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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (39987)	8/26/2002 1:40:54 PM
From: Elsewhere	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

[Americans] have free will, [Europeans] don't. We think, they react. We make decisions, they are a preprogrammed bag of responses to our decisions. We bear ethical responsibility for what we decide to do; and we also bear ethical responsibility for what they do because it is wholly determined by what we decide to do. Wow, what a superhero this den Beste guy is. Really smart, brave, tough. dB doesn't even get his facts straight as I showed in a previous post. Why anybody cares about his opinion which is based on an erroneous foundation is beyond my comprehension. dB just creates a lot of dB (decibel, i.e. noise).

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (39987)	8/26/2002 2:55:36 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

You've mischaracterized Judt's argument (he doesn't argue that the Israelis must do everything, just that because of the power imbalance they must take the lead) but this post is really, I gather, about the US-European relations. And it's on my mind. I've just finished a very fast skim read of Joseph Nye's book, The Paradox of American Power. amazon.com His main point is that, in international relations, power is much more than military power. If one accepts the classic definition of power as the ability to get others to do what they would not otherwise have done, then that ability is linked to a great deal of resources, not simply military ones. The principle one he worked on, in the sections I read, was something like emulation (my term, not his). To the degree that populations in countries and, to engage in a bit of reificiation, states, wished to be like your country, you had more than a little ability to influence their behavior. If one just takes that small point away from the book, and there is, obviously, much more, then the Europeans might not retaliate as your guy suggests but simply not go along if the US attitude troubles them. If the Europeans (I'm not certain this is a good category but am leaving it alone for the purpose of this discussion) have little reason to go along with the US on proposition X, they might have in the past but, if they were convinced of US arrogance and go-it-alone atttitude, might just step aside. Over time that becomes a serious problem. On a great many issues but you can imagine on the "war on terrorism." I assume that much of their cooperation in it is dependent on a certain amount of good will toward the US. The other part of this equation that fascinates me is the assumption that, presented with a reasonable argument, the "Europeans" would not go along on Iraq. Since there are no reasonable arguments in the public domain at the moment, we haven't tested that yet.