The big idea behind this little book has been touted as ‘Americans are from Mars; Europeans are from Venus’. That’s not quite right. The real thesis is not that Americans are war-hungry and Europeans peace-loving, but that Americans deal with problems, and Europeans avoid them. If anything, Americans are from the planet Can-do, and Europeans from Can’t-face-doing.
Try conducting practically any transaction in America and compare it to the way you’re treated in Britain and you get the measure of what Robert Kagan, a Washington Post columnist and veteran of the State Department, is driving at. An American working in a deli, or shining your shoes, wants to make sure you get what you ask for and doesn’t mind being told to stick some extra Dijonnaise on or to give your brogues an extra buff.
Over here, you have the distinct impression that work is really beneath most people and that anything done for you in return for money amounts to the most tremendous favour. Bill Bryson, the American whose Notes from a Small Island has just been picked as the book that best evokes modern Britain, was asked last week what he loves about this country. He went for our politeness – particularly our tendency to ask shopkeepers, ‘I’m terribly sorry but could you help me find a shirt my size?’ – and the engaging squalor of British bed and breakfasts. He didn’t, though, make the connection between the two: British bed and breakfasts are horrible because no one bothers to complain.
And the same attitude, writ large, applies to the European approach to conflict, although Kagan gives Britain and Tony Blair a small get-out clause when it comes to criticising the European attitude to Iraq. What’s happening there – and what happened in Afghanistan – is classic Can-do stuff for the Americans, and Can’t-face-doing for the Europeans. The Americans see the state of the Iraqi bed and breakfast and set out to clean it up in the best way they know how.
It wasn’t ever thus. Kagan’s convincing line is that the European strategy – peace at all costs – is a relatively new creation, born at the time that America’s muscles outgrew those of its rivals in the 1920s. The depressing truth is that whoever is top dog at any particular time has to get involved in dogfights, whether willingly – like Greece, Rome and Britain in their empire days – or by necessity, like America, the first king of the hill with no desire to colonise the lower slopes.
The eclipse of the European powers as world leaders after the first world war led to a greater reliance on collective security. Now it is the United Nations that is seen as the repository of all that is good; then it was the League of Nations. It makes perfect sense: if someone else becomes top dog, you make alliances with other puppies. And, if you’re still vulnerable, you try to make peace treaties. As one of the League’s leading statesmen, the Czech foreign minister, Edvard Benes, put it, ‘Our purpose was to make war impossible, to kill it, to annihilate it. To do this we had to create a system.’
Systems, though, don’t work. Bombs do, as America has realised in Hiroshima, Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq again (presumably) and – who knows where next time, but there will be a next time, as long as the top dog goes on winning Best in Show and the wilder puppies keep on getting angry and jealous.
After the second world war, America was delighted at the prospect of someone else shouldering the burden in the face of the new enemy, the Soviet Union. President Truman was perfectly happy with a world where Britain and Russia competed for influence, and America served as ‘an impartial umpire’.
But Britain, short of money and beginning to slough off its imperial obligations, preferred the umpire to take to the court. The net may have happened to fall down the middle of Europe, but the Western service line stayed several thousand miles away across the Atlantic for 40 years.
Britain may in turn have become little more than an American aircraft carrier, but that’s because that’s what the British wanted. And it still is what a lot of people want. The recent protests against the arrival of B-52s at RAF Fairford were manned by peaceniks bussed in from across the country. The Fairford locals were content with their American friends. ‘We don’t want you in Fairford,’ they chanted at the protesters in broad Gloucestershire accents.
The Americans, though, would be much happier not to be nestling in the lee of the Cotswolds at all. They would have preferred Western Europe to create its own military force, albeit under Nato control, a force capable of taking on the Russians and knitting its own bodybags. But the Europeans weren’t prepared to put their hands in their pockets and still aren’t – the proposed European army can never be on the same scale as American forces with such an imbalance of military spending.
With no choice, then, the Americans go on shouldering the burden, all the while, though, inventing more and more brilliant technological devices to keep the manufacture of shrouds to a minimum. And the further America moves ahead of its military rivals, the more disposed it is to take care of military problems rather than leave them alone.
Kagan, who has an engaging way of knocking what could be dreary heavyweight political material into down-home folksy wisdom, puts it like this. A man with a knife, roaming a bear-filled wood, will prefer to lie low rather than take on a bear with only the knife. The same man armed with a gun will go out looking for the bear; why hang around living in fear when you can take on the problem and almost certainly win?
And you’re much likelier to go looking for the bear if the bear’s been looking for you; it’s no coincidence that when Osama bin Laden delivers his threats, it’s always America that comes first in the list of enemies, and when those threats are carried out, the trucks full of bombs and planes full of people are aimed at America, and American targets abroad.
With the exchange of terrorist attacks and military reprisals heading almost exclusively to and from America, it’s no surprise that Europe wants to keep out of the way of the traffic. Not faced so directly with terror, and less capable of dealing with it, Europe can afford the luxury of depending on ‘negotiation, diplomacy and commercial ties, on international law over the use of force, on seduction over coercion, on multilateralism over unilateralism’.
Who can blame the Europeans for turning to jaw-jaw ahead of war-war when the strategy has been so phenomenally successful in Europe for the last half century? Nations at each other’s throats for a thousand years are at peace now and, it’s not too mad to say, for ever.
Peace in Europe is, as Kagan says, a miracle and miracles tend to inspire faith. Couldn’t the rapprochement that worked in postwar Europe work in Iran and Iraq and, come to think of it, Israel and a new Palestine? The Europeans, proud of turning their swords to ploughshares, are frustrated by the new boss who refuses to melt down his weapons. What they forget is that they got a good deal of service out of those swords between 1939 and 1945, before they could take the risk of converting them into agricultural equipment. America is still reluctant to make the trip to the blacksmith’s and Kagan gives a brilliant explanation of why.
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