The Impending Crisis

I am slowly coming to the conclusion that we are in the midst of a very far-reaching realignment of world politics comparable to that a century ago that marked America's ascendancy to world power status (1898-1918) or that of a century earlier (1789-1815) that marked the eclipse of France as a competitor to Britain on the world stage.

Although unfashionable to admit to publicly - colonialism is so un-PC nowadays - many among the elites of Europe (especially France and Belgium, but even Italy and Britain) remain incensed at the US for the loss of their colonial empires following WW2 and their consequent loss of global infuence. They attempted to compensate for their lack of real political and military power by clever diplomacy and their growing economic power as Europe recovered from the war (plus, in the case of Britain and France, the prestige associated with control of a handful of nuclear weapons) . Eventually the eurosclerosis of continental socialism caused them to fall farther and farther behind the US and to see that the new power economies of Asia would outstrip them as well.

In a curious way, the fall of the Soviet Union made things even worse for them since it made their role in NATO (a sort of consolation prize as Junior partners in the great game so galling that DeGaulle pulled France out of it in the '60s) a virtual irrelevance in the great power game of this brave new world. The search for a new role for NATO as a sort of regional proxy for the UN in the Balkans or as a means of tempering US influence in Afghanistan will not be enough to restore Europe to what she still sees as her rightful place at the center of the world. Thus, the need to reach out to Russia and China to create an effective counterweight to the US and its few remaining allies.