Friday, November 04, 2005
Rumsfeld tweaks the Germans and European passivity
SPIEGEL: How concerned are you about Iran?
Rumsfeld: All of us have to be concerned when a country that important, large and wealthy is disconnected from the normal interactions with the rest of the world. They obviously have certain ambitions, powers and military capabilities ...
SPIEGEL: ...and nuclear ambitions...
Rumsfeld: That's apparently what France, Germany, the UK and the International Atomic Energy Agency have concluded. Everyone wants to have the Iranians as part of the world community, but they aren't yet. Therefore there's less predictability and more danger.
SPIEGEL: The US is trying to make the case in the United Nations Security Council.
Rumsfeld: I would not say that. I thought France, Germany and the UK were working on that problem.
SPIEGEL: What kind of sanctions are we talking about?
Rumsfeld: I'm not talking about sanctions. I thought you, and the U.K. and France were.
SPIEGEL: You aren't?
Rumsfeld: I'm not talking about sanctions. You've got the lead. Well, lead!
SPIEGEL: You mean the Europeans.
Rumsfeld: Sure. My Goodness, Iran is your neighbour. We don't have to do everything!
SPIEGEL: We are in the middle of regime change in Germany...
Rumsfeld: ... that's hardly the phrase I would have selected.
Heh.
SPIEGEL's assumption that the European powers are just American proxies in the confrontation with Iran says vastly more about the state of European public opinion than American foreign policy. It frankly does not occur to most Europeans that they might take action in the world beyond their own borders, no matter how great or proximate the threat. This passivity -- which is quite different from pacivism -- is the ultimate evidence of Europe's great collapse. Wretchard:
The rise of America to global dominance is, from another point of view, simply the result of surviving the European crash. David Fromkin argues in Europe's Last Summer that the Cold War was the tail end of the most consequential event of the 20th century: the Great War, caused by the fact that European Powers had run out of countries to conquer and hence, fell upon themselves. America has remained functional and grown to power as a nation, but it does not, nor does it seek to dominate the world to the extent of Europe in its heyday, when Britain alone governed a quarter of the world.
What the Great War did not wreck and the Second War did not finish off, postwar socialism did. Europe is facing death spiral demographics and flat economic growth. If current trends continue, India will surpass the German economy within a few years. But nowhere have the effects of Europe's only indigenous religion, Marxism, been more pronounced than in the country that embraced it most closely: Russia. Mark Steyn in The Australian revives a term once reserved for the Ottomans when he calls Russia The Sick Man of Europe.Russia is literally dying. From a population peak in 1992 of 148 million, it will be down to below 130 million by 2015 and thereafter dropping to perhaps 50 or 60 million by the end of the century. ... most Russian women are voting with their foetus: 70 per cent of pregnancies are aborted. ... Add to that the unprecedented strains on a ramshackle public health system. Russia is the sick man of Europe, and would still look pretty sick if you moved him to Africa. It has the fastest-growing rate of HIV infection in the world. By 2010, AIDS will be killing between 250,000 and 750,000 Russians every year. It will become a nation of babushkas, unable to muster enough young soldiers to secure its borders, enough young businessmen to secure its economy or enough young families to secure its future. True, there are parts of Russia that are exceptions to these malign trends. Can you guess which regions they are? They start with a "Mu" and end with a "slim".
The world may be reverting to the pre-European era, and Gingrich's Long War may really be the Long War for the survival of the West. Not its return to dominance, but simply its right to continued existence; to the chance of rediscovering its identity.
The question, of course, is whether the end of European passivity would help, or hurt. Ralph Peters is worried. Writing well before the present intifada in suburban Paris:
Europe's current round of playing pacifist dress up was enabled by America's protection during the Cold War. We allowed our European wards to get away with a minimum number of chores. The United States did (and still does) the dirty work, seconded by our direct ancestor, Britain. Even the North Atlantic Treaty Organization merely obscured how little was asked of Europe. For almost a century the work of freedom and global security has been handled by the great Anglolateral alliance born of a struggle against the tyranny of continental European philosophies hatched on the Rhine and Danube. Our struggle continues today, against fanaticism and terror.
It is unlikely that Europe's present pacifism will last... Europe will rediscover its genius, reforming itself if necessary. There will be plenty of bitterness and recriminations along the way, but Europe will accept the need to change because change will be forced upon it. The trouble with European genius, of course, is that it has a dark side. If its racist populations feel sufficiently threatened by the Muslim millions within their divided societies and by terror exported from the Islamic heartlands, Europe may respond with a cruelty unimaginable to us today. After all, Europe is the continent that mastered ethnic cleansing and genocide after a thousand years of pactice. We Americans may find ourselves in the unexpected position of confronting the Europe of tomorrow as we try to restrain its barbarities toward Muslims.
Perhaps even 73-year old Donald Rumsfeld will live to regret the return of European leadership.
15 Comments:
By 
, at
Fri Nov 04, 09:35:00 AM:
All of this is becoming very sobering. I need a drink.
By 
Cardinalpark, at
Fri Nov 04, 09:50:00 AM:
Great post TH. Yuo don't need to be ambivalent about Rumsfeld. You could not have smarter, tougher, more demanding civilian leadership of the DoD. It's why he arouses so much ire form Army leadership. But his approach is modernizing and streamlining the military and putting more leadership in the hands of Airmen, Marines and Special Forces is spot on.
His comments on Iran and Europe are sad and hilarious.
By Catchy Pseudonym, at
Fri Nov 04, 10:04:00 AM:
"The trouble with European genius, of course, is that it has a dark side. If its racist populations feel sufficiently threatened by the Muslim millions within their divided societies and by terror exported from the Islamic heartlands, Europe may respond with a cruelty unimaginable to us today."
I find that comment awkward because I think we can say the same about America. I think what bothers me more about that statement is that as pacifist or activist, this person is implying that Europe is a problem to the world and America will have to come in a save the day. It seems written out of selective parsing of history.
By Charlottesvillain, at
Fri Nov 04, 12:01:00 PM:
I don't know why you are ambivalent about Rumsfeld. I think he is a hero. To paraphrase George Will, Rumsfeld is the most dangerous man in Washington, because he is not planning to run for higher office. His candor has saved us years of political nonsense and put on the track of confronting those who would destroy us. Clearly there are not many among our political class with that kind of enduring courage.
By , at
Fri Nov 04, 12:18:00 PM:
Dear Mr. TigerHawk:
The riots in the Paris suburbs are an interesting story, but not that relevant to American interests. The reason is that Europe is no longer that relevant to American interests. We have high respect for Ralph Peters, but, as we have expressed to you before, we don't believe that Europe, in either a positive or negative role, will be any sort of global geo-strategic player for a long time to come. This is because Europe will need to focus for the foreseeable future on its internal security problems, something that the Paris riots clearly demonstrate.
Europe is assisting the U.S. with Afghanistan and the Balkans, but that will be the end of what the U.S. can expect from NATO. Iran and other problems loom, but the U.S. will have to look elsewhere for alliances, or "go it alone."
Europe can't help fight a fire in the next village when its own house is burning.
Westhawk
By Counter Trey, at
Fri Nov 04, 12:24:00 PM:
Excellent post.
I agree with CP and the Villain. What has not been written about, however, is the intelligence and will of the man who hired Rumsfeld. Lesser presidents would have caved at the pressure that came at Bush from all sides. It cannot be easy when the left, the media, the intelligence community, and several generals are calling for your guy's head. Give credit to Bush for sticking with Rummy.
By Catchy Pseudonym, at
Fri Nov 04, 01:23:00 PM:
Yes Europe, or certain countries in Europe, have a dark history in the 20th century. They also have much more history. But it was superiority of that statement that bothered me. Regardless of history, I believe what caused those atrocities to happen could just as easily happen here in America, and they have, maybe not as overtly in the 20th century as compared to Europe's.
The statement implied to me that there is an underlying fault or evil in Europe that America doesn't have. I just wanted to point out that we do have the capabilites for those evils and if we're worried about Europe's reaction to Muslims, we should be as worried about ourselves as well. .
By Counter Trey, at
Fri Nov 04, 02:29:00 PM:
Catchy,
If it didn't happen here after Pearl Harbor and 9-11, it never will. And, don't bother giving the standard line about the immorality of Japanese internment camps. There were no Auschwitzs.
By Catchy Pseudonym, at
Fri Nov 04, 02:46:00 PM:
I should just let you have your own arguement. Apparently you don't require anyone else for it.
As far as your point. I think you sound naive. Ask the Native Americans and African Americans whether they feel America has ever or is ever capable of atrocities. I think they might have a different answer than you.
By TigerHawk, at
Fri Nov 04, 04:59:00 PM:
Catchy,
We certainly have ugliness in our past, particularly with regard to the two cases you cite -- the enslavement of Africans and the subjugation of Indians. I would not dare suggest that "it cannot happen here." However, European ethnic-cleansing is both persistent over many centuries and quite recent. Whether you count from 1945 (the Final Solution) or 1999 (Kosovo), the perpetrators or at least accessories after the fact are alive today. Indeed, given that there have been short periods of European pacifism before, there is no evidence at all that the European character has changed since either of these atrocities. To argue otherwise is to give too much weight to the experience of but one or perhaps two generations.
However ugly, American atrocities were quite specific. Slavery was an Arab and African practice that was industrialized by Europeans and ended by the British. America's southern states had to be beaten into abandoning the practice, but beaten they were, and they gave it up before much of the rest of the world (including especially the Muslim world).
The wars against the Indians were just that -- wars. Indeed, they were wars of conquest. With few exceptions, Indians were not members of American society, and when they were they were often venerated rather than persecuted. You might well argue that Americans of European descent had no business waging a war of conquest against the Indians, but at the time relatively few Westerners (or other people in the world) thought it was morally wrong to conquer territory from another people, even a technologically disadvantaged people. The Indian wars were imperialism, which is bad, but they were motivated by a desire for the land. This is different, in my view, than the ethnic cleansing of people who live among you, which is a European specialty. Since we are no longer in the business of conquering land to possess it (with the possible eventual exception of Alberta ;)), I think that the risk of European ethnic cleansing far exceeds the American.
By Catchy Pseudonym, at
Fri Nov 04, 05:09:00 PM:
This discussion went to a place I didn't really mean it to go. I agree with you. American history has its ugliness, but we haven't and I can't see us ever committing genocide like you're describing. I was more pointing out that the aire of superiority of that statement bothered me. I wasn't trying to make the point that America is capable of genocide, though I believe any society when incredibly stressed with war, famine, fear... is capable of things they would never like to admit.
By TigerHawk, at
Fri Nov 04, 05:12:00 PM:
Oh. On the matter of Donald Rumsfeld.
I really have no idea whether he is great or a disaster. The bureaucratic war over his management has been so intense, I actually can't figure out whether he has strengthened the military or weakened it. There are certainly very smart and able people on both sides of the Rumsfeld debate, and I don't think that all who deplore him are cynical (Ralph Peters, for example).
I do like him, in the sense that I am very attracted to his style of communication. He is the rare person in government who speaks clearly and directly. Perhaps that is sometimes counterproductive, but since the Bush administration has something of a shortage of such people (although things have gotten a lot clearer since Rice took over State from Powell) I count it as a positive.
Some of his appointees, however, were not as smart as Rumsfeld and twice as arrogant. If only half the stories about Doug Feith are true, for example, he was a huge disaster.
More importantly, there is the matter of Iraq. I think, actually, that our war in Iraq is quite successful by the standard of history. Unfortunately, it is a failure against the expectations that were set for it. Donald Rumsfeld deserves a great deal of the blame for having mismanaged the public case for war (as does his partner in such things, Dick Cheney).
Also, his candor does not sustain itself through difficult questions, so it is a little hard to know whether he also deceives himself. If you read the whole Spiegel interview, you see that he dodges most of the tough questions about Iraq.
Ultimately, Rumsfeld will be considered one of the most consequential Secretaries of War/Defense in history. In all likelihood, his reputation will grow or shrink with the rest of the "Vulcans" who have determined the broad themes of American foreign policy for the last five years. Their reputation will depend on the state of the Middle East and the war against Islamist jihad in twenty or thirty years, if not longer.
By Counter Trey, at
Fri Nov 04, 06:02:00 PM:
Catchy,
This country was created by law, not birth like in Europe, and so we have no record of genocide.
Please; the word naive should only be pinned on someone who places Noam Chomsky in an "Honorary" category.
By , at
Mon Nov 07, 11:03:00 PM:
As a native American, I'll respond to catchy's comments about atrocities committed against NA's. Who does catchey think committed the vast majority of such atrocities? Answer - Europeans.
Unless you want to make the argument that landing in the New World immediately removed one's heritage from that of a European to that of an American. Which I can assure you, most NA's do not.
By , at
Tue Nov 22, 06:21:00 PM:
Filipinos have not forgotten that the United States is capable of genocide.
