Hanson has elsewhere made the point that democracies are among the easiest forms of government to influence and manipulate as long as it comes in a form short of killing violence. Once that threshold is crossed those peoples become unrecognizably violent and implacable until the issue is decided on the battlefield. One of the things that Old Europe is only now coming to recognize is that 9/11 has kicked the United States into that mode and that old methods of public disapproval and derision no longer evoke the apologetic response from Americans that they used to.
...Europeans loudly pronounced a new anti-Americanism and talked of a separate "German way"; Americans silently seethed and were resigned to give them their wish...
...And in that moral calculus, September 11 shocked an affluent and at times self-satisfied American citizenry into confessing that it was no longer either too wealthy, too refined, or too sensitive to kill killers.
The above two quotations I took from the stunning epilogue to Hanson's Ripples of Battle, a book I finished this morning on the bus and with which I am only now coming to terms. All of his books are fine pieces of scholarship; this one was no exception, but things were kicked into an entirely different plane when the epilogue, which details the implications, the "ripples," of 9/11 in the context developed in the other battles (Okinawa, Shilo, and Delium) in the book, sets forth in clear terms the reason for much of the disarray our European alignment seems to be finding itself. In Hanson's words, "the world...had suddenly cracked apart and would not be put back together with quite the same pieces."
I would strongly recommend this book for those who enjoy placing current events in the broad historical context and interpreting them through classical models. The book is worth the purchase price for the epilogue alone, IMHO.