This blog is becoming interactive! My friend Lars Hasselblad Torres sent

me the following email, which I quote with his permission: "Hey peter,

scouted out your blog today, and noted your irritation

with European anti-war movement. Is it safe to say their anti-americanism,

or is it their tactics to get in the way of Bush policy? Anyway, thought

you might find ‘of

paradise and power: america and europe in the new world order‘ of

interest: robert kagan lays out a hobbesian vs. kantian mood form each."

Lars then followed up with a set of good references to the whole question

of US-European relations, including this link to the Foreign

Policy Association. To Lars’ list, I would add Timothy Garten Ash’s

good New York Review piece

that collects virulently anti-European comments by senior US officials.

These are at least as inflammatory and unjustified as the anti-American

comments that set me off.

I suppose my suspicions about European anti-Americanism were born a long

time ago, especially in graduate school in England. There’s a lot of bad

faith and scapegoating on the European left: a desire to attribute bad

things to the US when European countries are just as responsible. I also

think that people on the European left tend to attribute undesirable features

of American life to something intrinsic and cultural about us—for

instance, "American individualism"—when the causes of our

problems apply to them as well. Three examples:

• I was in Britain when American teenagers started mass shootings in

  high schools. Universally, British pundits attributed these crimes to

  a profound sickness in US culture. I would have said that the "epidemic"

  of school shootings (which involved about 1 in every ten million students)

  was not a symptom of anything; it was a copy-cat phenemonon. Indeed,

  copy-cat school killers subsequently turned up in France, Scotland,

  and Germany.

• European critics generally analyze vulgar popular culture as a reflection

  of American culture, although European and Japanese firms generate a

  considerable amount of it; the US also produces a mighty stream of high

  culture; and the demand for the worst products is global. So I think

  it’s largely irrelevant to interpret Hollywood and pop music as "American"

  phenomena.

• Our social policy is more conservative than the norm in European,

  although the gap is not as big as Europeans tend to think. (They focus

  on the federal government and don’t realize that our states take 8.5

  percent of GNP in taxes and spend it on domestic programs. As a result,

  the government’s share of GNP is almost exactly the same—30 percent—in

  the US

  and in Sweden.) In any case, I do not believe that our social policy

  is more conservative because of American individualism or some other

  feature of our culture. We have a median

  family income of $62,228 (for 4-person families). At that level,

  people don’t believe that they will benefit from social spending, except

  to support retirement and local public education. Hence the solid support

  for Social Security and Medicare and local education. In Europe, median

  family incomes are lower—but rising. Hence the political center

  in Europe is gradually drifting right, and will not stop soon.

Which brings us to the current debate about Iraq. I think the French

and others are completely right that we should postpone an invasion and

try to strengthen the inspections. But to what extent is this difference

of opinion a result of a cultural gap between the Europeans (allegedly

"from Venus") and the Americans ("from Mars")? The

US has an offensive military capacity that the Europeans lack, singly

and collectively. So perhaps the US must play bad cop in order

to allow the Europeans to play good cop. Absent a military threat from

the US, there would be no inspections, and the Saddam regime would go

completely unchecked and unchallenged. This would be morally unacceptable

to the European left, especially if European companies continued to do

profitable business with Iraq. If this is right, then there are not different

cultures on either side of the Atlantic. Rather, the West is one culture;

it relies on a powerful military that happens to be headquartered in the

USA.

None of which excuses the ham-handed and sometimes offensive way in which

Rumsfeld and other Bushies handle diplomacy ….