Explaining Differences in U.S. and European Views

In recent history, no world even has highlighted the differnces between the U.S. and Europe, more than the conflict in Iraq.

There is a great essay, by Robert Kagan, on this topic that explains why. This is one of the most lucid rational explanations I have heard. It certainly goes way beyond the analysis presented in the non-print media, the web and to a large degree print media.

This essay begin with this nugget.

"It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world. On the all-important question of power -- the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power -- American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Kant's "Perpetual Peace." The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might. That is why on major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus: They agree on little and understand one another less and less."

BTW, I belive the U.S. occupies a much more rational world view, IMHO. The Europeans are deluded by not having to defend their own continent. The world system cannot be safegaurded by treaties and commercial obligations, not when large groups or people are more interested in forcibly imposing their religious views on others or righting historical wrongs.