Bringing the Troops Home

In the past few days, the Bush Administration has proposed one of the largest and most significant redeployments of the US military in the last 50 years. As would be expected, Sen. Kerry instantly and reflexively condemned removing troops from Europe and South Korea, despite the fact that he had called for removing troops from Korea twice this year. Charles Krauthammer's and Victor Hanson's columns are devoted to this issue. Krauthammer takes the Democrats to task for their illogical response to this proposal.

The Democrats' response is a classic demonstration of reactionary liberalism, the reflexive defense of the status quo long after its raison d'être has evaporated. John Kerry adviser Wesley Clark protested vigorously: "As we face a global war on terror with Al Qaeda active in more than 60 countries, now is not the time to pull-back our forces."

He cannot be serious. How exactly are the 72,000 American troops in Germany fighting al Qaeda? A lot of good they did in uncovering the al Qaeda cell in Hamburg that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks
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The New York Times editorial page offered this reason for maintaining the status quo: Otherwise, "the military will also lose the advantage that comes with giving large numbers of its men and women the experience of living in other cultures." Seventy-thousand GIs parked in Stuttgart, practicing their German and listening to Wagner. Finally, a military deployment the New York Times can support.

Hanson, meanwhile, looks somewhat optimistically at the effects that this redeployment will have on Europe.

The real significance, inasmuch as many airbases and depots will stay, is symbolic and psycho-sociological. Unwittingly, we had created an unhealthy passive-aggressiveness in Europe that clinicians might identify as a classic symptom of dependency. Europe — now larger and more populous than the United States — has reduced defense investment to subsidize a variety of social expenditures found nowhere in the world. So insular had its utopians become under the aegis of NATO's subsidized protection that it was increasingly convinced that the ubiquitous United States was the world's rogue nation, the last impediment to a 35-hour work week, cradle-to-grave subsidies, and wind power the world over.

A once-muscular and hallowed NATO has become a Potemkin alliance. The more jetting grandees praised the "historic role of the Trans-Atlantic partnership," the more its logic dictated that it would deploy only where there were no enemies of the West — parading and maneuvering where there were never dangers, bickering and recriminating about going where there always were.

Europe, as the perpetual adolescent, took potshots at its doting parent, always with the assumption that Dad would still hand over the keys, ignore the cheap sass, and "be there for me" if the car ended up in the ditch.
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Gut-check time is approaching. In places like Brussels, Berlin, and Oslo, in the next half-century citizens will slowly decide who wishes and does not wish to be an ally of the United States of America. Some will prefer opportunistic neutrality and thus go the Swedish and Swiss route. Others in their folly may ape French and Spanish bellicosity, and think isolating the U.S., selling weapons to the Middle East, or going on maneuvers with the Chinese might work. Still more may prefer to remain staunch friends like the Poles and Italians, realizing that, for all the leftist slurs about unilateralism, never in the history of civilization has such a powerful country as the United States sought advice and cooperation from weaker friends about the wisdom, efficacy, and consequences of using its vast military.

But this is no parlor game any more. Islamic fascism, scary former Soviet republics, rogue Middle Eastern nuclear states, an ever more proud and muscular China thirsty for oil — these and more specters are all out there and waiting, waiting, waiting...

Welcome back to the world, Europe.