Sunday, August 22, 2004

Watch Europe Carefully

Historian Victor Davis Hanson favors American troop reductions in Europe, but warily:

"Anyone old enough to have known the Wehrmacht in the past and the intra-European hounding that goes on in the present does not believe that we are at the end of history — at least not until the nature of man changes and national character is revealed as a mere construct. Germany is united again, but an economic colossus stalled, as its politicians silently gnash about "unfairness" in the EU, and as German Euros go east and south to subsidize "others." Germany, in fact, is in flux, a period of shake-out not seen since the late 1920s, in which the reaction to a failed socialist-pacifist agenda will one day either bring pro-American reform or unpredictable fury, in any direction"