the Americans see the Europeans trying to exercise a veto on the sovereign rights of American self-defense
It is rather difficult to include the US action in Iraq under the "self-defense" umbrella. There was not much evidence of imminent threat.
If the Europeans do seriously begin to take their policies in a rival direction, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, as it might lessen the unhealthy dependence of Europe on America for defense.
Defense against what? What credible military threat does Europe face that would make them dependent on the US for their defense? Europe lacks the capacity to project power, but that's offense, not defense.
There is one thing that the Europeans understand that the administration in Washington can't seem to grasp: the world, including the US, has to have a credible multilateral dispute resolution system. Not a perfect one, that's impossible, but something credible. America simply cannot maintain order in the world alone: an American presence in some areas is unnecessarily provocative, American forces are intolerably expensive to deploy, and America will not act in cases where no major national interest is at stake.
If we are going to argue that the UN cannot be made to work, we have to propose something that can work, and it has to be something that is not controlled exclusively by the US. A unipolar power structure is inherently unstable, and in the long term is in nobody's interest, including ours. |
