IMO, Victor Davis Hanson nails it once again.

The Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis needs some tough love.



Imagine a continent that collectively budgets very little on its own defense, instead finding protection in a distant and democratic superpower that pays rent for the privilege of basing troops, planes, and ships to stop hooligans — sometimes, as in the case of an embarrassingly impolite Mr. Milosevic, right on Europe’s doorstop.

In return, many European elites ridicule American values, naïveté, and insularity — even as their countries have raked in billions of American dollars in trade surpluses and tourism from mostly oblivious, aw-shucks Americans. We self-absorbed, parochial yokels laughed and paid little attention to the fact that some in Europe had forsaken Christianity for this weird, emerging boutique religion of anti-Americanism.

Who could take their ankle-biting seriously? Who, after all, would give up all that they had gotten so cheaply — that dream of all spoiled teenagers: to snap at and ridicule their patient and paying parents, even as they call on them in extremis for help whenever the car stalls or the rent is short?

Yet suddenly many Europeans are not talking of “Europe,” but telling us instead: “You Americans must be careful in lumping us all together as if there are not real differences among us.” Thank the crazed Chirac and his infantile Talleyrand for this new, more nationalist and “non-European” identity, now growing among Europeans in the wake of the Iraqi war.

The unease with the Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis is just beginning. In the coming year alone, troves of archives — economic, political, and military — will reveal France to have been more an enemy than a friend of the United States in the present war, and that a legion of German, French, and Russian businessmen, journalists, and politicians were on the Iraqi take, or worse. The duplicity of our so-called friends will make their deceit during the Balkan fiasco look like child’s play.

So it would be a terrible mistake to assume that our relationship with “Old Europe” will — or should — so easily get back on track. Our own Washington-New York nexus is assuring us that it was just the generation of 1968 come of age in Europe, and our own clumsiness, that led to the fallout over Iraq — as if Mr. Bush’s Texas drawl were the problem.