Table Talk

John Vinocur has a worthwhile op-ed in the "International Herald Trib," looking ahead to Bush's upcoming Europe trip and what might or might not be on the table:

The United States can't be interested in consecrating a Europe that could well turn out to be a Righteous Power, instructing, pontificating and limiting its responsibilities to what Robert Zoellick, Condoleezza Rice's future deputy secretary of state, said a year ago was Europe's predilection for endless negotiations in excellent hotels in pleasant locations. This Righteous Power aspect (the phrase is that of a former Bush White House official), sometimes comparing the supposed new nobility of Europe's purpose with the Americans' hard-power clangor, is obvious in many European descriptions of life as the gentle superpower.

... At the moment, French generals are complaining about the non-pertinence in a terrorism-driven era of Chirac's plan to spend €8 billion (the equivalent of about one-tenth of France's debt) on new submarine-launched nuclear missiles with a range sufficient to hit China. And here, Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer returned from the tsunami area in Asia acknowledging that the Americans were "very much faster" getting aid to its victims because they had the proper transport aircraft - and that Germany might think of renting some as a stopgap in the future.