Over the last four
years Americans have played a sort of parlor game wondering when—or
if—the Europeans might awake to the danger of Islamic fascism
and choose a more muscular role in the war on terrorism.
But after the acrimony
over the invasion of Iraq, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo, pessimists
scoffed that the Atlantic alliance was essentially over. Only
the postmortem was in dispute: did the bad chemistry between the
Texan George Bush and the Green European leadership who came of
age in the street theater of 1968 explain the falling out?
Or was the return
of the old anti-Americanism natural after the end of the Cold
War—once American forces were no longer needed for the security
of Europe?
Or again, was Europe’s
third way a realistic consideration of its own unassimilated and
growing Muslim population, at a time of creeping pacifism, and
radically scaled down defense budgets after the fall of the Berlin
Wall?
Yet suddenly in 2006,
the Europeans seem to have collectively resuscitated. The Madrid
bombings, the murder of Theo van Gogh, the London subway attacks,
and the French rioting in October and November seem to have prompted
at least some Europeans at last to question their once hallowed
sense of multiculturalism in which Muslim minorities were not
asked to assimilate at home and Islamic terrorists abroad were
seen as mere militants or extremists rather than enemies bent
on destroying the West.
On January 19, Jacques
Chirac warned that his military would use its nuclear forces to
target states that sponsored terrorism against France—El
Cid braggadocio that made George Bush’s past Wild West lingo
like ‘smoke ‘em out’ and ‘dead or alive’
seem Pollyannaish by comparison. Not long after, it was disclosed
that the French and the Americans have coordinated their efforts
to keep Syria out of Lebanon and to isolate Bashar Assad’s
shaky Syrian regime. And in a recent news conference Donald Rumsfeld
and the new German defense minister Franz Josef Jung sounded as
if they were once more the old allies of the past, fighting shoulder
to shoulder against terrorists who would like to do to Berlin
what they did to New York.
The once plodding
and ineffectual British-French-German diplomatic effort to circumvent
Iran’s nuclear program finally reached its predictable dead-end.
But instead of the usual backtracking appeasement dressed up in
diplomatic doublespeak about “multilateralism” and
“dialogue”, the Europeans pointedly warned the Iranians
that further enrichment was unacceptable and that the use of force
to prevent acquisition of an Iranian bomb could not be ruled out.
A Europe that once dismissed as retrograde America’s anti-ballistic
missile system may well soon be in range of Iran’s envisioned
nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles.
The Dutch suddenly
agreed to deploy up to 1,400 troops in the more dangerous regions
of southern Afghanistan. That show of fortitude prompted NATO
to boast that its European and American forces may soon go on
the offensive against many of the most recalcitrant Taliban strongholds.
When a Danish paper
was threatened for printing cartoon caricatures of the Prophet
Mohammad, neither the government of Demark nor the usually politically-correct
European Union tried to impose censorship in the face of Arab
boycotts, rioting, and not-so-veiled threats to make life difficult
for Scandinavians. Instead, newspapers all over Europe reprinted
the cartoons, ignored Arab threats—only to witness the United
States State Department of all governments offer limp-wristed
palliatives about cultural sensitivity rather than principled
support of the surprising European defense of free expression
and speech.
Have the Europeans
flipped out?
Hardly. Recent polls
show a majority of Europeans are becoming increasingly tired of
current liberal immigration policies and foreign aid programs
that have given billions of dollars to the Palestine Authority
that they now learn in the aftermath of Yasser Arafat’s
death resulted in both rampant corruption and the Hamas backlash.
It is one thing to subsidize a double-talking Arafat, quite another
to keep giving money to terrorists who openly promise to finish
the European holocaust.
More importantly,
despite distancing themselves from the United States, and spreading
cash liberally around, the Europeans are beginning to fathom that
the radical Islamists still hate them even more than they do the
Americans—as if the fundamentalists add disdain for perceived
European weakness in addition to the usual generic hatred of all
things Western.
German Chancellor
Gerhard Schroeder is out—and, in humiliating fashion for
a supposedly principled socialist, now grubbing for petrodollars
for the Russian state-run conglomerate Gazprom. Despite his eleventh
hour saber rattling, Jacques Chirac is emasculated. Conservatives
are now firmly in power in Australia, Canada, Germany, and the
United States. Immigration legislation under consideration from
Scandinavia to France makes the American Patriot Act seem tame.
Italian wiretaps led to arrests of Muslim terrorists who were
plotting another 9/11 at the very time Democratic Senators in
confirmation hearings tore into Justice Alito for supposedly condoning
police-state tactics.
Liberals here at
home attribute the change of European hearts and minds to the
abandonment of our own neocon unilateralism, and Mr. Bush’s
long overdue return to multilateral bridge building. But that
is a superficial exegesis, given that America still supplies the
bulk of the coalition troops in both Afghanistan and Iraq—and
receives daily European goading about electronic surveillance
abroad and detention centers in Eastern Europe.
Two other developments
better explain the warming in Atlantic relations and the Europeans’
sudden muscularity. First, the Bush administration wisely adopted
a Zen-like strategy of keeping low and letting the ankle-biting
Europeans take the lead in dealing with radical Islamists like
the Iranian theocracy and Hamas. As we stayed silent and played
the sullen bad cop, the good guys were sorely disappointed at
learning that, yes, the Iranians want both the bomb and Israel
destroyed, and that, yes, Hamas, is still intent on annihilating
the Jewish state and expecting subsidies to realize that aim.
Second guessing and cheap anti-Americanism are easy without responsibility,
but the Europeans found very quickly that for all their subtlety
and exalted rhetoric they did no better than George Bush in dealing
with these anti-Western fanatics.
Second, the
two most difficult hurdles are now past—the removal of the
odious Taliban and Saddam Hussein. And thus the overblown caricature
of Americans as war-mongering bombers has run out of gas. Europeans,
of course, always wished both autocracies gone, but quickly learned
they could admit that desire only in the first case.
But now that the Americans
are doing the fighting and dying, the Europeans can still be against
the war, but “for the peace” with the utopian rationale
that “whether the war was right or wrong, Iraq must not
become a failed state.” Even the most diehard leftists are
beginning to see that the fascists who once threatened Salman
Rushdie and now bully the Danish cartoonists are the same as those
who blow up female school teachers and reformers in Baghdad.
So is Europe now
finally at the front or will they retreat Madrid-like in the face
of the inevitable second round of terrorist bombings and threats
to come?
Americans are not
confident, but we should remember at least one simple fact: Europe
is the embryo of the entire Western military tradition. The new
European Union encompasses a population greater than the United
States and spans a continent larger than our own territory. It
has a greater gross domestic product than that of America and
could, in theory, field military forces as disciplined and as
well equipped as our own.
It is not the capability
but the will power of the Europeans that has been missing in this
war so far. But while pundits argue over whether the European
demographic crisis, lack of faith, stalled economy, or multiculturalism
are at the root of the continent’s impotence, we should
never forget that if aroused and pushed, a rearmed and powerful
Europe could still be at the side of the United States in joint
efforts against the jihadists. And should we ever see a true alliance
of such Western powers, the war against the fascists of the Middle
East would be simply over in short order.
Victor
Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and
author of A
War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian
War.
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