A friend sent me a pointer to this article in the Washington Post titled "New U.S. Doctrine Worries Europeans"

Some points I whole-heartedly agree with, for ex:

One senior European official said the new U.S. message to Europe was: "You have become irrelevant, and unless you do something dramatic to raise your defense expenditure, this is the end. The phone is not ringing."

and, in a twisted way, this Reagan reference -- but NOT in the way the author seems to intend:

Rallies by tens of thousands of anti-war demonstrators in London and Rome on Saturday were reminiscent of the protests of the early 1980s in favor of nuclear disarmament and against President Ronald Reagan's tough stance on the Soviet Union.

All I can say is which stance contributed more towards winning the Cold War --containment/appeasement or active engagement?

And the doozy in the article for me:

"There's a tone of contempt that people here deeply resent," said John Wyles, a journalist and policy strategist who works for GPlus Europe, a consulting firm.

Never mind the DECADES of anti-American sentiment streaming from Europe which we sorta "just took" in a "well, we'll take it under consideration" sort of way.   What these guys are reacting to is that now, all of a sudden, a bit of that contempt is starting to flow back.

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The good folks from Innocents Abroad, provide this commentary on the same Washington Post article strongly echo'ing my issues + a few in my previous post on the ICC:

...The point is, Europe is now trying to place the blame for a weakening of the international consensus wholly on the US. But Europe is the real source of the problem. And this should not surprise us, because Europe’s political elite, with its left-leaning bias, still regrets the fact that the US finally defeated the Soviet Union. There are many in the ranks of the European Union who were highly sympathetic to the Soviet experiment and are now looking to the EU as a means of extending that experiment in the world.

...But perhaps the most obvious point simply concerns my perennial theme: the nation. The EU is fundamentally hostile to the nation-state and is determined to subsume it under the EU bureaucracy. The problem here is that the nation is more than just an administrative structure, it is a profoundly political form. Equally important, it is the political form that has served and still serves as the vehicle for modern democracy. Today, Europe’s political class has little time for the nation-state, and believes that it can institute a form of democracy unhindered by national concerns: a democracy of humanity. The US, by contrast, remains a nation, ...

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