Has the Magic of America Truly Ended?

Has the Magic of America Truly Ended?

By Robert Stein, Ph.D

March 13, 2008

The psychopathology of communalism is well exemplified in today’s International Herald Tribune article (set forth below). French Foreign Minister Kouchner, speaks of the “magic” as being over for the United States. Obviously no one can question Mr. Kouchner’s commitment to humanitarianism, being as he was, the founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres. However, consistent with his socialist leanings he favors a collective approach to solving all world problems. So he found no inconsistency in advocating the overthrow and removal from power of Saddam Hussein, while simultaneously opposing the U.S. invasion of Iraq.


His statement, coming as it does after Mr. Sarkozy’s recent tryst with the American Congress, either represents the emergence of a schizophrenic-like condition in French foreign policy…or it suggests, that just as Mr. Sarkozy expressed his undying faithfulness to his recent ex-wife, while he engaged in extracurricular activities with other women, Mr. Kouchner and the French foreign ministry are playing both sides against the middle.

The fact that Mr. Kouchner not only can’t see the contradiction in his positions but also expresses a deep disillusionment with America is reflective of this sickness.

A bloodthirsty dictator was removed from power, but America didn’t “follow the rules” [of engagement] which the socialists believe they have already established. These rules guarantee nations will jawbone problems and avoid decisive action…since by definition the “collective” approach to security via the United Nations usually guarantees paralysis. How rapidly can anything occur when everyone has to agree before action can be taken. In reality, if Saddam hadn’t been physically removed by the U.S., he would have shortly succeeded in removing sanctions and reconsolidating his power.


But what is deeply troubling to so many socialists is the lack of hard power which Europe possesses. American power scares them, because they only have limited control over it. The abandonment of an independent EU military force and the French decision to rejoin the military wing of NATO further highlights this deficit. Consistent with the manner in which ego defense mechanisms function, we hear Mr. Kouchner projecting his disillusionment with EU and by extension French military muscle, onto America, which has no such deficit. He acknowledges this in the article.


It isn’t possible to turn the clock back 200 years to the glory of the early French republic. Military hard power is a “pay to play” proposition. Unless the French want to increase military spending as a percentage of GDP, they will always be disillusioned by America following American national interest. However socialists such as Kouchner are blind to the actual lack of nationalism in American assertiveness, since, using the formal definition of nation, America is a conglomeration of many nations in a single state. Unlike the European imperialism which submerged the continent in blood, American assertiveness consistently expands opportunity, expands prosperity and expands individual freedom in those nations which are touched by it.


Although socialists around the world claim they are disillusioned with Bush’s foreign policy, they are in fact disillusioned by their weakness in harnessing American military muscle and exploiting it to enforce their persistent blathering and the goals they feel are important. Since they are unwilling to invest in their own militaries to accomplish such purposes, they persistently attempt to write documents which give them a say in American decision-making. The Bush administration, their faults notwithstanding, never yielded to the socialist’s siren song.

With a presidential election upon us, we will shortly hear the refrain again that the world, meaning the collective, should have a voice in the choice of a U.S. president. Yet, those who make such statements ignore a fundamental fact. It was under the sheltering of American preeminence and because of the expenditure of American blood and money, that the current world economic system has survived and flowered. Although America has often acted in its own unique interest, it is still acting decisively to protect and nurture the economic and democratic systems it has helped establish.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/12/europe/france.php


'Magic is over' for U.S., says French foreign minister

By Alison Smale


International Herald Tribune


Wednesday, March 12, 2008


PARIS: Bernard Kouchner, the foreign minister of France and a longtime humanitarian, diplomatic and political activist on the international scene, says that whoever succeeds President George W. Bush may restore something of the United States' battered image and standing overseas, but that "the magic is over."


In a wide-ranging conversation with Roger Cohen of the International Herald Tribune at the launch of a Forum for New Diplomacy in Paris, Kouchner on Tuesday also held out the hope of talking with Hamas, the Palestinian faction that rules the Gaza Strip but has been ostracized by the West and by its Palestinian rival, Fatah, because it opposes peace talks with Israel and denies that Israel has a right to exist.


Asked whether the United States could repair the damage it has suffered to its reputation during the Bush presidency and especially since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Kouchner replied, "It will never be as it was before."


"I think the magic is over," he continued, in what amounted to a sober assessment from one of the strongest supporters in France of the United States.


U.S. military supremacy endures, Kouchner noted, and the new president "will decide what to do - there are many means to re-establish the image." But even that, he predicted, "will take time."


Kouchner began the 90-minute event with a speech that emphasized that "there is not just a new diplomacy; there is a new world."


To those intimidated by or fearful of what seem to be the rising challenges of globalization, climate change, spreading disease or new technology, Kouchner had a simple message: "The great difficulty is to accept this new world."


"There are not more problems - please, have a little memory - than 35 years ago," he said, recalling how, in 1971, he co-founded Médecins Sans Frontières in response to the horrors of the conflict in Nigeria over Biafra.


The challenges may be daunting, he said, noting for instance that the world had decided to act to curb the AIDS epidemic, but asking, "Can we take charge of all the other diseases? I'm not sure."


Some of the most persistent diplomatic challenges emanate from the Middle East, and Kouchner was asked about approaches to Iran, whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has called for the destruction of Israel, or to Hamas, which has the same stated goal.


Kouchner and other European diplomats have tried to talk Iran out of its controversial nuclear program, but officially rejected all contacts with Hamas, which is listed as a terrorist group by the United States and the European Union. Asked whether there is a way to engage Hamas, which is supported by a significant minority of Palestinians, Kouchner appeared to hold out hope of contact, saying: "I'm looking for a diplomatic way to say yes."


He then carefully couched this statement by noting that, in general, "we have to talk with our enemies," and that Fatah, which controls the West Bank, "always said they were in favor" of unity talks with Hamas. But after Hamas routed Fatah forces from Gaza in June, the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, has refused to deal with Hamas, which he accused of committing a coup. Kouchner, of the Socialist left in France, stirred controversy when he accepted the offer from President Nicolas Sarkozy, leader of the Gaullist center-right, to join his government last May.


At the end of the conversation, held in a glittering hall at the Académie Diplomatique Internationale, the IHT's partner in the new diplomatic forum, Kouchner denied that his activism had been curbed by the need to run the resplendent Foreign Ministry on the Quai d'Orsay and France's large diplomatic machinery around the world.


But he conceded that practicing the new diplomacy - which he defined as being action that is more practical, multifaceted and realistic than mere protocol calls and visits - "is very difficult, and very time-consuming."

Clinton and Obama Calls for 'Solutions' & Change' Will Impair Economic Freedom: Are Consistent With Europe's Global Collectivist and Socialist Agenda

http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson022708.html


February 27, 2008


The Future with Europe


The Swiss Newspaper Junge Freiheit Interviews Victor David Hanson


Although the focus of the interview was on immigration policy, the following extract demonstrates a rather accurate description of the European global collectivist and socialist agenda, whose principles and programs Senators Clinton and Obama apparently embrace in their calls for ‘Solutions’ and ‘Change’.


...JF: Do you see any appreciable differences between the way the U.S. is dealing with immigration issues, and Europe's response to similar problems?


VDH: We will stop the influx soon and through our powers of assimilation and popular culture absorb those here; you may well not and thus are already seeing a tiny elite on top mouthing utopian leftwing bromides while a radical rightwing movement on bottom will grow, demanding xenophobic solutions.


I am not confident in an easy solution for Europe, given its 20th-century past - whether confronting the specter of a Muslim Eurabia, or the counter-rightwing backlash that could get very ugly. You in Europe have little facility - socially, culturally, and politically - to absorb immigrants into full-fledged Europeans. We do (as Europe's historic critiques of America as a mongrel nation attest) - if the numbers of new arrivals are reasonable, of diverse backgrounds, and of legal status.


Officially Europe sounds more utopian, while in reality Europeans are clannish and reluctant to integrate and embrace; America sounds strident and angry, while Americans in their personal lives integrate, assimilate, and marry Mexican nationals who come here illegally - the tragedy being that if we just cut the numbers of new arrivals of illegals, the existing cohort would soon disappear through assimilation.


JF: What is it that makes the U.S. and Europe so different from each other? From the outside, the two are often perceived as a monolithic unit: the West. Does this unity really exist, or are we talking about two separate worlds? Do you think the alliance between the U.S. and Europe is made to last, or is it no more than an illusion?


VDH: We have a common legacy, as the elections in France and Germany remind us. And we coalesce when faced by a common illiberal enemy - whether against the Soviet empire or radical Islam.


But after the fall of the Soviet Union, you diverged onto a secularized, affluent, leisured, socialist, and pacifist path, where in the pride and arrogance of the Enlightenment you were convinced you could make heaven on earth - and would demonize as retrograde anyone who begged to differ.


Now you are living with the results of your arrogance: while you brand the U.S. illiberal, it grows its population, diversifies and assimilates, and offers economic opportunity and jobs; although, for a time you've become wealthy - given your lack of defense spending, commercial unity, and protectionism - but only up to a point: soon the bill comes due as you age, face a demographic crisis, become imprisoned by secular appetites and ever growing entitlements. Once one insists on an equality of result, not one of mere opportunity, then, as Plato warned, there is no logical end to what the government will think up and the people will demand.


JF: Would you say many Europeans' critical attitude towards the U.S. is rooted in legitimate concerns, or does it rather stem from a typically European bias against the U.S.? How would you describe the nature of this bias?


VDH: In part, the animus originates from innate envy, and jealousy over the loss of European imperial preeminence; in part, there is the old befuddlement that a mongrel population of European rejects in America has now created the largest and most powerful nation in history - as a sort of deviant Western answer to European notions of class exclusion and aristocratic pretension. But once you predicate status, as is done in America, in a Western liberal society on the acquisition of money rather than birth, then you see something enormously dynamic, but also crass, and that crassness apparently drives the Euros crazy. Finally, we are enablers: there are no consequences to vocal and cheap anti-Americanism. If we withdrew our troops, and cut the E.U. loose, then it would see that in a world without America at its side, creepy people like Putin, Ahmadinejad, and Dr. Zawahiri are not just bogeymen of a U.S. President.


JF: Is there a corresponding bias against Europeans in American society? How come nobody has ever thought to diagnose such a sentiment? Is it truly non-existent, or is it just that Americans are too wise, and Europeans too cowardly to mention it?


VDH: There has always been skepticism of Europe as a class-bound, hopelessly aristocratic static society, warped by Old World factionalism, and prone to dangerously wide springs between totalitarian fascism and totalitarian Marxism. Few note such suspicions of ours, since we are self-obsessed within our borders, and don't translate these musings into some driving ideology. Nor do we feel that Europe per se affects our lives to any great degree, despite our ubiquitous Western heritage that we owe to Europe and the billions of U.S. dollars that are held by European governments.


The irony is that while Europeans periodically chest-pound and loudly vie with each other in hating the United States for various alleged sins (fill in the blanks from global warming to Iraq), slowly, insidiously we in the U.S. are drifting away from Europe, whether defined by commitments to its security (I doubt we would intervene again in the Balkans) to sort of a popular weariness. One article in Le Monde or a quip by a Chirac or Schroeder might pass over the heads of those in Iowa or Nebraska, but not a few hundred of these per day. So the Europeans have done the almost impossible: alienated a Western powerful ally, that kept it safe and free for the majority of the 20th century.


JF: Europeans like to take the U.S. to task for their geopolitical immorality. Are Europeans really morally superior? Or would you rather say, Americans are not immoral but Europeans are unrealistic? Where does this lack of realism originate? And where will it lead Europe in years to come?


VDH: Well, Europeans are no more or no less moral than the U.S. - though the collective West itself is quite a bit more moral than a Russia, China, or India, whether we look at China's environmental travesties, Japan's whale hunting, or Russia assassinations abroad. Europe allowed a quarter of a million to be butchered in the Balkans for a near decade. Its agricultural subsidies are the most illiberal in the world, and it has no compunction about trading or even extending trade credits to the most oppressive regimes in the world, whether that be Cuba, Iran, or Syria.

No, I don't think Europeans are "unrealistic." They are instead canny in fabricating a utopian veneer and a sophisticated humanistic rhetoric to mask everything from cut-throat trade policies to a complete abrogation of international military responsibilities.


Americans, in contrast, are the naive ones. They spend billions trying to jump start democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, while being blamed as "imperialists." They keep the peace on the high seas, whether in the Persian Gulf, the Aegean, or the Korea Sea, and run up enormous deficit in the international free commerce that ensues. And they open their markets to almost anyone, and run on enormous massive debts that encourage a China or India to enter the international system of commerce and trade.


JF: Europeans like to cast the European Union less as a kind of United States of Europe but rather as a precursor to a "one world" utopia. What is your view on this? Do Americans feel any sympathy for this idea? Will it get Europe anywhere?


VDH: Europe is to be commended for creating a structure that avoided a third world war. But its present notion of utopia - minimal defense, socialism, atheism and agnosticism, continental governance - is a prescription for disaster. When the individual believes in nothing transcendent, has no allegiance to a notion of nationhood, and believes nothing is worth sacrificing for, stasis sets in, lethargy follows, and an effete citizenry becomes as vocal in condemnation as it is impotent in matching deed with word.


JF: What would serve American interests better - a "one world" European Union, which would always be fundamentally "other than" the U.S. in structure as well as in nature but would never challenge the U.S.'s position as a super power? Or a United States of Europe, which would function according to similar principles as the U.S. but might well prove a threat to U.S. hegemony?


VDH: We would welcome the challenge and tension of the latter, since with it there lies hope; the former, however, means the fountainhead of Western culture will slowly decline and whimper as it melts into a pool of irrelevance. Who wants to see that? Americans love Sarkozy for his muscular rhetoric and the glimpse of a proud France of years past.


JF: What would Europe need to do differently in order to become a serious international contender?


VDH: Open its economy to free trade; reduce the size of government; curb entitlements; rearm; forge a closer alliance with the U.S/, the U.K., Australia, Japan, and other Westernized countries; and redefine the E.U. as a sort of commonwealth rather than an omnipotent Big Brother.


JF: European powers have ruled the world for century without ever being challenged by any powers outside of Europe. Has this situation changed and if so, how come Europeans are not aware of the change? What risks do Europeans run by ignoring it?


VDH: Being powerful and rich, but weak militarily means all your eggs are in the U.N. basket, and such multilateral associations are as corrupt as they are weak - rusty chains that reflect the vulnerability of their autocratic weak links. So you offer low-hanging, enticing overripe fruit to anyone who chooses to pick it - whether radical Islam, Iran, Putin's Russia, or China.


And you demonize the United States for our skepticism of such questionable multilateral institutions; but we suspect that your critiques are not based on principle, but the necessity of collective defense and decision-making in lieu of a credible military. How sad that you hate the liberal nation that defends you, and appease the illiberal forces who would intimidate or destroy you.