Topical Take - Column by Mark Steyn
ON THURSDAY, to celebrate America’s Independence Day, I celebrated America’s independence – not just from George III but from the rest of what passes for the civilised world. You only have to listen to a couple of minutes of any BBC current affairs show or glance at the front pages of any Continental newspaper (or even, on particularly bad days, read selected Telegraph columnists) to realise that America is the western world’s odd man out, and has been increasingly since September 11th.
Personally, I couldn’t be happier about it. I’m delighted the United States is “out of step” with, say, Belgium. Not because I’m Belgophobic. If the Belgians want to support the International Criminal Court, keep Saddam in office until his nuke arsenal is ready to fly, and continue subsidising Yasser Arafat’s pay-offs to the relicts of suicide bombers, that’s fine, go ahead, you’re an independent nation.
Unfortunately, on the European side, it’s the very concept of independence that’s at issue. The Rest Of The West disputes not America’s positions so much as their right to have positions. To do so is “unilateralist” – which is, when you think about it, just another word for “independent”. When your positions are as independent of the global consensus as those of Mr Bush then you must be – all together now – “arrogant”. Or so we are assured by such famously modest types as John Simpson, the liberator of Kabul, and his anonymous interviewee in these pages last week, the “leading British civil servant” who complained about the President’s “arrogance” while describing him as “a bear of very little brain”.
One sympathises with Sir Hugh Sless-Auld-ffarquahar, GCMG or whoever it was. Obviously, the Presidency of the United States has never attracted the same calibre of talent as the Deputy Permanent Under-Secretaryship of the Ministry of Car Parks. But I wonder if this is quite the way to ensure Britain’s voice is heard in Washington. In their haste to line up at the Eurinals and spray their contempt over Bush, the Smug-ffarquahars of the world have settled on the line that Mr Bush is presuming to “announce to the Palestinians who should and shouldn’t be their leader.” Actually, that’s not what the President said and, in fact, it’s the Euro-elite who tell people who they can vote for. In February, Louis Michel, the Belgian Foreign Minister, speaking on behalf of the EU, threatened sanctions against Italy if they voted for Umberto Bossi’s Northern League. Nothing “arrogant” about that, apparently.
In other words, the Michels and Pattens and Smug-Pratts are indulging in what the psychologists call displacement. Mr Bush is a polite, modest fellow. He speaks softly because he carries the world’s biggest stick. Conversely, the Europeans speak ever more shrilly because their twig is even tinier than Osama bin Laden’s notoriously small penis. If they wanted to, they could make the twig bigger, by spending more on defence. But they’ve made a conscious decision not to: the EU has embarked on a unique scheme for world domination dependent on hectoring the rest of the planet into submission. If Mr Bush is allowed to go his own way, the European strategy of noisy impotence – all mouth and no trousers – will be exposed as a sham.
But America is also an historical anomaly: the first non-imperial superpower. It has no colonies and no desire for any. For almost 60 years, it’s paid for the defence of the west virtually single-handed while creating and supporting structures – the UN, Nato, G8 – that exist only to allow its “allies” to pretend they’re on an equal footing. For “allies”, read dependencies: it’s because the US provides generous charity defence guarantees that the European governments have been free to fritter away their revenues on socialised health care and lavish welfare and all the other entitlements the Euro-progressives berate America for not providing for its own citizens. The non-arrogance of Washington is unparalleled in human history: it’s American muscle that tames Bosnia but it’s the risibly pompous Paddy Ashdown who gets to swank about the joint playing EU viceroy.
In Washington, meanwhile, cooler assessments are being made. America knows now what multilateralism boils down to: There’s no point pooling resources with people who have no resources to pool. There’s no point getting together and forming a whole that’s less than the sum of your individual part.
If that sounds “arrogant” to Europe, well, do something about it. You don’t want Bush to topple Saddam? Fine. Sign a mutual defence pact with Baghdad. You like Yasser that much? Send your mythical Rapid Reaction Force to guard Ramallah. That’s what real powers do. But sneering civil servants being patronising about colonials isn’t going to cut it. That argument was settled in 1776.
ON THURSDAY, to celebrate America’s Independence Day, I celebrated America’s independence – not just from George III but from the rest of what passes for the civilised world. You only have to listen to a couple of minutes of any BBC current affairs show or glance at the front pages of any Continental newspaper (or even, on particularly bad days, read selected Telegraph columnists) to realise that America is the western world’s odd man out, and has been increasingly since September 11th.
Personally, I couldn’t be happier about it. I’m delighted the United States is “out of step” with, say, Belgium. Not because I’m Belgophobic. If the Belgians want to support the International Criminal Court, keep Saddam in office until his nuke arsenal is ready to fly, and continue subsidising Yasser Arafat’s pay-offs to the relicts of suicide bombers, that’s fine, go ahead, you’re an independent nation.
Unfortunately, on the European side, it’s the very concept of independence that’s at issue. The Rest Of The West disputes not America’s positions so much as their right to have positions. To do so is “unilateralist” – which is, when you think about it, just another word for “independent”. When your positions are as independent of the global consensus as those of Mr Bush then you must be – all together now – “arrogant”. Or so we are assured by such famously modest types as John Simpson, the liberator of Kabul, and his anonymous interviewee in these pages last week, the “leading British civil servant” who complained about the President’s “arrogance” while describing him as “a bear of very little brain”.
One sympathises with Sir Hugh Sless-Auld-ffarquahar, GCMG or whoever it was. Obviously, the Presidency of the United States has never attracted the same calibre of talent as the Deputy Permanent Under-Secretaryship of the Ministry of Car Parks. But I wonder if this is quite the way to ensure Britain’s voice is heard in Washington. In their haste to line up at the Eurinals and spray their contempt over Bush, the Smug-ffarquahars of the world have settled on the line that Mr Bush is presuming to “announce to the Palestinians who should and shouldn’t be their leader.” Actually, that’s not what the President said and, in fact, it’s the Euro-elite who tell people who they can vote for. In February, Louis Michel, the Belgian Foreign Minister, speaking on behalf of the EU, threatened sanctions against Italy if they voted for Umberto Bossi’s Northern League. Nothing “arrogant” about that, apparently.
In other words, the Michels and Pattens and Smug-Pratts are indulging in what the psychologists call displacement. Mr Bush is a polite, modest fellow. He speaks softly because he carries the world’s biggest stick. Conversely, the Europeans speak ever more shrilly because their twig is even tinier than Osama bin Laden’s notoriously small penis. If they wanted to, they could make the twig bigger, by spending more on defence. But they’ve made a conscious decision not to: the EU has embarked on a unique scheme for world domination dependent on hectoring the rest of the planet into submission. If Mr Bush is allowed to go his own way, the European strategy of noisy impotence – all mouth and no trousers – will be exposed as a sham.
But America is also an historical anomaly: the first non-imperial superpower. It has no colonies and no desire for any. For almost 60 years, it’s paid for the defence of the west virtually single-handed while creating and supporting structures – the UN, Nato, G8 – that exist only to allow its “allies” to pretend they’re on an equal footing. For “allies”, read dependencies: it’s because the US provides generous charity defence guarantees that the European governments have been free to fritter away their revenues on socialised health care and lavish welfare and all the other entitlements the Euro-progressives berate America for not providing for its own citizens. The non-arrogance of Washington is unparalleled in human history: it’s American muscle that tames Bosnia but it’s the risibly pompous Paddy Ashdown who gets to swank about the joint playing EU viceroy.
In Washington, meanwhile, cooler assessments are being made. America knows now what multilateralism boils down to: There’s no point pooling resources with people who have no resources to pool. There’s no point getting together and forming a whole that’s less than the sum of your individual part.
If that sounds “arrogant” to Europe, well, do something about it. You don’t want Bush to topple Saddam? Fine. Sign a mutual defence pact with Baghdad. You like Yasser that much? Send your mythical Rapid Reaction Force to guard Ramallah. That’s what real powers do. But sneering civil servants being patronising about colonials isn’t going to cut it. That argument was settled in 1776.
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