Alas for Kerry

Having heard Niall Ferguson on C-SPAN, I am not a fan. His Third Way thinking annoys me, even when he worries about Kerry's potential problems with the not-so allied transatlantic alliance in the rambling article that parallels his fuzzy thinking.

In other words, a Kerry administration would set about mending fences with allies who are not currently on America's side - which means most of continental Europe - in order to reduce and ultimately wind up America's commitments in Iraq.

Most of continental Europe has never been on America's side and the so-called Transatlantic Alliance has never been a fixed American asset. During most of the Cold War Europe was involved in battles with their own totalitarian tendencies, 60s radical chic terrorism, anti-nuclear protests, evolving economies they promptly strangled with regulation, and wholly preoccupied in building the socialist dream they think they've found it in the EU.

Ferguson seems to think the alliance shared a common enemy: communism. But communism is just a variant version of socialism, one practiced by the not-bright-for-primetime Russians and their satellites, and not a very successfully offshoot either. In that battle, the United States carried the water while European governments ran through the gambit of politics, finally setting on coalition governance as a way of incorporating the lately communist Greens without the bother of having citizens actually voting to validate radical environmentalism.

The fact is, Europeans are so pathologically self-centered that they are incapable of friendship even with one other, which is why when they periodically struggle for a centralized political ideal, totalitarianism once again raises its head and then they slaughter each other in the millions. About that time, we are friends again. Once we have defeated them.

Forty years after WW II, Europeans couldn't even resolve the crisis in Kosovo without American military intervention. They had neither the resources, the money, or, more importantly, the will. The Europeans dont' have an aversion to war, they have bureaucratic paralysis, near-pathological self-absorption, and lack of guts. Nothing new in that. During the Cold War Russia would have overrun the continent without the U.S. determination that it be otherwise. The weakness of Europe is that they won't, or can't, acknowledge their own deficiencies. Yet they want us to follow their lead. No fucking thanks.

Kerry won't command any European respect. He will just lower us to their level.