In college, have you ever been in a group project where you were the only one putting in any effort? When the time came to assemble the final paper, did your fellow group members send you badly written or plagiarized chunks of text? Was their lack of effort rewarded because, in the group evaluation, it was your one opinion against their five opinions? Did the group get an A because they got a free ride in your wake? Or, if you got a B, did they think you dropped the ball? This is the relationship of the United States and Europe. European countries are like C students, united in their belief that the US is wrecking the curve.
The US has saved Europe three times in the last hundred years: twice from German militarism and once from Bolshevist Communism. Talk to most Europeans and you'll immediately hear that the US didn't enter the world wars soon enough and that we were superfluous in the Cold War; the Soviet Union never really wanted to take over Western Europe. Or that Communism would've fallen apart soon enough on its own. Or that it wasn't really that bad. Or that putting military bases and nuclear weapons in Western Europe was just not nice.
Today, American warships protect trade routes around the world. The prospect of American intervention has kept Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan from being invaded for decades. Europe benefits from this, yet most Europeans criticize us for trying to police the world. They are shameless free riders but enjoy looking down on us for doing their dirty work.
Europe has a simple response to genocide: let it happen. Examples? The Armenians in Turkey, the Jews in Germany, Bosnian Muslims in the former Yugoslavia, the Tutsis in Rwanda. Three of them happened in Europe and Rwanda's ethnic strife is partly a consequence of the racial hierarchy supported by colonial powers. In fairness, genocide does permanently solve the problem of ethnic conflict. But, more importantly, no Europeans have to feel like they are using force to solve problems. After all, violence never solves problems; only watching people get butchered and occasionally issuing statements of protest can solve problems.
The US isn't perfect, not by a long shot, and has also too often been inactive unless its commercial interests were threatened. Still, Europe remains the gold standard for valuing words over action. Europeans should be honest enough to admit that people outside their country just don't matter that much to them; it is self-evidently true. But then, they would also be admitting that they're no better than Americans and perhaps a little worse. In order to maintain their vision of themselves as morally superior, they might even have to stop criticizing Americans for not knowing foreign languages and appreciating their football and start taking a genuine interest in the world beyond their borders.
Then again, why should they? Let the US handle it.
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