Some interesting statistics:-
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2 June 2004
The Decline of the West
By Gwynne Dyer
All the countries whose troops fought in Normandy sixty years ago
-- the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, and Poland -- are
sending their leaders there on 6 June for the last big commemoration of
D-Day. The soldiers who fought there and survived are entering their
eighties now, and not many will be left in another decade. But it feels
like the last time for a lot of other things as well.
The D-Day landings were the biggest amphibious operation in
history, but the battle for Normandy was not all that big by 1944
standards. Total losses for the Western allies down to the break-out from
Normandy were 32,807 killed, while the simultaneous Soviet offensive in
Belorussia on the eastern front cost about 250,000 Soviet lives. And
despite the film 'Saving Private Ryan', less than a third of the Allied
dead in Normandy were Americans.
It was British and Canadian troops who fought their way through a
German killing zone twenty miles (30 km.) deep, drawing German resources to
the east of the beach-head so that General Patton's American tanks could
break out from the western end and race for Paris. 17,769 British and
5,002 Canadian soldiers (and 650 Free Poles) died in the Normandy battle,
compared to 9,386 Americans.
Yet Normandy really was an American battle above all, and an
important one. The war against Hitler was already won by June, 1944: the
Soviet army was less than a year away from entering Berlin. The D-Day
landings were really about where the Soviet army would stop, and their
success meant that the armistice line would be drawn down the middle of
Germany, not at the English Chanel. The result was a half-century in which
the United States and western Europe became so deeply entwined that people
talked about 'the West' as if it were a permanent political phenomenon. It
isn't.
There never was a West' politically before 1945: just countries
inhabited mostly by people of European descent, sharing the same broad
cultural and religious heritage, who fought one another regularly and built
competing empires around the planet. After 1945, however, the threat of
Soviet troops permanently stationed in the middle of Germany made all the
Western European powers implore America to stay in the continent militarily
-- and Washington, which had identified the Soviet Union as its main
post-war rival for global power, was ready to comply.
The creation of the NATO alliance in 1949 sealed the deal: the
interests of Western Europe and the United States were now the same, and so
'The West' (aka the 'Free World') was born. The alliance thrived for almost
half a century, but it was bound to go into a slow decline once its reason
for being, the Soviet threat, ceased to exist at the beginning of the
1990s.
Strategic concerns diverged: official Washington sees China as a
potential challenge to America's status as sole superpower, Europeans see
it mainly as a trading partner. Social and political values were already
far apart, and getting further: Europeans tend to see Americans as
religious and ideological zealots living in a raw capitalist society where
the poorest tenth might as well be in the third world; Americans see
Europeans as feckless, free-loading socialists who don't understand that
the world is a dangerous place.
Nine-eleven didn't cause this rift, but it added another layer:
Europeans see terrorism as a long-term problem that can do considerable
damage and must be contained; Americans (or at least those who set the
terms of the public debate) see it as an apocalyptic threat that must be
destroyed at any cost. This mind-set fed the Bush administration's
instinctive unilateralism and provided a saleable political rationale for
the neo-conservatives' project of pax americana'. The resulting wars have
accomplished in three years what might otherwise have taken fifteen: the
Western alliance has been gutted, although the shell remains.
Exactly one year ago Condoleezza Rice, US National Security
Adviser, mournfully told journalists at the G-8 summit how disappointed she
was with the French, the Germans and even the Canadians: "There were times
when it appeared that American power was seen to be more dangerous than
Saddam Hussein. I'll just put it very bluntly. We just don't understand
it." Maybe she understands it a bit better now, but probably not.
No matter. The West, as a coherent political and military
influence in the world, is breaking apart and this is not necessarily a
tragedy. The unique and temporary circumstances that summoned it into
existence have vanished, and so it was bound to follow. It fulfilled a
useful role when Soviet power had to be contained and when all the large
democratic states in the world, apart from India and Japan, were on the
western and eastern shores of the North Atlantic. The world isn't like
that any more.
The world is a far safer and better place than in the depths of the
Cold War, and democracies are now in the majority. If democratic values
need to be defended, then Brazil, South Africa, India, Indonesia and South
Korea need to be involved just as much as the 'Atlantic' democracies, and
the appropriate forum to do it in is not the moribund NATO alliance but the
United Nations. Which is, by no coincidence at all, the institution that
the governments who sent those young men charging up the Normandy beaches
in 1944 were designing even as their soldiers died.
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