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. But Bush s wilderness crisis had passed.He went back tosaying that the war on terrorism was very simple and that Ariel Sharon was  aman of peace. 102European Kantians and American HobbesiansThe Weekly Standard offered a running commentary on how Americanunipolarism went down in Europe, nearly all of it acerbic.Routinely it blastedEuropean complaints about American arrogance and unilaterialism, callingEurope the  axis of rudeness. Often it noted that the ungrateful Europeans livedunder the protec-tive umbrella of American power.Duke University politicalscientist Peter D.Feaver complained that Bush s  axis of evil speech  provokedan extraordinary degree of vitriol from our European allies. In his account,much of the howling merely resumed Europe s pre-9/11 tendency to look downon its American superiors:  The yowling from the press and intellectuals ispredictable and returns those cosseted elites to their familiar habit. But therewas something new in the European attacks on the Bush Doctrine, he observed.Senior government officials were  willing to be shrill on the record, withapparently little thought and less care to the diplomatic repercussions. Feaverdetected a  desperate intensity in recent European complaints about America-the-bully.British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw derided Bush s State of theUnion address as election-year pandering; French Foreign Minister Alain150 IMPERIAL DESIGNSRichard had an  impolitic hissy fit, claiming that France felt threatened byBush s bullying; European Union Director of International Affairs Chris Pattendeclared that Bush couldn t possibly have thought through the implications ofthe Bush Doctrine.Feaver judged that although European leaders pridedthemselves on their cultivated manners and civility, they showed none toAmericans.103University of Virginia political scientist James W.Ceaser explained thatEuropeans were jealous of American success and power, and that whenEuropeans spoke of the American  hegemon or  imperium or  hyperpowerthey usually weren t being merely descriptive.America s global domination setthem on edge.Former French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine, for example,claimed that  hyperpower was simply a factual description for the Americancolossus,  The United States is not the sole country convinced of being endowedwith a universal mission, but it is the only one that has the means for doing soand that considers itself entirely legitimate in carrying out this role. Ceasarremarked,  One does not know whether to be flattered or insulted. 104Kristol puzzled over European resentments at a distance, but living inBrussels, Kagan dealt with them constantly.Every day he heard Europeans saythings about international affairs that were truly foreign to his American friends.Attending an  endless merry-go-round of highbrow European conferences, hereported that  the settings couldn t be nicer; the food and wine couldn t bebetter; the conversations couldn t be more polite.And the suspicion, fear andloathing of the United States couldn t be thicker. His American friends tried toremind him that America had its anti-American pacifists, anti-interventionists,and America Firsters, too, but what they didn t comprehend was that in Europe, this paranoid, conspiratorial antiAmericanism is not a far-left or far-rightphenomenon.It s the mainstream view. Anti-Americanism was the norm inEurope, Kagan observed; it was strong, pervasive, and cut across all social groups.During the Cold War European anti-Americanism was counterbalanced byanticommunism, but now it wasn t counterbalanced by anything.When GermanChancellor Gerhard Schroeder campaigned on an antiAmerican platform, hewasn t mobilizing a left base or reaching out to fringe voters:  He s talking to theman and woman on the street, left, right and center. 105This phenomenon of nearly universal anti-Americanism in Europe cried out foran explanation.Appropriating the language of a recent self-help bestseller,Kagan explained that Americans were from Mars and Europeans from Venus.Europeans lived in a  post-historical paradise of international law andcooperation.They believed that power is not the determinative reality in higherforms of civilization [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]