The Hour of Europe - by Anne Applebaum
Way back in 1991, when an otherwise forgettable foreign minister of Luxembourg infamously pronounced that sentence, it seemed to portend great things. "This is the hour of Europe": That meant that in the post-Cold War world, Europeans, not Americans, would resolve the conflicts that were about to become the Bosnian war, and maybe a lot of other things, too. Yet he was wrong. Those Balkan conflicts were eventually "resolved," up to a point, not by Europe but by the United States and NATO. European influence in Washington dwindled -- and then dwindled further during the Bush administration, which mostly treated the very idea of "Europe" as a kind of pointless distraction.
As the election draws closer, the anxiety will grow. In a strange sense, Bush's catastrophic diplomacy was a gift to Europe's politicians. "Bush allowed them to explain away radical Islam as an understandable, even legitimate, response to the hypocrisies and iniquities of American policy," one British columnist wrote this week. Bush also allowed them to blame American "unilateralism" for their own lack of initiative, to use bad American diplomacy as an excuse for doing nothing.
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