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This is a good article. It's best when it stays objective and descriptive, though it still makes some powerful polemical points without the sort of vulgar and stupid abuse that seem so common when neo-cons talk about Europe lately.

Two paradoxes.

1) Caesar rightly notes that we care so little about European chatter about the death penalty or gun control that it's hard to get worked up about their protests. Do they really take such things at all seriously over there, or is it just a formality? One can object to their attitudes and interventions but does it really add up to a desire to remake the world, or just busy work? In any event, Ceasar's admission that we care so little about their views on such things makes it unconvincing that these things are of any great importance.

2) Why does the "war of civilizations" or "war for the west" end up dividing Western civilization more than anything else? If one really believes in the West, would one really let oneself enter the black hole of pointless and endless US/European abuse? If one believes in a Western civilization beyond the conflicts of the day, why is the sight of it so easily lost in the vituperation?

Ceasar could have written an article like this twenty years ago, during the protests over missile stationing. Tempers ran higher then. And yet the alliance survived and triumphed because of agreement about the fundamentals and the means of achieving them, and because the greater struggle with the enemy never degenerated into a Europe vs. the U.S. conflict.

[hinckley buzzard]

Your last sentence clarifies an important difference between now and twenty years ago: Then, Europe understood who the enemy was, and that it wasn't us. Today, Europe is effectively denying that a common enemy exists. Only Russia seems to get it, the British to some degree. The rest are asleep, just like the thirties.