https://quillette.com/2020/09/03/a-europe-divided-and-unfree/
Since the end of the Cold War, Europe has believed it is more resilient than it is, and less vulnerable. It has indulged the conceit that it will never again find itself at daggers drawn with its Russian neighbor. In the European imagination, post-communist Russia posed no threat, a convenient interpretation that remained intact even after the rise of the KGB’s mafia state and the projection of Moscow’s imperial designs on its “near abroad.” At the 2007 Munich Security Conference, Vladimir Putin spoke of a “unipolar world”—meaning one dominated by the United States—that would prove “pernicious not only for all those within this system but also for the sovereign itself.” America’s “hyper use of force,” declared the Russian president, was “plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts.”
At the time, with an unpopular Republican president at the helm in Washington—unpopular, that is, in Europe, though also in America—Europeans extended a generous reception to Putin’s remarks. Many Europeans retained their traditional skepticism of American power and remained committed to the idea of a “different” European foreign policy, though few bothered to explain what that might entail. Sovereignty was the all-consuming interest in Europe in those days, and with US soldiers garrisoned en masse across the broader Middle East, European officials detected more danger in American unilateralism than unchecked jihadism, let alone Russian revanchism. More than a decade later—after Russian aggression dismembered Georgia and Ukraine, and a bloody foray into the Levant, and now the prospect of Russian aid for the Belarusian dictatorship—they might wish to reconsider.
Of course, Europe was then and is now highly skeptical of any use of force as well as the notion of permanent conflict. It is no longer the Europe of Napoleon and Bismarck, much less that of Plato and Thucydides. Instead, as Robert Kagan pointed out in his ingenious 2003 work Of Paradise and Power, it is the Europe of Immanuel Kant. Traumatized by the hideous experiences of the 20th century, Europeans have adopted a postmodern and posthistorical view that military force is unnecessary—immoral, even—in a world where problems ought to be resolved through the ambit of law. Thus Europe has tended to look on America’s abidingly muscular approach in world affairs with bitter incomprehension. Until very recently, Americans have hailed from Mars while Europeans—at least since launching the European Union—have resided on Venus.
