FEATURES
Europeans are worse than
cockroaches
There is a Cold War between the
US and the EU, says Mark Steyn, and it will end with
the collapse of Old Europe
New Hampshire
Here’s a round-up of recent items from the world’s press you
may have missed: Item 1: In the last two weeks, two
Toronto-bound El Al flights had to be diverted to other
airports after credible terrorist threats were made about
using surface-to-air missiles against them. The Canadian
transport minister, David Collenette, responded by suggesting
that the Israeli airline’s service to Pearson International
Airport might be ended.
Item 2: The Baghdad hotel in which Paul Wolfowitz was staying
was blown up. Several people were killed, though the US deputy
defence secretary emerged unscathed. Much of the death and
destruction was caused by French 68mm missiles ‘in pristine
condition’, according to one US officer who inspected the
rocket tubes and assembly. In other words, they’re not rusty
leftovers Saddam had lying around from the 1980s. The Baathist
dictatorship had acquired these missiles from the French
rather more recently.
Item 3: According to Le Nouvel Observateur, ‘D’après un
questionnaire de la Commission Européenne, 59% des Européens
pensent qu’Israël est le pays le plus menaçant pour la paix
dans le monde.’
Item 4: In the Guardian, Tariq Ali ended this week’s column on
the mounting American (and NGO) death toll in Iraq thus:
‘Iraqis have one thing of which they can be proud and of which
British and US citizens should be envious: an opposition’.
On 11 September 2001, I wrote that one of the casualties of
the day’s events would be the Western alliance: ‘The US
taxpayer’s willingness to pay for the defence of Canada and
Europe has contributed to the decay of America’s so-called
“allies”, freeing them to disband their armed forces, flirt
with dictators and gangster states, and essentially convert
themselves to semi-non-aligned.’ ‘The West’ was an obsolete
concept, because, as I put it later that month, for everyone
but America ‘the free world is mostly a free ride’.
Two years on, most governments, at least officially, and most
commentators, at least in the mainstream press, still don’t
believe the relationship between America and its ‘allies’ is
in a terminal state. But the above quartet of stories — and
you can find equivalent items any week — illustrates why it
can’t be put back together.
One: Mr Collenette’s response to terrorists is to take it out
on their targets. Terrorists are threatening to use SAMs
against El Al? No problem, we’ll get rid of El Al. That’s a
great message to send. How soon before similar threats are
phoned in to similarly jelly-spined jurisdictions in Europe?
Pretty soon El Al won’t be flying anywhere. But no matter: Air
Canada and Air France and Lufthansa will still be flying to
Tel Aviv — at least until a couple of anonymous phone calls
are made hinting at fresh targets.
The threats against El Al came via phone calls from the
Toronto area from terrorists claiming to have heat-seeking
missiles. Police subsequently found a cache of weapons
including a German-made shoulder rocket launcher that was
smuggled into Canada through the ingenious method of dropping
it in the mail and letting the Post Office deliver it. So
there are two approaches to this problem: you can crack down
on Toronto-based terrorist cells and try to get government
agencies not to deliver their rocket launchers; or you can ban
El Al. Mr Collenette inclines to the latter. This is a man, by
the way, who marked the first anniversary of 11 September by
publicly regretting the fall of the Soviet Union because now
there is nobody to check America’s ‘bullying’.
Lesson: In the war on terror, the United States believes in
pre-emption; Canada, like many other ‘allies’, believes in
pre-emptive surrender. These two strategies are incompatible.
Two: Just suppose that one of those French rockets had killed
Paul Wolfowitz. One of the greatest fictions of the
interminable debate on Euro-American differences over Iraq is
that it’s an argument about the means, not the end. If only
Bush had been a little less Texan, less arrogant, less
bullying, if only he’d been less impatient and willing to put
in the hours, he could have brought the French and Germans
round. After all, everyone agrees Saddam Hussein is a very bad
man.
Not the French and Germans. There’s too much evidence
suggesting the main reason they were unable to join the Bush
side in this war is that they’d already signed on to the other
team and they’d decided, in the sort of ghastly vernacular the
cretinous Yanks would use, to dance with them what brung you.
They’re being admirably consistent about this: at the recent
Madrid conference France and Germany both refused to pony up
one single euro to Iraqi reconstruction. It was never about
the means, only the end.
Lesson: America and ‘Old Europe’ have different objectives in
Iraq, and those objectives are incompatible.
Three: 59 per cent of Europeans think Israel is the biggest
threat to world peace. Only 59 per cent? What’s wrong with the
rest of you? But, hey, don’t worry. In Britain, it’s 60 per
cent; Germany, 65 per cent; Austria, 69 per cent; the
Netherlands, 74 per cent. The good news is that Israel won’t
be a threat to world peace much longer, at least not if Iran’s
nuclear programme carries on running rings around the
International Atomic Energy Agency and the ayatollahs fulfil
their pledge to solve the problem of the Zionist Entity once
and for all.
Let us leave for another day the question of whether Israel is
actually a bigger global menace than North Korea, which has
hung a big shingle on the street saying ‘Nukes? We Got ’Em!
And You Won’t Believe Our Prices!’ The fact is that 11
September bound America to Israel in ways that oblige
Washington to regard European distaste for Jews as more than a
mere social faux pas. Given the rate of Islamic immigration to
Europe, those anti-Israeli numbers are heading in only one
direction. At present demographic rates, by 2020 the majority
of children in Holland — i.e., the population under 18 — will
be Muslim. What do you figure that 74 per cent will be up to
by then? Eighty-five per cent? Ninety-six per cent? If
Americans think it’s difficult getting the Continentals on
side now, wait another decade. In that sense, the Israelis are
the canaries in the coalmine.
Lesson: America’s and Europe’s world views have diverged
significantly, and those world views are now incompatible.
Four: Tariq Ali may not be the most representative political
commentator, but it’s still quite something to find the house
journal of the United Kingdom’s leftie establishment printing
the assertion that Americans and Britons can only envy the
vigour of the Iraqi ‘opposition’. So that’s what Iain Duncan
Smith was doing wrong! He should have been loading up
ambulances with rockets and firing them into hospitals. That’s
the way to draw attention to the problems of the NHS.
The other day I accidentally referred to Tariq Ali as Tariq
Aziz and within minutes had a little flurry of emails from
correspondents sneering that evidently all these guys sound
alike to me. Well, I wouldn’t say that. But Tariq Ali and
Tariq Aziz are sounding very much alike. In fact, T. Ali
sounds more Baathist than T. Aziz these days. When I was in
the Sunni Triangle, I met many Iraqis who were grateful to the
Americans; some who wanted a more visible US presence on the
ground, a few who resented the infidel occupier — but not one
who was as gung-ho for the Saddamite holdouts and Syrian and
Iranian opportunists as Tariq Ali. For him, and for Mr
Collenette, and for Goran Persson and Nelson Mandela and many
many others, even on 11 September, the issue was never
terrorism; the issue was always America.
Lesson: Washington and Europe do not agree on the problem, so
they’re hardly likely to agree on the solution.
Tariq and co. are right to this extent: in the scheme of
things, it’s not about Islamic terrorism. The Islamist goal is
a planet on which their enemies are either dead or Muslim
converts. That’s not going to happen. But Islamism is
sufficiently disruptive to rupture permanently the old
‘Western alliance’. A lot of things have been said on both
sides, but what’s impressive about the Europeans is the
palpable desire for America to fail, and Bush to fall.
I can’t see that happening. On election day next November, the
Democrats have no chance of taking back the House of
Representatives and they’re all but certain to lose seats in
the Senate. Bush is likely to be re-elected: with that 7.2 per
cent growth in GDP, it’s hard even for the BBC to keep
pretending America’s in the middle of some sort of recession;
and whatever happens in Iraq it’s difficult to see the
Democrats, running on a foreign policy of Cut & Run, being the
beneficiaries. But the trouble with a war on terror is that
the victories go unreported — the plotters who get foiled, the
bombers who don’t make it through. All you hear about are the
defeats. Let’s say there’s a terrorist attack in the US in the
next 12 months and it kills several hundred people. On the one
hand, you could argue that this shows the soundness of Bush’s
judgment in making terrorism the priority of his
administration. On the other, you could argue that this proves
he never learnt the lessons of the failures of 11 September.
Knowing the American media, I’d bet on the latter line being
the one they settle on.
But other than that, the arguments over the next few years are
going to be between conservatives — between those who think it
is worth pushing on with an ambitious programme to bring the
Middle East within the non-deranged world, and those who
figure that’s doomed to fail and we should settle for
something less. This project is in the national interest of
the United States but, in the end, the fate of the world’s
hyperpower does not hinge on it.
Now let’s turn back to Europe. The Telegraph’s Adam Nicolson
got irritated the other day because Denis Boyles of America’s
National Review had dismissed the Europeans as ‘cockroaches’.
Boyles is wrong. The Europeans are not cockroaches. The
cockroach is the one creature you can rely on to come crawling
out of the rubble of the nuclear holocaust. Whereas the one
thing that can be said with absolute confidence is that the
Europeans will not emerge from under their own rubble.
Europe is dying. As I’ve pointed out here before, it can’t
square rising welfare costs, a collapsed birthrate and a
manpower dependent on the world’s least skilled, least
assimilable immigrants. In 20 years’ time, as those Dutch
Muslim teenagers are entering the voting booths, European
countries, unlike parts of Nigeria, will not be living under
Sharia, but they will be reaching their accommodations with
their radicalised Islamic compatriots, who like many
intolerant types are expert at exploiting the ‘tolerance’ of
pluralist societies.
How happy what’s left of the ethnic Dutch or French or Danes
will be about this remains to be seen. But the idea of a
childless Europe rivalling America militarily or economically
is laughable. Sometime this century there will be 500 million
Americans, and what’s left in Europe will either be very old
or very Muslim. That’s the Europe that Britain will be binding
its fate to. Japan faces the same problem: in 2006, its
population will begin an absolute decline, a death spiral it
will be unlikely ever to climb out of. Will Japan be an
economic powerhouse if it’s populated by Koreans and
Filipinos? Possibly. Will Germany if it’s populated by
Algerians? That’s a trickier proposition.
Last Sunday, recalling the US–Soviet summits that helped ‘ease
the tensions of the Cold War’, the New York Times’s Thomas
Friedman proposed we hold regular US-Franco-German summits.
Implicit in that analysis is the assumption that France and
perhaps other Continental countries now exist in a quasi-Cold
War with America. If that’s so, the trick is to manage the
relationship until the Europeans, like the Soviets, collapse.
Europe is dying, and it’s only a question of whether it goes
peacefully or through convulsions of violence. On that point,
I bet on form. |
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© 2003 The Spectator.co.uk
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