Victor Davis Hanson: Europe's wish

The link in this post is to a Wall Street Journal article, so if it doesn't work you have two choices: buy the paper or subscribe online.

Nonetheless, Hanson nails the European character and pathology very nicely:

Europeans talk of the Kerrys' environmentalism in tired references to the American reluctance to sign the Kyoto accords, a flawed treaty that no Democratic president could defend and few Democratic senators would ratify. In the meantime, one sees an occasional train rush alongside the Rhine spewing from its lavatories raw human waste onto the tracks. Mammoth nuclear plants dot the French countryside. Restaurants are so smoke-filled that the pâté takes on the flavor of Gauloise, and tipsy afternoon drivers emerge from upscale restaurants with three or four glasses of wine under their belts to swerve on antiquated roads. Tourists take cheap shots that they fear being cooked alive in an August Paris flat or being buried in rubble at de Gaulle airport.

McDonald's is prominent among the stylish cafés of Luxembourg. Dubbed-in "Friends" and "Jerry Springer" blare from hotel televisions. Bare navels, Ray-Bans, pierced everything, and baggy jeans suggest a studied effort to emulate the look of Venice Beach. For a bewildered American, the key in squaring the anti-American rhetoric with the Valley Girl reality is simply to understand Western Europeans as elite Americans. Their upscale leisured culture is not much different from Malibu, Austin and Dupont Circle . . . Perhaps this notion that Europe itself has become a cultural appendage of the U.S. explains why it views our upcoming election as a referendum on its own future as well.

None of these paradoxes is new. Yet the European meddling in this particular presidential election is. Less talked about is that the image of an allied Europe has been shattered here at home. And all the retired NATO brass and Council on Foreign Relations grandees are finding it hard to put the pieces back together again. The American public now wants to be told exactly why thousands in their undermanned military are stationed in a continent larger and richer than our own without conventional enemies on its borders. If Europeans think it is nonsensical to connect Iraq with our own post 9/11 security, then Americans believe it is far more absurd to envision an American-led NATO patrolling their skies and roads 15 years after a nearby hostile empire collapsed -- especially when NATO turns out to be as isolationist as America is expected to be engaged abroad.