Posted on 02/27/2005 12:32:39 PM PST by Zivasmate
U.S. can sit back and watch Europe implode
February 27, 2005
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST Advertisement
A week ago, the conventional wisdom was that George W. Bush had seen the error of his unilateral cowboy ways and was setting off to Europe to mend fences with America's ''allies.''
I think not. Lester Pearson, the late Canadian prime minister, used to say that diplomacy is the art of letting the other fellow have your way. All week long President Bush offered a hilariously parodic reductio of Pearson's bon mot, wandering from one European Union gabfest to another insisting how much he loves his good buddy Jacques and his good buddy Gerhard and how Europe and America share -- what's the standard formulation? -- ''common values.'' Care to pin down an actual specific value or two that we share? Well, you know, ''freedom,'' that sort of thing, abstract nouns mostly. Love to list a few more common values, but gotta run.
And at the end what's changed?
Will the United States sign on to Kyoto?
No.
Will the United States join the International Criminal Court?
No.
Will the United States agree to accept whatever deal the Anglo-Franco-German negotiators cook up with Iran?
No.
Even more remarkably, aside from sticking to his guns in the wider world, the president also found time to cast his eye upon Europe's internal affairs. As he told his audience in Brussels, in the first speech of his tour, ''We must reject anti-Semitism in all forms and we must condemn violence such as that seen in the Netherlands.''
The Euro-bigwigs shuffled their feet and stared coldly into their mistresses' decolletage. They knew Bush wasn't talking about anti-Semitism in Nebraska, but about France, where for three years there's been a sustained campaign of synagogue burning and cemetery desecration, and Germany, where the Berlin police advise Jewish residents not to go out in public wearing any identifying marks of their faith.
The ''violence in the Netherlands'' is a reference to Theo van Gogh, murdered by a Dutch Islamist for making a film critical of the Muslim treatment of women. Van Gogh's professional colleagues reacted to this assault on freedom of speech by canceling his movie from the Rotterdam Film Festival and scheduling some Islamist propaganda instead.
The president, in other words, understands that for Europe, unlike America, the war on terror is an internal affair, a matter of defusing large unassimilated radicalized Muslim immigrant populations before they provoke the inevitable resurgence of opportunist political movements feeding off old hatreds. Difficult trick to pull off, especially on a continent where the ruling elite feels it's in the people's best interest not to pay any attention to them.
The new EU ''constitution,'' for example, would be unrecognizable as such to any American. I had the opportunity to talk with former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing on a couple of occasions during his long labors as the self-declared and strictly single Founding Father. He called himself ''Europe's Jefferson,'' and I didn't like to quibble that, constitution-wise, Jefferson was Europe's Jefferson -- that's to say, at the time the U.S. Constitution was drawn up, Thomas Jefferson was living in France. Thus, for Giscard to be Europe's Jefferson, he'd have to be in Des Moines, where he'd be doing far less damage.
But, quibbles aside, President Giscard professed to be looking in the right direction. When I met him, he had an amiable riff on how he'd been in Washington and bought one of those compact copies of the U.S. Constitution on sale for a buck or two. Many Americans wander round with the constitution in their pocket so they can whip it out and chastise over-reaching congressmen and senators at a moment's notice. Try going round with the European Constitution in your pocket and you'll be walking with a limp after two hours: It's 511 pages, which is 500 longer than the U.S. version. It's full of stuff about European space policy, Slovakian nuclear plants, water resources, free expression for children, the right to housing assistance, preventive action on the environment, etc.
Most of the so-called constitution isn't in the least bit constitutional. That's to say, it's not content, as the U.S. Constitution is, to define the distribution and limitation of powers. Instead, it reads like a U.S. defense spending bill that's got porked up with a ton of miscellaneous expenditures for the ''mohair subsidy'' and other notorious Congressional boondoggles. President Ronald Reagan liked to say, ''We are a nation that has a government -- not the other way around.'' If you want to know what it looks like the other way round, read Monsieur Giscard's constitution.
But the fact is it's going to be ratified, and Washington is hardly in a position to prevent it. Plus there's something to be said for the theory that, as the EU constitution is a disaster waiting to happen, you might as well cut down the waiting and let it happen. CIA analysts predict the collapse of the EU within 15 years. I'd say, as predictions of doom go, that's a little on the cautious side.
But either way the notion that it's a superpower in the making is preposterous. Most administration officials subscribe to one of two views: a) Europe is a smugly irritating but irrelevant backwater; or b) Europe is a smugly irritating but irrelevant backwater where the whole powder keg's about to go up.
For what it's worth, I incline to the latter position. Europe's problems -- its unaffordable social programs, its deathbed demographics, its dependence on immigration numbers that no stable nation (not even America in the Ellis Island era) has ever successfully absorbed -- are all of Europe's making. By some projections, the EU's population will be 40 percent Muslim by 2025. Already, more people each week attend Friday prayers at British mosques than Sunday service at Christian churches -- and in a country where Anglican bishops have permanent seats in the national legislature.
Some of us think an Islamic Europe will be easier for America to deal with than the present Europe of cynical, wily, duplicitous pseudo-allies. But getting there is certain to be messy, and violent.
Until the shape of the new Europe begins to emerge, there's no point picking fights with the terminally ill. The old Europe is dying, and Mr. Bush did the diplomatic equivalent of the Oscar night lifetime-achievement tribute at which the current stars salute a once glamorous old-timer whose fading aura is no threat to them. The 21st century is being built elsewhere.
You know what I guess that is when Europe started to really deteriorate in the first place
that huge wave of European migration after World War II, of which my parents were a part of, brought all the Europeans with chutzpah, work ethic, love of freedom over here and left the whiners, losers and lovers of the status quo at home.....so in essence Europe had a "courage drain"....
even in the 1950's my father felt there was so much bureaucracy etc in Holland that he'd have a better shot in Canada and man was he right.....although the encrouching bureaucracy here is getting down right annoying.....
of course Canada and America were founded by brave gutsy Europeans, sick of the aristocracy and the Church etc.....
and a security risk to be dealt with.
Or that humped-up mush-headed judges can interpret any way they see fit.
Heck U.S. judges do that with an 11 page constitution!
Visit Euroland Themepark soon! In 50 years, the islamist iconoclastic majority will reduce it to rubble.
Perhaps, at some point, old Europeans might start moving here to get away from the mess they are allowing to happen.
Unnatural self-selection.
We are the genetic inheritors of people who said "F*** this S***!. I'm outta here!"
"You know what I guess that is when Europe started to really deteriorate in the first place"
In the late 1970's the US and Europe were going in similar directions - down the crapper. Thatcher came and saved England, which is why England still has the most potential of all of Europe, and, you guessed it, Ronald Reagan came and completely turned around a spiraling downward America. G-d bless him.
Brilliant point!
It wasn't posted, it was excerpted.
So where do you think all those whiney euros will end up migrating to?
It would ahve if we had not moved immediately to prop it up by allowing unchecked immigration. Most of the illegals send a large part of their earnings back home, where it is spent. This keeps what's left of their economy afloat.
New Zealand?
too small. Next guess..??? Anyone.... Anyone.... Buellor? Beullor?....
Wherever they go, they will be surrounded by TROP. If they stay in Europe, they're prisoners in their own land and by then anywhere else they go - Malaysia, THailand , most of Africa and the Middle East, their welcoming hosts will be TROP. You reap what you sow.
Yeah, but this time, no freebies, like a Marshall Plan. We will rebuild Europe in America's conservative Judeo-Christian image. Otherwise let their anti-religious, multiculturalist, socialist liberals dig their own way out.
Perhaps. Or something else would have prevented it. That’s what makes these long range catastrophic predictions of dynamic system so absurd. Something always interrupts.
[smile] I don't think that it’s the CIA that makes it absurd, it’s that anyone tries to predict something so far out of something so volatile and dynamic.
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