Conrad Black: Don’t Give Up on Europe
As with so many other foreign-policy matters, there is room and reason for the United States to reassess its policy toward Europe. That policy was stable throughout the Cold War: support of anything that assisted the Western Europeans in being better Cold Warriors. The destruction of World War II and related conflicts such as the Spanish, Yugoslav, and Greek civil wars left all Europe from Castile to Leningrad and Stalingrad — except for Switzerland, parts of France, Scandinavia, and the British Isles, and pockets around Prague and Vienna — largely smashed to rubble and depopulated of young men. Tens of millions of people had been displaced. In such desolation and chaos, the advance of Western Europe’s Communist parties was a real danger. So was the proximity of Stalin’s mighty Red Army, only 100 miles from the Rhine, after he had violated every clause of the Yalta agreement, especially the guarantees of democracy and autonomy in Poland and “Liberated Europe.”...
For 40 years, the United States was engaged in trying to impart courage to the Europeans. There were constant temptations to and from the leftist parties throughout Europe, particularly in Germany, France, and Italy (in the last two, the local Communist parties routinely polled over 20 percent of the vote, and waffly socialists another 10 or 15 percent, until the Eighties). These could always be easily distracted by Soviet pitches for “neutrality.” The Americans carried most of the defense commitment and steadily complained of uneven “burden-sharing.” The European reply was a specious improvisation that because Western Europe was closer to the Soviet bloc, it was at greater risk, so the Americans should compensate by providing most of the manpower and hardware. American strength, which much of Europe resented, enabled Europe to be weak and yet to remain free....
Only periodic bursts of exceptional European leadership and great dexterity in Washington kept the alliance functioning. In the 1948 Italian elections, Pope Pius XII’s announcement of the automatic excommunication of any Communist voter, coupled to President Truman’s statement that a Communist victory would cause the immediate end of all Marshall Plan assistance, probably saved the pro-Western De Gasperi government. In 1951 and 1952, West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer may have scored the greatest feat of statesmanship of the entire Cold War when he declined Stalin’s offer of German reunification in exchange for Cold War neutrality, and carried German public opinion with him. The same gambit from the Kremlin 20 years later would probably have succeeded. And in the 1980s, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher uniquely supported the American retaliatory air attack on Libya, and led the deployment of intermediate nuclear missiles in Western Europe. When the Left clamored for a nuclear-free Europe, she expressed her preference for a “war-free Europe.”...
Now, Europe is hobbled by the invoice for decades of paying social-democratic Danegeld to the workers and small farmers who so often in their history have mutated into revolutionary mobs. Europe, America, and Japan are all groaning under the weight of decades of overconsumption, the unproductive delusions of the service economy, and, in most countries (but not the U.S.), the degeneration of the social safety net into an unaffordable hammock of rich entitlements gouged from those who have earned the money and paid out to those who have not, with patchy regard to merit. And as Europe’s birthrate has imploded and it has replaced its own unborn with frequently disaffected Muslims, a new argument for transatlantic solidarity arises from the sudden erosion of the West and its emulators, such as Japan....
In most of Europe, fewer working-age people work shortening working years to support an ever-aging and less active population. Greece is the precursor of the problems of almost all of the West, though it is poorer and has been even more incompetently governed than most....
The advanced and aspirant democracies should reinvent themselves in dedication to victory in the third great era of the world’s democratization, following the glorious victories of World War II over Fascism and of the Cold War over Communism. We have not got through those implacable Manichaean ordeals to enter the Spenglerian decline of the West. To quote famous preceptors, “If not us, who? If not now, when?”...