This survey of European power and resentment is a valuable reminder of just how much broad power Europe has despite its long decline in hard power and global influence:
[If] “Europe” is defined by the membership of the 28-member European Union, then it should easily be the world’s superpower. The European project now has an aggregate population (512 million) that dwarfs that of the United States (326 million). Even its GDP ($20 trillion) is often calibrated as roughly equivalent to or even larger than America’s ($19 trillion).
Historically, European geography has been strategically influential—with windows on the Atlantic, Baltic, and Mediterranean, the ancient maritime nexus of three continents. Rome is the center of Christianity, by far the world’s largest religion. Some of the world’s great nations—Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, New Zealand, and the United States—were birthed as European colonies. Some two billion people speak European languages, including hundreds of millions outside of Europe whose first language is English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French.
European products—Airbus, BP, Shell, and Volkswagen—are global household names. France each year hosts the greatest number of the world’s tourists. Europe as a whole is more visited than any other nation or geographical area—and no wonder, given Europe was the home to civilization’s most significant breakthroughs: the birth of the city-state, the emergence of Roman republicanism and its later globalized empire, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution.
Many of the world’s greatest thinkers, writers, scientists, and politicians were European, from Plato, Socrates Cicero, Octavian and Pericles to Copernicus, Dante, Galileo, Da Vinci, Newton, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Einstein, and Churchill. And likewise, the greatest cataclysms in world history took place on European soil: The Black Death, Stalin’s genocide in Western Russia, World Wars I and II, and the Holocaust. The Western military tradition was born in Europe, and the world’s most lethal armies in history—Roman, French, German—were all European, as were the most skilled commanders, from Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Napoleon and Wellington.
All this is why it has been American policy for a century to prevent any potentially hostile power from gaining control of that concentration of potential power.
And yes, I include the European Union as a a potential power America should absolutely oppose in controlling geographic Europe.
So Europeans know that America will fight for Europe even if Europe won't fully fight for their own security.
Although in the back of European minds they know that America doesn't actually need to make sure Europe is on America's side. That's nice and very helpful, but because of our geographic isolation at worst America just has to make sure nobody else controls Europe to mobilize its power against us. If America has to destroy the continent to save it from enemy control, that will be close enough for government work.
Indeed, if I recall my Cold War ancient history (it is sometimes so odd that the Cold War, which was political science when I was growing up is now virtually ancient history), this reality caused a weird contradiction in European defense policy regarding the Soviet Union.
On the one hand, Western Europe wanted to keep the Soviets out and knew that America would defend them; but they had to do enough to keep America interested in defending them from the Soviets.
And Europe also didn't want to defend too much because Europeans didn't want to be the battlefield between America and the Soviet Union--a battle that might destroy Europe, especially if it went to "tactical" nuclear weapons (which would seem pretty "strategic" in their effects if exploded in large numbers on European soil even if they were aimed at Soviet army targets).
So there was a strange inclination for Europeans to be weak enough so that an American defense of Europe to prevent the USSR from capturing Europe intact would require a rapid American escalation to strategic nukes, making sure America and the USSR would suffer the most in a battle for Europe. If the Soviets knew America had to nuke the USSR to defend Europe, that would preserve Europe more than European conventional military power.
For added fun, I do think that America has a moral reason to defend the fellow West in Europe. But if geographic Europe becomes a political European Union as an autocratic multi-ethnic empire, the moral reason to defend Europe dissipates rapidly, no? Is one more empire worthy of defending?
Europe is worth fighting to control. You'd think the Europeans would recognize that they should keep themselves worthy of defending.
UPDATE: Related.
It is easy to forget--and this was a useful reminder to me--that Europe with its autocracies and monarchies was not fully part of a free West (although obviously part of the Western tradition) until we rebuilt Western Europe in that template after World War II. And NATO expansion after defeating the Soviet Union was more explicit in demanding democracy and rule of law for new members.
We really do need Europe in our team. Which is one reason I am a firm supporters of America's leading role in NATO and do not think the alliance is obsolete.
But Europe does have a role in keeping America in Europe by remaining worthy of defending--as we designed it to be. Which is why I so vocally despise the European Union.
