The French and the Germans are trying to create a European counterbalance to the United States. It's a bad strategy -- bad and worn out by clumsy and excessive use. Why? Because Europe's history is weighted down by the pernicious notion of the ``balance of power.'' France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Britain and the Low Countries had more or less comparable dimensions, populations, armies and navies in the 16th Century. So, since then, the major powers' survival strategy was to prevent certain military alliances between states or dynastic empires from gaining so much weight that they would be unbeatable on the...