuff)!

Well just wait until the EU goes belly up. If we manage to avoid an EU type Socialism, turn around entitlements (I know, I know - but at least to some degree.) and forge ahead with a new technology and economic leap they will really start to hate us. I was over there when the second Mars rover landed and, brother! were the Euros PO'd. I saw some that were literally in pain. They took it as some sort of personal affront. Of course Americans do not feel this when some science or engineering project of the EU succeeds - we tend to honestly congratulate them, which of course both confuses them and irritates them all the more. In truth the would hate us no matter what we did for they just want to blame us for their own failure and decadance. Over the last 30 years the media has pumped them full of notions and asssumptions about America that are so out of line with reality. I wonder if that was what Europe was like in the 1930s?

Let us pray for a renewal of this country. Then the EU will not really matter to us.

What the EU should really worry about is our attitude toward them.

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