Is a stronger EU good or bad for the US? Europeans tend to think the US wants to weaken us, while this "letter to the Europeans" published by the National Review Online seems to suggest the opposite. Unfortunately I had to cut it in order for the article to fit here, but I prompt you to read the whole piece. I picked the second half and posted here.

Even in this era of crisis, we cling to the notion that in the eleventh hour you, Europe, will yet reawake, rediscover your heritage, and join with us in defending the idea of the West from this latest illiberal scourge of Islamic fascism. For just once, if only for the purpose of theatrics, we would like to urge calm and restraint to a Europe angry, volatile, and threatening, in the face of blackmail and taunts from a third-rate theocracy in Tehran — or a two-bit fascist thug fomenting hate and violence from a state-subsidized mosque in a European suburb.
Alas, recently, Europeans have been taken hostage on the West Bank, Yemen, and Iraq. All have been released. There are two constants in the stories: Some sort of blackmail was no doubt involved (either cash payments or the release of terrorist killers in European jails?), and the captives often seem to praise the moderation of their captors. Is this an aberration or indicative of a deeper continental malady? Few, in either a private or public fashion, suggested that such bribery only perpetuates the kidnapping of innocents and provides cash infusions to terrorists to further their mayhem.
On the home front, a single, though bloody, attack in Madrid changed an entire Spanish election, and prompted the withdrawal of troops from Iraq — although the terrorists nevertheless continued, despite their promises to the contrary, to plant bombs and plan assassinations of Spanish judicial officials. Cry the beloved continent.
The entire legal system of the Netherlands is under review due to the gruesome murder of Theo van Gogh and politicians there who speak out about the fascistic tendencies of radical Islam often either face threats or go into hiding. Cry the beloved continent.
Unemployment, postcolonial prejudice, and de facto apartheid may have led to the fiery rioting in the French suburbs, but it was also energized by a radical Islamic culture of hate. In response followed de facto French martial law. All that remains certain is that the rioting will return either to grow or to warp liberal French society. Indeed, so far has global culture devolved in caving to Islamism that we fear that only two places in the world are now safe for a Jew to live in safety — and Europe, the graveyard of 20th-century Jewry, is tragically not among them. Cry the beloved continent.
Your idealistic approach to health care, transportation, global warming, and entitlements have won over much of coastal and blue America, who, if given their way, would replicate here what you have there. Yet the worry grows that none of this vision of your anointed is sustainable — given an aging and shrinking population, growing and unassimilated minority populations, flat growth rates, increasing statism, and high unemployment.
If America, the former British commonwealth, India, and China, embraced globalization, while the Arab Middle East rejected it, you sought a third way of insulating yourselves from it — and now are beginning to pay for trying to legislate and control what is well beyond your ability to do either.
Abroad you face even worse challenges. In the post-Cold War you dismantled your armed forces, and chose to enhance entitlements at the expense of military readiness. I fear you counted only on a tried and simple principle: That the United States would continue to subsidize European defense while ignoring your growing secular religion of anti-Americanism.
But in the last 15 years, and especially after 9/11, heaven did not come to earth, that instead became a more dangerous place than ever before. Worse, in the meantime you lost the goodwill of the United States, which you demonized, I think, on the understanding that there would never be real repercussions to your flamboyant venom.
Your courts indict American soldiers, often a few miles from the very military garrisons that alone protect you. Your media and public castigate the country whose fashion, music, entertainment, and popular culture you so slavishly embrace.
The Balkan massacres proved that a mass murderer like Slobodan Milosevic could operate with impunity in Europe until removed by the intervention of the United States. And yet from that gruesome lesson, in retrospect we over here have learned only two things: The Holocaust would have gone on unabated hours from Paris and Berlin without the leadership of United States, and in this era of the Chirac/Schroeder ingratitude the American public would never sanction such help to you again. If you believe that an American-led NATO should not serve larger Western interests outside of Europe, we concede that it cannot even do that inside it.
We wish you well in your faith that war has become obsolete and that outlaw nations will comply with international jurisprudence that was born and is nurtured in Europe. Yet your own intelligence suggests that the Iran theocracy is both acquiring nuclear weaponry and seeking to craft missile technology to put an Islamic bomb within reach of European cities — oblivious to the reasoned appeals of European Union diplomats, who themselves operate as Greek philosophers in the agora only on the condition that Americans will once more play the role of Roman legionaries in the shadows.
Russia may no longer be the mass-murdering Soviet Union, but it remains a proud nationalist and increasingly autocratic power of the 19th-century stripe, nuclear and angry at the loss of its empire, emboldened by the ease that it can starve energy supplies to Western Europe, and tired of humanitarian lectures from Westerners who have no real military to match their condescending sermons. Old Europe has neither the will nor the power to protect the ascending democracies of Eastern Europe, much less the republics of the former Soviet Union from present Russian bullying — and perhaps worse to come.
The European strategy of selling weapons to Arab autocracies, triangulating against the United States for oil and influence, and providing cash to dubious terrorists like Hamas has backfired. Polls in the West Bank suggest Palestinians hate you, the generous and accommodating, as much as they do us, the staunch ally of Israel.
So, terrorists of the Middle East seem to have even less respect for you than for the United States, given they harbor a certain contempt for your weakness as relish to the generic hatred of our shared Western traditions.
You will, of course, answer that in your postwar wisdom you have transcended the internecine killing of the earlier 20th century when nationalism and militarism ruined your continent — and that you have lent your insight to the world at large that should follow your therapeutic creed rather than the tragic vision of the United States.
But the choices are not so starkly bipolar between either chauvinistic saber rattling or studied pacifism. There is a third way, the promise of muscular democratic government that does not apologize for 2,500 years of civilization and is willing to defend it from the enemies of liberalism, who would undo all that we wrought.
A European Union that facilitates trade, finance, and commerce can enrich and ennoble your continent, but it need not suppress the unique language, character, and customs of European nationhood itself, much less abdicate a heritage that once not merely moralized about, but took action to end, evil.
The world is becoming a more dangerous place, despite your new protocols of childlessness, pacifism, socialism, and hedonism. Islamic radicalism, an ascendant Communist China, a growing new collectivism in Latin America, perhaps a neo-czarist Russia as well, in addition to the famine and savagery in Africa, all that and more threaten the promise of the West.
So criticize us for our sins; lend us your advice; impart to America the wealth of your greater experience — but as a partner and an equal in a war, not as an inferior or envious neutral on the sidelines. History is unforgiving. None of us receives exemption simply by reason of the fumes of past glory.
Either your economy will reform, your populace multiply, and your citizenry defend itself, or not. And if not, then Europe as we have known it will pass away — to the great joy of the Islamists but to the terrible sorrow of America.

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Source.

That letter rings so true.

Especially the last sentence.

Trite! "The European strategy of selling weapons to Arab autocracies" As if the USA never has ?

Trite! "The European strategy of selling weapons to Arab autocracies" As if the USA never has

Back when we were trying ot keep the commies from over running the free world, yes we did.

Sounds like a prosicution to the islamic minority in Europe. But I did only read the firts sentences and the last as its getting late and the fact that i hate to read aswell as it sounded like something i wouldnt like to read content vise as it seems to be prosicuting a minority but i still dont know so, I will try to read it later on. And give my thoughts of what i have read. Untill then its this comment to read, but dont look to much into it

Thank you AlexKall. Later.

Well IG, you have made quite a find digging up Dr. Hanson. He is one of my favourite academics in a strange twist of fate. I may not always agree with his conclusions but I respect the man as he is rooted in the reality of the present day with an eye towards the future, all viewed with a firm understanding of the past. Farmers are funny that way.

I do agree with his assessment of Europe and I would go one further that I think the doomsday scenario is unavoidable. Europe will succumb to the Islamic world. I see this as a swinging of the pendulum back from the oppression of the middle east by western colonial powers to one where now the power and wealth from oil is wielded against the western powers so inextricably linked to its consumption. I also fear there is something of a collective guilty conscience among the ruling liberal elite of europe and their supporters that bear too much shame over sins of their forefathers rendering them unable to stand up for fear of being called to task as yet another generation of oppressors. This culture of appeasement is intractable and I view this as a done deal, the die has been cast and nothing can stop it. In fact it would not surprise me in the least that in thirty years when reading a history of Europe to come across a passage saying that this assimilation into the grip of Middle Eastern powers was by this date in the present a fait accompli.

At a wild guess it was written by an American as it is about as subtle as telling someone "you would be right more often if you just agreed with me" and probably about as effective.

Basically it reads as would be expected as though it were written by someone who can see the problems, has no understanding of or desire to find out why they exist but has decided the other guy is wrong.


Seriously I dont think veiled insults are going make much of a change to the US/EU impasse.

Rather than a wild guess, have a read... bio, other articles, etc... unless of course you would prefer to just rely on prejudice.

http://victorhanson.com/

Perhaps the most pathetic example of this strange nexus between first- and third-world Western bashing was seen in mid-December on television. Just as the United States government declared a high alert, one could watch a replay of the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy trashing America to a captivated, near-gleeful audience in New York. Her dog-and-pony show was followed by pathetic pleading from her nervous interrogator, Howard Zinn, not to transfer her unabashed hatred of the Bush administration to the United States in general.

Mimicking the theatrics of American intellectuals — Roy’s hands frequently gestured scare quotes — she went from one smug denunciation to another to the applause of her crowd. Little was said about the crater a few blocks away, the social pathologies back home in India that send tens of thousands of its brightest to American shores, or Roy’s own aristocratic dress, ample jewelry, and studied accent. All the latter accoutrements and affectations illustrated the well-known game she plays of trashing globalization and corporatization as she jets around the Western world precisely through its largess — all the while cashing in by serving up an elegant third-world victimization to guilt-ridden Westerners.

Is it weird that Western perks like tenure, jet-travel, media exposure, and affluence instill a hatred for the West, here and abroad? Or rather for a certain type of individual does such beneficence naturally explain the very pathology itself?

http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson...0312300000.asp

One of my favourite passages of his from a few years back... enjoy.

Originally Posted by bulldogg

Rather than a wild guess, have a read... bio, other articles, etc... unless of course you would prefer to just rely on prejudice.

So disagreeing is now prejudice, thats a nifty little emotive addition to the board but once again we come back to "disagreeing doesnt equal hatred" argument.

Seriously what does it matter what his other stories are like we were asked to comment on the one at hand, if someone cares to post another story and ask opinions then I will reply based on that one.