The Imitators: Part III

Some of the people who are most adamant against outsourcing economic activity from the United States to other countries often seem to think we should outsource our foreign policy to "world opinion" or act only in conjunction "with our NATO allies."

Often there is a blanket assumption that European countries are just so much more sophisticated than American "cowboys." But there is incredibly little interest in the track record of those European sophisticates whom we are supposed to consult about our own national interests-- including, in an age when terrorists may acquire nuclear weapons, our national survival.

In the course of the twentieth century, supposedly sophisticated Europeans managed to create some of the most monstrous forms of government on earth-- Communism, Fascism, Nazism-- in peacetime, and to start the two World Wars, the bloodiest in all human history. After both World Wars, the United States had to step in to save millions of people in Europe from starving amid the wreckage and rubble that their wars had created.

During the Cold War, may European intellectuals once again misread the threat of a totalitarian dictatorship-- in this case, the Soviet Union. When they finally recognized the threat, many saw the question as whether it was "better to be red than dead." They were no more prepared to stand up to the Soviet Union than they had been to Nazi Germany. Worse yet, much of the European intelligentsia objected to America's standing up to the Soviet Union.

Are we now to blindly imitate those who have been so wrong, so often over the past hundred years? These do not seem like people whose sophistication we should defer to...

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