Europe and America Part I: How We See Europe

Honestly, I began this entry as one big response to several comments in Matt Lewis' blog, but it has just grown out of hand... So, I'm separating it into several parts.Here's the comment page that started this whole thing:http://www.townhall.com/blog/default.aspx?mode=post&g=f5d08614-b704-435c-bd4a-8a5877c51b44&comments=true#f1c0eed2-9a89-4267-a494-ebd44bcc9b57

I'm addressing this post to any reader interested, but the question was raised by Nee and El Gordo.

1.) Our Perception of Europe
So, before we continue to gripe about who owes who what, lets understand exactly where both sides stand.

Mr. Nee, and Mr. el gordo the first thing that I want to point out is that you seem to be looking at Europe from a very outdated point of view. World War II ended over 60 years ago, and Europe is entirely different. Remember that when you say that we arrived in Europe to save it, we only saved one half of Europe from the other half. Remember that Germany, Italy, Romania and Finland are all European countries. Furthermore, you seem to be ignoring the whole idea that for 50 years, America's prodigious nuclear arsenal, incomparable technological prowess and tireless intelligence kept Western Europe out of reach of the Communist Eastern Bloc. That event, likely more than World War II, shaped modern Europe.

Modern Europe is no longer a group of empires and semi-empires devising the most horrendous means of killing each other - culminating in the world wars that nearly destroyed Western civilization. Modern Europe, taking in part from the essential strucutres that comprised NATO, the G8 (then G6), and the EEC gave rise to the semi-national federation that currently dominates Europe, and will soon dominate the global economy, the European Union.Now, the EU is the bastion of true and free government, spreading the word and wisdom of democracy with, frankly, incredible speed and success (Eastern Europe for example). War on the Continent is now about as likely as another US Civil War.

However, even if I were to take your point of view for granted, I disagree that Europe somehow owes us a debt of honor for World War II. The Nazi regime truly deserved to be battered, smashed and thrown into the creatories of history, but if some other situation appeared anywhere else in the world, the United States would be honor-bound to intervene. Furthermore, the United State did not participate in the majority of the fighting during WWII. More than 75% of the ground war took place in Eastern Europe, between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht. US fighting, outside of Africa and Italy took place only after 1944, at the same time as Operation Bagration, where the bulk of fascist armed forces was annihilated by Zhukov in Belarus. If somethine like that happened in North America, then Europe would be honor-bound to intervene as well. As far as I am concerned, our involvement in WWII was not an investment, but a true and just cause. We rebuilt the entire Western world, which laid mostly in ruins, and saved them from Communism - that is where our credibility lies.

If the US has any major credibility for WWII, then it lies from the side of the Chinese, who we indirectly liberated from the Japanese by winning the war in the Pacific - but US-Asian mutual perceptions are a whole different discussion all together.

Furthermore, we owe quite a lot to Europe as well. It was thanks to a lot of French intervention that the United States was able to finally become independent. Furthermore, it was thanks to the European models of government and to European Enlightenment thinkers that our Founding Fathers had a suitable philosophy to create the basis of the finest nation on earth. In more recent times, Europe provided a staunch ally during the Cold War, and the unity of our two markets, EEC and the US, we were able to grow economically, forming the two most unstoppable economic powers in the history of humanity - the EU and the United States.We two continents are joined at the hip, inextricably dependent upon one another, as we always have been and as we always will be.