Mark Steyn: World should give thanks for America
[...] The New World is one of the oldest settled constitutional democracies on Earth, to a degree the Old World can barely comprehend. Where it counts, Americans are traditionalists.
We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany's constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy's only to the 1940s, and Belgium's goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it's not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than France's, Germany's, Italy's or Spain's constitution, it's older than all of them put together.
Americans think of Europe as Goethe and Mozart and 12th century castles and 6th century churches, but the Continent's governing mechanisms are no more ancient than the Partridge Family. Aside from the Anglophone democracies, most of the nation-states in the West have been conspicuous failures at sustaining peaceful political evolution from one generation to the next, which is why they're so susceptible to the siren song of Big Ideas – communism, fascism, European Union.
[...]
So Americans should be thankful they have one of the last functioning nation-states. Europeans, because they've been so inept at exercising it, no longer believe in national sovereignty, whereas it would never occur to Americans not to. This profoundly different attitude to the nation-state underpins, in turn, Euro-American attitudes to transnational institutions such as the United Nations. [...]
(bold emphasis mine)We have an enduring constitution that actually means something, even if too many of us now seem willing to throw it away. It's a blessing, and worth protecting and cherishing. There's much more, it's an excellent article. I wanted to post about it on Thanksgiving, but I was too busy with other stuff. Even today, I haven;t much time, there's a storm coming in tomorrow, so I've got a busy day ahead of me.
Pat also did some good excerpts on his blog.
Related Link:
From Soeren Kern at the Brussels Journal:
America Wake Up! Europe Wants to Be a Superpower
[...] So why do Europeans continue to assail American “hard power” as bad for the world, when their own “soft power” consistently fails to make the grade?
Because the American military magnifies the preponderance of US power and influence on the world stage, thereby exposing the fiction behind Europe’s superpower pretensions. Because the United States has set the standard for what it means to be a superpower, European elites seek to de-legitimize one of the main pillars of American might, namely its military hard power. Europeans know they will never achieve hard power parity with America, so they want to change the rules of the international game to make soft power the only acceptable superpower standard.
This is why Americans should care about further European integration: The EU is trying to ensconce a system of international law (based on its own image and on that of the United Nations) that it hopes will make it prohibitively costly in the realm of international public opinion for the United States to use its military in the future. For Europeans, multilateralism is all about neutering American hard power, not about solving international problems. It is about Lilliputians tying down Gulliver.
By bending over backwards to appease European sensibilities on Iran, for example, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has dragged the United States headfirst into a multilateral trap that has been set by pacifist Europeans. Their main desire is to prevent America from acting against Iran, even if it means that Islamic radicals in Tehran end up with a nuclear bomb.
Many Europeans are hoping the next American president will adopt a more postmodern relativist perception of reality. All the more reason, therefore, why Americans should examine if the leading presidential contenders are committed to the “hard power” that plays such a vital role in securing American interests and ideals around the world. Europeans may understand even better than do many Americans just how much is at stake in the upcoming US presidential election.
European elites are pushing the EU in a direction that should be deeply disconcerting to Americans concerned about international security and stability. The Reform Treaty will make Europe more centralized and far less democratic than it already is. In practice, this means that many foreign policy decisions that directly affect the United States, ranging from economics and trade to transatlantic cooperation on Islamic counter-terrorism, increasingly will be made by unelected anti-American bureaucrats in Brussels rather than by national governments. [...]
(bold emphasis mine) The weak don't deserve to survive. That's not my opinion; it's an impartial law of nature. It's reality, the way things are. If the Europeans wish to flout that law at their own peril, they are free to do so, but it seems to me quite obvious that their's is not a model we should try to emulate.
It was difficult to pick just an excerpt from this article, I recommend reading the whole thing.
Here's another good link, from Pat's blog:
The (reluctant) American Empire
This is the definitive answer to all those who whine endlessly about supposed "American Imperialism". Very informative, with many embedded links, too.
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