Farewell to Europe 11/12/05 Not too long ago, the conventional wisdom was that Europe was going to emerge as a unified and mighty economic and political superpower. We were told it would engage in earnest, if friendly, competition with the United States, but that, thanks to its substantially larger population and productive capacity, the European Union (EU) would inevitably displace America on the world stage. It took less than a fortnight of rioting in France, and now in several other countries of what Donald Rumsfeld has called Old Europe, to lay bare the preposterousness of this prospect. Even before Islamists...