Europe's Choice

The Europeans have made their choice for President of the United States. In a poll that came out today, 8 out of 10 Germans would vote for Kerry for President. The rest of Europe, or at least "Old Europe" seems similarly inclined. Victor Hanson takes a look at Europe's involvement in this election and its effects on both it, and them.

Europeans casually talk of the Kerry rapprochement to come, as if in their magnanimity they have given Americans one last chance to return to sobriety. They exude a bold confidence, even to strangers, that the brightened prospects of the Democratic challenger are proof that America has seen the European light and therefore, of course, Mr. Kerry must win. Never has Europe been so emotionally involved in an American election -- and never to their peril have they read America so wrong.

Michael Moore is offered up as proof of grassroots American unhappiness with the president. Was he not perched in an exalted seat at the Democratic convention? Completely lost on Europeans is that Mr. Moore, for all his notoriety, is still a cult figure. As the list of cinematic distortions in his recent film grows, "Fahrenheit 9/11" increasingly will be relegated to the genre of crass propaganda once mastered by the far more gifted Leni Riefenstahl in her similarly slanted "political documentary," "Triumph of Will."
[...]
Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira Heinz Kerry is a big hit in Europe, as if a native of colonial Mozambique has unique insight into the pathologies of the American experience. But fairly or unfairly, this force-multiplier of her husband's Europeanism is beginning to grate like some character out of a Henry James novel -- reflecting unease with the predictable mixture of acquired fortune, haute culture and aristocratic disdain.

As many commentators have written, much of the existing policy would change very little in a Kerry Administration - Kyoto would remain unsigned, as would the ICC, and no matter what Kerry says about withdrawing troops from Iraq it would be virtually impossible to do that. So why do they like Kerry so much, and hate Bush so much? I think it is more than the simple explanation of Bush is a "cowboy" and Kerry is a sophisticate. It is because Bush showed the Europeans that their system - their way of doing things - doesn't work. After 50 years of living under a US defense umbrella, the Europeans convinced themselves that force was no longer necessary. The attacks of September 11, and the US response showed that soft power was not enough; that there were evil people who would not live under the "rule of law", and who needed convincing in other ways - the very ways that Europeans lacked and therefore rejected.

So now, they are left supporting a candidate who promises a return to the old ways - the ways of September 10th. And in doing so could actually harm themselves more.

The election of John Kerry would probably not reverse either the current policy in Iraq or the ongoing reappraisal of foreign relations. The European fixation with the upcoming election and rabid hatred of George Bush instead may backfire in the U.S.; indeed, even now European animus acerbates growing unease with what Americans read and see abroad. As never before the Europeans have unabashedly called for the defeat of an incumbent American president in the next election.

They better hope that George Bush loses.