A civilization that believes in nothing will ultimately submit to anything.
By Bret Stephens, WSJ
At last count, members of the European Union spent more than $200 billion a year on defense, fielded more than 2,000 jet fighters and 500 naval ships, and employed some 1.4 million military personnel. More than a million police officers also walk Europe’s streets. Yet in the face of an Islamist menace the Continent seems helpless. Is it?
Was France helpless in May 1940?
Let’s stipulate that a van barreling down a seaside promenade isn’t a Panzer division, and that a few thousand ISIS fighters scattered from Mosul to Marseilles aren’t another Wehrmacht. But as in France in 1940, Europe today displays the same combination of doctrinal rigidity and loss of will that allowed an Allied army of 144 divisions to be routed by the Germans in six weeks. The Maginot Line of “European values” won’t prevail over people who recognize none of those values.
So much was made clear by French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who remarked after the Nice attack that “France is going to have to live with terrorism.” This may have been intended as a statement of fact but it came across as an admission that his government isn’t about to rally the public to a campaign of blood, toil, tears and sweat against ISIS—another premature capitulation in a country that has known them before.
Mr. Valls was later booed at a memorial service for the Nice victims. It would be heartening to think this was because he and his boss, President François Hollande, have failed to forge a strategy to destroy ISIS. But the public’s objection was that there hadn’t been enough cops along the Promenade des Anglais to stop the attack. In soccer terms, it’s a complaint about the failure of defense, not the lack of a proper offense.
Then there is Germany, site of three terror attacks in a week. It seems almost like a past epoch that Germans welcomed a million Middle Eastern migrants in an ecstasy of moral self-congratulation, led by Angela Merkel’s chant of “We can do it!” Last summer’s slogan now sounds as dated and hollow as Barack Obama’s “Yes we can!”
Now Germany will have to confront a terror threat that will make the Baader-Meinhof gang of the 1970s seem trivial. The German state is stronger and smarter than the French one, but it also surrenders more easily to moral intimidation. The idea of national self-preservation at all costs will always be debatable in a country seeking to expiate an inexpiatable sin.
Thus the question of whether Europe is helpless. At its 1980s peak, under François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl, the European project combined German economic strength and French confidence in power politics. Today, it mixes French political weakness with German moral solipsism. This is a formula for rapid civilizational decline, however many economic or military resources the EU may have at its disposal.
Can the decline be stopped? Yes, but that would require a great unlearning of the political mythologies on which modern Europe was built.
Among those mythologies: that the European Union is the result of a postwar moral commitment to peace; that Christianity is of merely historical importance to European identity; that there’s no such thing as a military solution; that one’s country isn’t worth fighting for; that honor is atavistic and tolerance is the supreme value. People who believe in nothing, including themselves, will ultimately submit to anything.
The alternative is a recognition that Europe’s long peace depended on the presence of American military power, and that the retreat of that power will require Europeans to defend themselves. Europe will also have to figure out how to apply power not symbolically, as it now does, but strategically, in pursuit of difficult objectives. That could start with the destruction of ISIS in Libya.
More important, Europeans will have to learn that powerlessness can be as corrupting as power—and much more dangerous. The storm of terror that is descending on Europe will not end in some new politics of inclusion, community outreach, more foreign aid or one of Mrs. Merkel’s diplomatic Rube Goldbergs. It will end in rivers of blood. Theirs or yours?
In all this, the best guide to how Europe can find its way to safety is the country it has spent the best part of the last 50 years lecturing and vilifying: Israel. For now, it’s the only country in the West that refuses to risk the safety of its citizens on someone else’s notion of human rights or altar of peace.
Europeans will no doubt look to Israel for tactical tips in the battle against terrorism—crowd management techniques and so on—but what they really need to learn from the Jewish state is the moral lesson. Namely, that identity can be a great preserver of liberty, and that free societies cannot survive through progressive accommodations to barbarians.
I put Bret Stephens in the same category as Charles Krauthammer, both who supported the Gaza Disengagement.
(See below.) They put on an intrepid pro-Israel anti-leftist front but when it comes down to it they are “milk-toast” liberals afraid/unwilling to alienate the establishments of either Israel, or the US.
Wednesday, November 21st, 2012
On Sunday, Wall Street Journal editor and columnist Bret Stephens did what too many need to do: own up to the mistake of supporting the Disengagement Plan.
At the time, Stephens was editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post.
In his WSJ column Stephens wrote that on each of the points he argued regarding the Disengagement plan he turned out to be wrong. He writes:
My error was to confuse a good argument with good policy; to suppose that mere self-justification is a form of strategic prudence. It isn’t. Israel is obviously within its rights to defend itself now against a swarm of rockets and mortars from Gaza. But if it had maintained a military presence in the Strip, it would not now be living under this massive barrage.
Or, to put it another way: The diplomatic and public-relations benefit Israel derives from being able to defend itself from across a “border” and without having to get into an argument about settlements isn’t worth the price Israelis have had to pay in lives and terror.
…
Put simply, Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza yielded less security, greater diplomatic isolation, and a Palestinian regime even more radical and emboldened than it had been before. As strategic failures go, it was nearly perfect.
It goes With NATO as it goes with fair trade. U must pay your fair share.
The EU cannot count on DT if they refuse to pay their fair share!
The EU has NO strategy to defeat Islamism because the US Adm (big brother BHO decided NOT to have one)) has no strategy. We must remember that the US/USSR saved Europe from Nazism.
If and when DT become Pr. there will be a strategy but the EU will have to foot a significant portion of the bill. Let the socialists pay for the 66 years of mess they have generated.
The EU socialists want one more time to be saved from Islamism by the US/USSR!!!
euro govs want them to censor the fact that the terrorists are muslims. They dont want their citizens to know and protect themselves, they want them to be sitting ducks as their govs dont protect them and keep flooding them with muslim terrorists. That way their leaders hope to keep their jobs.
thats the short story in a nutshell.
correct only to a point.. militarily, technologically…. but still hampered culturally and diplomatically.
😛 😛 😛
another huge myth…. Israel has more anti semitic muslim terror and abuse than France…. and its all enabled intentionally and willingly. The GOI intentionally limits the curtailing of those dangers exactly for the same reasons as europe… its Stockholm Syndrome millenial masters.
Yes, they can learn how to throw their citizens to the dogs to appease the muslim sympathizers like the English did with “Breaker Morant”; they can learn how to create false flags like Duma in order to enable fascist crackdowns on those dissenting against muslim terror and muslim abuse; they can learn how to create double standards restricting their own in order to appease others;they can learn how to allow foreign enemies to pump money into local mole orgs that sabotage the nation; they can learn how to deceive their own citizens with smoke and mirrors because “they know better” what is best for the nation; etc etc etc….. they can also learn that breaking down the identity of their own tribes unity is the sure way for the enemies to win AND they can see how a “Jewish State” makes “progressive accommodations to barbarians” by restricting its own citizens from living in their historic homeland and by restricting its own citizens from worshiping at their holiest sites.
Gosh, it appears that Bret and I are viewing the scene from different station points.