The excuses for Europe's rejection of anybody but a social democrat candidate is astounding:
Our alliance really was built on shared values. In 1990, 2001 and 2003 the US assembled western coalitions to fight big wars.
Beyond the minor Libyan exercise, it’s hard to imagine that happening again, says Keohane. Since just 2000, we’ve grown far apart. Several factors coincided. The Soviet threat collapsed. Shared memories of beating Hitler waned. Less visibly, students’ migratory patterns changed: ever more Europeans study in other European countries rather than the US. Germany and Britain now send fewer students to America than do Nepal or Vietnam.
In politics and economics, we diverged spectacularly. George W. Bush introduced a peculiarly non-European evangelical Christianity into presidential politics. He landed Europeans in two wars that we ended up regretting. He shattered the belief that western countries stood together for human rights. Our mutual trade waned: in the decade to 2007, even before the economic crisis, the share of the European Union’s imports coming from the US halved to just 12 per cent.
"Europeans" regret the wars George W. Bush fought? What's this "we" stuff the Europeans speak of? Britain was the only country in Europe to commit significant forces to the invasion of Iraq. And Britain is the only European country that has committed significant forces to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban.
Not to belittle my thanks to other European countries that have been willing to fight with us in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they have been minor factors. Canada has dwarfed their sacrifice.
And while a number of European countries committed troops to both Iraq and Afghanistan, they have been more war tourists than fellow combatants.
Even the so-called "good" war of 1991 again saw Britain as the major European commitment to our war alliance. France did commit troops, but were so light that they were assigned left flank guard duties along with our 82nd Airborne Division rather than being with the main thrusts going at the heart of Saddam's army.
Just where were the rest of the Europeans in those two wars who we've supposedly driven from the alliance by fighting in those two wars? We don't have reason to regret two world wars that Europe drew us in to fighting because of their failures to remain peaceful?
So Europe's disengagement predates George W. Bush and two "regretful" wars that overthrew murderous tyrants which most Europeans only experienced on television.
And we promoted freedom and human rights in the Arab and Moslem worlds.
Yet we are the ones who abandoned a Western stand on human rights? Good God, they've gone quite mad.
In 1990 and 1991, when I taught an introductory American history course in a local community college, I covered the period between the French and Indian War and our Revolution as a period when Americans stopped feeling the need for British protection and resented the British demands that we pay for Britain's role in defending us from threats we no longer felt. I told my students that we could expect to see the same distance develop between Western Europe and America after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, and Europeans stopped seing a threat to them.
Of course, one difference is that we aren't trying to compel Europeans to defend themselves. Our prodding to spend more is resented, to be sure, but we do not try to coerce and we clearly have not drafted allies to fight in our "regrettable" wars. We asked for a "coalition of the willng" and made do with that. And so without a military threat to Europe, Europe no longer sees the conservative part of America willing to fight for the West as an acceptable partner in Western civilization.
Europeans have to face the fact that it isn't America that has changed (Jimmy Carter's open religious beliefs were really better than Georg W. Bush's?), but Europe that has changed. Europe once feared the Soviet Union, but is becoming the Soviet Union Lite with Italy and Greece being pushed by the Brussels apparatchiki into accepting virtual puppet rulers selected by the EU to compel their subjects into abiding by EU budget rules. Without Barack Obama at the helm to push America into joining the new Europe, the Europeans don't see a common bond with America.
It's not that we've changed that much. Europe has changed so much that only a candidate for office as far gone as they are into social democratic policies is seen as a common standard bearer of the Western civilization that they have become. How far gone is Europe that they see Mitt Romney--who was acceptable to the voters of deep Blue Massachusetts as their governor--as outside the bounds of acceptable political beliefs?
Add in the distasteful sight of Americans bitterly competing for votes to determine our path when Europeans are used to one slightly center-left coalition vying for control against another slightly center-right coalition that never offers their voters a real choice (as Mark Steyn put it so well) and you magnify the divergence of our outlooks. I may not like the sight, either, but at least we have a real choice.
But this is a European problem and not our problem--assuming we don't continue down Europe's path. Europe hasn't fallen out of love with America as much as they've fallen out of love with bearing the burden of defending Western freedom.
Europe's approval of America the last four years is clearly a warning sign to us that we are on the wrong track, and not a development we must react to by wailing "why do they regret us?"
Oh, and for some extra yucks, what candidate this year is claiming Biblical authority for his proposals? (Tip to Instapundit) Yeah, the Atlantic divide is our fault.
