Continental drifts.

• Author: Wheatcroft, Geoffrey
• Position: United States and Western Europe

As the new year opened with Hamas rockets and Israeli shells exploding over what we used to call the Holy Land, that frightening fireworks display also obliquely illuminated one of the great political developments--and great challenges--of the past generation, the growing gulf between the United States and Western Europe. The two have been closely allied before and may be so again, but the odds against that are lengthening, and recent events only see a culmination of the trends of decades past, as Europe steadily drifted in one direction and America in the other. When seeking friends in the coming century, each may be increasingly tempted to look elsewhere than across the Atlantic.

As usual, Washington offered "unwavering" support to Israel. Meantime, and also as usual, the European Union was cutting an ignominious figure, or figures. In a painfully accurate jibe, Henry Kissinger once said that he would take "Europe" seriously when "Europe" had a number he could call in a crisis. His words were given fresh meaning by the antics of President Nicolas Sarkozy, who failed to notice that France had just relinquished the rotating presidency of the EU to the Czech Republic and set off on his own peace mission to the Levant, to the great confusion of the Czechs and everyone else.

At the same time, there was a wider gap than ever between European and American perceptions of the conflict. Merely to follow those wrenching events through the American or the European news media is to be jolted by the dissonance: seen on either side of the Atlantic, Gaza might be two entirely different stories. So might a number of other urgent topics of the moment. The question of Turkey, and the way that it has become such a cause of contention between the European Union and the United States, deserves treatment on its own and at length. For the moment, it need merely be said that when the sometime--European Commissioner Chris Patten (once a British cabinet minister, now chancellor of Oxford) remarked that it was very good of the Americans to keep offering Turkey membership in the EU, but this is a matter in which the Europeans might feel they have some say themselves, he was speaking for the rest of Europe. And Iraq of course was another litmus test, the two continents reacting quite differently.

Six years ago, the war not only divided Europe from America but apparently divided Europe within itself. Except that it didn't really: popular sentiment was strongly opposed to the war, in every country. As the war approached, there were immense demonstrations against it all over Europe half a million marching peaceably in Berlin, and numbers not far short in London, Rome and Barcelona--with two leaders heeding their citizenry and opposing the invasion, Gerhard Schroder of Germany and Jacques Chirac of France. What distorted the picture was that a number of European leaders, notably Tony Blair, Silvio Berlusconi and Jose Maria Aznar, chose to support Bush against the wishes of their own electorates. (In Blair's case, this required a considerable degree of misrepresentation or even plain deception, of inflated intelligence claims, "dodgy dossier" and all. His compatriots certainly remembered that when they watched Blair receive a presidential medal from Bush in January 2009.)

In turn, it was European opposition to the war that provoked an outpouring of contemptuous and somewhat vulgar American indignation: those cries of "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," congressmen eating "freedom fries" and Thomas Friedman saying in the New York Times that France should be "voted off the island." The European response confirmed in some American eyes the thesis which Robert Kagan, the prominent neoconservative writer, had already formulated under the catchy slogan "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus." This was further elaborated in his book Of Paradise and Power, which by coincidence was published a few days before those demonstrations. The gulf was now unbridgeable, Kagan claimed, between irenic or pacifistic or flabby Europeans, inhabiting their "Kantian" universe of rights and ideals, and hard, realistic "Hobbesian" Americans, who understood the need for war of all with all. Kagan didn't put it quite like that, but he did say that it was "time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world."

He might have been right, although not in the way he intended. Even Kagan should admit that the events of the past six years have given some color to European skepticism about the desirability of unilateral intervention or the universal efficacy of force. In his final press conference, Bush forlornly admitted that his "mission accomplished" stunt when he landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003 might now seem ill-advised. But then, that was only the high-water mark of much hubristic American boasting. We were told that the invasion had been a success when Saddam's statue was toppled, and again when he was discovered (and once more, if not in so many words, when he was hanged), and now we have been told that the "surge" has worked. Of course it was bound to in simple and temporary military terms, but that leaves unanswered the question Europeans proposed at the beginning: whether the invasion was based on any rational and feasible political project.

Going back a little further to 2002, we were told by two Washington Post columnists about another great victory. The late and much-lamented Michael Kelly, killed covering the invasion of Iraq, proclaimed "the triumph (and it is, over all, clearly that) of the American campaign in Afghanistan," and his colleague Charles Krauthammer again berated European feebleness when he said, "The proximal cause of NATO's death was victory in Afghanistan--a swift and crushing U.S. victory that made clear America's military...