Having just discovered Parapundit today, I'm soaking in all their stuff and planting them squarely in my list of favorite Blogs.    This is one of the BEST, most succinctly articulate descriptions of (one of the) root causes of the US/Euro rift:

The biggest cause of the frictions between Europe and America is that many European intellectuals are unwilling to accept that the bulk of the rest of the world is a Hobbesian jungle that can't be tamed by international institutions and treaties. The Hobbesian jungle is in no way ready to engage in anything resembling the supranational institution building and the constraints on national entities that are characteristic of the EU. The EU is not a model for how to solve the political problems of the world. The conditions that made the EU possible (including, among others, a grinding defeat of Germany, lengthy partition, and a continued US military presence) are absent in the rest of world.