Europe's Gamble

Robert Kagan -- always worth the read -- ponders The Crisis of Legitimacy: America and the World. Some highlights:

Contrary to much mythologizing on both sides of the Atlantic these days, the foundations of U.S. legitimacy during the Cold War had little to do with the fact that the United States helped create the UN or faithfully abided by the precepts of international law laid out in the organization's charter. Rather, U.S. legitimacy among Europeans rested on three pillars, all based on the existence of the Soviet communist empire. The sturdiest pillar was Europe 's perception that the Soviet Union posed a strategic threat to the West -- a reality made manifest by hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops parked in the center of Europe -- and its understanding that only Washington possessed the power to deter Moscow . Europeans also perceived the Soviet Union as a common ideological threat. The United States prided itself on being the "leader of the free world," and most Europeans agreed. Finally, Cold War bipolarity conferred what might be called "structural legitimacy" on the United States . The two superpowers' roughly equal strength meant that U.S. might, although vast, was kept in check. This is not to say that Europeans welcomed Soviet military power on the continent, but many implicitly understood that the existence of Soviet conventional and nuclear power acted as a restraint on Washington . Charles de Gaulle's France , Willy Brandt's Germany , and other states relished the small measure of independence from U.S. dominance that the superpower balance gave them.

When the Cold War ended, the pillars of U.S. legitimacy collapsed along with the Berlin Wall and Lenin's statues. There has been little to replace them with since. Radical, militant Islamism, however potent when manifested as terrorism, has not replaced communism as an ideological threat to Western liberal democracy. Nor have the more diffuse and opaque threats of the post-Cold War era replaced the massive Soviet threat as a source of legitimacy for U.S. power. Most Europeans never fully shared Washington 's concerns about weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq , Iran , and North Korea -- not during the Clinton administration, and not since. Nor do they share its post-September 11 alarm over the possible nexus between WMD and international terrorism. Rightly or wrongly, Europeans do not believe that those weapons will be aimed at them. To the extent that they do worry, moreover, most Europeans do not look to the United States to protect them anymore. They live in their geopolitical paradise, without fear of the jungles beyond. They no longer welcome those who guard the gates. Instead, they ask, Who will guard the guards?

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In the end, however, Europeans have not sought to counter U.S. hegemony in the usual, power-oriented fashion, because they do not find U.S. hegemony threatening in the traditional power-oriented way. Not all global hegemons are equally frightening. U.S. power, as Europeans well know, does not imperil Europe 's security or even its autonomy. Europeans do not fear that the United States will seek to control them; they fear that they have lost control over the United States and, by extension, over the direction of world affairs.

If the United States is suffering a crisis of legitimacy, then, it is in large part because Europe wants to regain some measure of control over Washington 's behavior. The vast majority of Europeans objected to the U.S. invasion of Iraq not simply because they opposed the war. They objected also because U.S. willingness to go to war without the Security Council's approval -- that is, without Europe 's approval -- challenged both Europe 's world view and its ability to exercise even a modicum of influence in the new unipolar system.

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To address today's global dangers, Americans will need the legitimacy that Europe can provide, but Europeans may well fail to grant it. In their effort to constrain the superpower, they might lose sight of the mounting dangers in the world, which are far greater than those posed by the United States . Out of nervousness about unipolarity, they might underestimate the dangers of a multipolar system in which nonliberal and nondemocratic powers would come to outweigh Europe . Out of passion for the international legal order, they might forget the other liberal principles that have made postmodern Europe what it is today. Europeans might succeed in debilitating the United States this way. But since they have no intention of supplementing its power with their own, in doing so they would only succeed in weakening the overall power that the liberal democratic world can wield in its defense -- and in defense of liberalism itself.

Right now, many Europeans are betting that the risks posed by the "axis of evil," from terrorism to tyrants, will never be as great as the risk posed by the American leviathan unbound. Perhaps it is in the nature of a postmodern Europe to make such a judgment. But now may be the time for the wisest heads in Europe , including those living in the birthplace of Pascal, to ask themselves what will result if that wager proves wrong.