John Rossant reviews Robert Kagan’s new book OF PARADISE AND POWER – America and Europe in the New World Order. An earlier version was published as an article last summer by the Hoover Institution’s Policy Review. Reviewer Rossant notes:
His central thesis is that the “power gap” between the U.S. and Europe is now so vast that there is little use in thinking of them as partners. “It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world,” he writes.
In the earlier Policy Review artcile, Kagan says:
Today‚s transatlantic problem, in short, is not a George Bush problem. It is a power problem. American military strength has produced a propensity to use that strength. Europe‚s military weakness has produced a perfectly understandable aversion to the exercise of military power. Indeed, it has produced a powerful European interest in inhabiting a world where strength doesn‚t matter, where international law and international institutions predominate, where unilateral action by powerful nations is forbidden, where all nations regardless of their strength have equal rights and are equally protected by commonly agreed-upon international rules of behavior. Europeans have a deep interest in devaluing and eventually eradicating the brutal laws of an anarchic, Hobbesian world where power is the ultimate determinant of national security and success.