PARIS–Modern Europe–liberal, democratic Europe–is a created in the United States. This tale was once known to every American, but as the generation responsible for this achievement dies, it seems this knowledge is no longer passed down.
The United State constructed the modern order upon an architecture of specific organizations: the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the International Court of Justice. In Europe, it constructed NATO and the European Union. This global order is in many respects an empire–a Pax Americana–but it is far more humane( in Europe, at least) than the European empires that preceded it.
The statesmen who make this global order were animated by two beliefs, one idealistic, the other realistic. The first belief: certain moral values are universal, and liberal democracies best reflect and cultivate those values. The second: in international affairs, anarchy reigns. Power is the only coin that matters.
Post-World War II Europe was designed by the United States to be the other half of the West, and Europe's success since 1945 has been a global advertising for liberal republic. The collapse of liberal republic in Europe would represent the failure of our own ideals. The collapse of European security would mean the end of liberal democracy.
Today, neither Europe nor the United State are wealthy or powerful enough, alone, to sustain and expand liberal republic in a world increasingly dominated by China, Russia, and anarchy. No European country alone , nor any of the American states alone, can maintain the liberal global order. A United Europe, however, and the United Country, are together strong enough to sustain and expand the liberal tradition and democratic values. It is exactly why the enemies of liberal republic are determined to drive a stake through our alliance.
The pacification of Germany was the greatest of American achievements. This is what constructed European peace and integration possible. Germany's demilitarization ended the Franco-German rivalry that situated the Continent alight and reduced it to ashes again and again.
The wars that broke out in 1939 and 1914 were iterations of the wars opposed by Bismarck, Napoleon and Louis XIV–Sedan, 1870; Leipzig, 1813; Jena, 1806; Austerlitz, 1805; Valmy, 1792; Turckheim, 1675. The 20 th centuries' wars were bloodier for only one reason: a massive improvement in killing capability. What would the next iteration of this war look like considering the technology we've got now?
Europe was cursed, for millennia, by internecine massacre and butchery. For centuries, it was the world's resulting exporter of violence. That is precisely why our postwar foreign policy was designed to ensure our permanent military hegemony over the Continent. American power put an end to centuries of European war. Only American power, as we exercised it, could have done so: No other nation was capable of playing this role. No other nation would be capable of it now. No other continental country has the world's largest GDP and a population of over 325 million, and no other country had–or has–enough distance from Europe to do it.
Postwar, Europe ceased to be the world's resulting exporter of violence because it was stripped of full sovereignty and subordinated to outside hegemons–first the U.S. and the USSR, then the U.S. alone.
We aimed the bloodshed by credibly guaranteeing Germany's security under the American nuclear umbrella. The long peace is the direct outcome. The benefits of this–to the U.S ., Europe, and the world–are not just economic, although those benefits are immense. The benefits are in wars not opposed, lives not squandered.
European free-riding isn't an anomaly or a trick, as many Americans now seem to believe–it's the central feature of our postwar security strategy. How is it, then, that abruptly, we've become consumed with fury that Europe is “taking advantage” of us? How have we forgotten that this is the point of the system? We designed it this route, and did so for overwhelmingly obvious historic reasons learned at incalculable cost.
Since World War II, we have been deployed in Eurasia to ensure the continent cannot be dominated by a single power capable of monopolizing its resources and turning them against us. We do this by suppressing security competition. We construct overwhelmingly massive military assets and situate them, strategically, as a warn:” You cannot win. Don &# x27; t even try .” By this entails, we prevent local arms races before they begin. We say, simultaneously,” But there is no need to try. Your safety is guaranteed. You need not worry about this .” And we regularly show–often at terrible hazard to ourselves–that we mean it. This strategy has largely maintained the peace in Europe for 74 years.
The United Nation underwrites European security through forward involvement and guarantees based on deterrence. In return, its friends accept the United States' dominant role in the international system. They contribute–significantly, in both fund and blood–toward session common challenges. Up to now, our statesmen have had the good sense to allow all concerned to save face and to describe our relationship as a partnership, with each contributing according to ability. Unfortunately, it seems everyone who understood what this actually meant–European subordination to U.S. hegemony–is dead.
Yes, the U.S. does pay more than its “fair share.” In exchange it receives more than its fair share of power. All parties to the arrangement receive prosperity and peace. This arrangement liberated Europeans and Americans alike from the most dangerous force confronting them: European fratricide. But we have forgotten how it happened or why. We have forgotten that our grandparents are people who built NATO. We have confused “old” with “obsolete.”
We have forgotten that the our alliance with Germany was the foundational relationship of the postwar order. We have forgotten that the European Union was our vision. In 1964, Paul Hoffmann, who led the implementation of the Marshall Plan, set this plainly:” Those of us involved in the actual administration of the Marshall Program had very much in our minds the building of a new Europe. We had been persuaded by Jean Monnet and others that there was no hope for progress of a compartmentalized Europe and that in a postwar world, Europe's future would be dim unless there was close cooperation among the Marshall Plan countries. Speaking personally, I thought that union would first come along economic lines and that some degree of political union was certain to follow .”
Americans died, suffered, and labored assiduously for generations to induce of Europe what it had never been before: a united zone of peaceful, prosperous, liberal democracies–and the other half of the West. The rescue and reconstruction of Europe was our greatest moral and political accomplishment, towering above any other in our country's short history. Our grandparents destroyed the most monstrous and tyrannical regimes humanity has known, then proved that our system of governance, or something much like it, could be built and made to work on that very soil. This is the story of the world we know, and the story of our country, too. This is the accomplishment now under threat.
We take it for awarded. The United Country seems so mammoth, so solid, so marmoreal that it requires immense imagination to recall that before our grandparents constructed this world, liberal democracy was a fragile and relatively untested experimentation. It was our victory in the Second World War and our reconstruction of Europe and Japan that stimulated us a global , norm-setting power–capable of defining the rules of international order. This is what constructed liberal democracy a global aspiration, and in many places, a reality.
The generation that ensure the rise of Hitler and Stalin and watched, for themselves, the destruction of the World Wars, the failure of the squalid socialist revolutions in Russia and China, and the genocide and enslavement over which these miserable regimes presided, were obviously, deep traumatized–so much so that they assumed what they had seen was unforgettable. They imagined these events, like the Crucifixion, would become a permanent part of human memory.
They were wrong. We're now cheerfully pissing away the greatest accomplishment of American history, the work of generations, achieved at incalculable expense in life and treasure: a free, united, procure, and prosperous Western world. The 20 th century has been forgotten. No one learned a thing from it.
Claire Berlinski is a freelance novelist who lives in Paris. She is crowdfunding her forthcoming book, The Rise of the New Caesars and the Death of Freedom.
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