Ian Boyne's article 'Obama as Europe's president' in The Sunday Gleaner offered a good analysis of differences between the world views of the United States and Europe and the consequent tensions in the NATO alliance. He quotes Robert Kagan, whom he regards as "the most intellectually formidable of the neoconservative voices in America" as saying:

"On the all-important question of power - the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power - American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation."

Kagan is correct - as far as this statement goes.

Where Kagan goes wrong is when he attributes this divergence to the military weakness of the Europeans. My view is that the divergence is caused by a certain immaturity in the American civilisation and its world view.

Paid the heavy prices

The Europeans have been through empire building and the consequent wars and they have paid the heavy prices for these adventures. The Europeans have witnessed the devastation of their continent by two world wars and the loss of populations of up to 13 per cent (Russia) and 10 per cent (Germany) in World War II alone. By comparison, the Americans lost two per cent of their population in their most bloody war, the civil war.

War is an expensive and destructive activity and mankind has to move away from it. It is instructive that the most war-averse US president of the last 50 years was Dwight Eisenhower who, as Supreme Allied Commander during WW2, saw first-hand the devastation of that war. After coming to power in 1953, he overruled many of his advisers, quickly ended the Korean War and did not start another for the rest of his presidency.

Military expenditures

The Americans have also worked themselves into a corner where they now need wars to support the military expenditures on which their economy now depends (the military industrial complex about which President Eisenhower warned). As the American conservative, Pat Buchanan stated in a recent article (Why Europe Won't Fight):

(If NATO should go out of business) "What would our foreign policy be? What would be the need for our vaunted military-industrial complex, all those carriers, subs, tanks, and thousands of fighter planes and scores of bombers?"

The Americans need to grow up and recognise that a "world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation" is mankind's only sustainable future.

I am, etc.,

HUGH P. SMYTHE

hsmythe@tstt.net.tt