I get the sense that many Europeans have adjusted to the new realities in a way that was not widely apparent in the United States until recently. Iraq was a very rude shock in this regard, and it is reverberating through the American consciousness in a rather magnified form. When the looming monster - and it really was - of the Soviet Union faded, Europe was left with a world in which only America stood in the way of a return to the good old pre-WWI days of the Great Powers, wherein the futures of entire continents were settled in a London or Paris or Brussels drawing-room over port. The preference within current European intellectual fashion for international negotiation at the UN and within NGOs is, in my opinion, nothing more than an updated version of this nostalgic past, one which is regarded in the United States as purely illusory and self-indulgent. Were the United States to vanish overnight the world would not return to the Habsburgs, the Romanoffs, and the Hohenzollerns, and all the wishful thinking in French academe won't make it so.
Americans, for their part, are less aware than they should be of the caustic effects of a half-century of Soviet propaganda on the collective consciousness of Europe. The generation that is now attempting to lead, both there and here, is one that cut its political teeth on the polarities of the Vietnam era, and if both sides of that struggle are reliving their youths within the current U.S. election cycle, it is much more one-sided in Europe, where the antiwar point of view never really had serious opposition and now is represented by a nearly monolithic print and broadcast journalism. That is one reason why Clinton and Kerry are in such better repute there than Reagan and Bush. But the monolithic nature comes at a cost - were the United States to succeed in Iraq it would not only never be communicated in Europe, it would be actively denied by a generation whose entire political worldview may not allow such a thing to be.
I don't see a cure soon. If there is one it may be that we will have to wait for my terribly polarized generation to fade into senescence, a prospect of some years yet, and for a new one unfettered by the political enthusiasms and illusions of the late Cold War to take the reins.
Communism didn't die when the wall went down, it started spreading more. It's all part of the NWO plan. Just look at the results of the end of the cold war, the UN membership is now 40% dicatatorship. It's a power grab by the oligopolists (multinational corps) and liberals are the stooges.
I was talking about German press coverage earlier this AM over on another thread. I may link answers to that post to your posts over here. I would never have thought of your expalnation, and they do fit the situation well.
longjack