Another Article

[rfmcdonald]

A book review by Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books that touches upon the imminent breakdown of the transatlantic alliance. My favourite paragraph:

So please, let us stop venting our anxieties and insecurities in vituperative macho digs at Europe. Whatever his motives, French President Jacques Chirac has been voicing opinions shared by the overwhelming majority of Europeans and a sizable minority of Americans, not to speak of most of the rest of the world. To claim that he, and they, are either "with us or with the terrorists" —that disagreement is betrayal, dissent is treason—is, to say the least, willfully imprudent. Whether we need the Europeans more than they need us is an interesting question and one I shall take up in a subsequent essay, but the United States has everything to lose if Europeans fall to squabbling among themselves for American favors; our leaders should be ashamed of themselves for gleefully encouraging this. As Aznar, Blair, and their collaborators wrote in their controversial open letter of January 30, 2003, "Today more than ever, the transatlantic bond is a guarantee of our freedom." This is as true today as it was in 1947—and it cuts both ways.