S.’s Email to me…

It helps put perspective on why the french and germans so openly contest the u.s. today btw the author is victor davis hanson -S.

Gone But Not Forgotten

Making war and peace in the new post-Soviet world.

It has been well over a decade since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet many, still caught up in past institutions and protocols of that bygone age, forget the degree to which the collapse of the Soviet Union is with us today and helps to frame almost all of our struggles since 9/11.Our troubles with Europe are said to arise from differing views of the world order and an imbalance in military power. Yet these new tensions cannot truly be understood without the appreciation that there are no longer 300 Soviet divisions poised to plow through West Germany. With such a common threat, natural differences between Europe and the United States — from the positioning of Pershing tactical missiles on German soil to prevent Soviet nuclear intimidation, to continental criticism of the American role in Vietnam and Central America — always were aired within certain understood and relatively polite parameters of common history and interests.America, after all, was appreciated for ending Hitler’s rule — and immediately after for pledging its youth and national security in an effort at keeping a murderous totalitarianism out of a recovering Europe. With a common and deadly enemy nearby, Western Europeans had no utopian illusions that the United Nations, rather than NATO and America, could stop an aggressive Soviet premier should he choose to fire up his tanks. The idea that a German president would bark out anti-American invective at a mass rally would have been inconceivable 20 years ago. But now Herr Schroeder does so routinely — not because his people hate us or because we his deserve antipathy, but simply because he can.In the shadow of the Soviet threat, Western European statesmen dared not disarm, but rather accepted the tragic reality that the world was a dangerous place and that deterrence — and not the bureaucrats of the Common Market — kept pretty awful people at a safe distance. With a Stalinist regime bloodied by the murder of 30 million of its own, and with World War II criminals of every stripe still lurking in its shadows, even hack lawyers in Brussels had no time to go after an American diplomat or general on bogus charges of genocide. Outnumbered three to one on the ground, a beleaguered Western Europe grudgingly invested in its own defense. Residents then accepted the bitter truth that the welfare state had gone about as far as it could — without its social expenditures taking away resources from the tanks, planes, and troops that alone could ensure its national survival.