Letters

National Interest, The, Fall, 2000

It may be that "most Europeans do not partake of anti-Americanism as the impulse for unity", but a great many euro-integrationist policymakers do. While I agree that Europe's potential to be a rival to the United States is limited, it will not be for lack of effort from many of its leaders. The surest antidote to that is to detach Britain in advance from any such European effort and keep it close to the United States.

Brzezinski is doubtless correct that the enlargement of Europe will make integration more difficult, but the protectionist forces in France and Germany are going to make an extension of the EU into Eastem Europe practically impossible. NAFTA should be renamed and extended into Eastern Europe and appropriate parts of the Middle East as well as Latin America and Australasia. Since I don't expect the enlargement of the EU to take place, my disagreement with the concept of a joint enlargement with NATO is slightly academic, but Brzezinski and others should be extremely cautious about attempting to extend the concept that an attack upon one is an attack upon all beyond Poland. In practice, virtually all of the deterrent credibility of NATO rests in the military power of the United States, and convincing the American public that it should consider an attack upon Riga, Kiev or Astana as equivalent to an attack on New York, Chicago or Los Angeles is a dubious strategic formulation and is going to be a very hard sell .

Of course the Russians must be treated respectfully and full admission to the West must be sincerely proffered to them. We must encourage the Western emulators over the xenophobic nativists in Russia. I also agree that these minor European steps toward improved self-defense should be encouraged. However, Brzezinski's phrase "buoyed by the modest success of the euro" is astonishing. The euro has been a fiasco and will continue to be so until France and Germany cease to be socialist countries virtually incapable of creating jobs or generating investment.

Extreme caution should be shown about anything emanating from Jacques Attali. Apart from his questionable administrative practices, he is a foaming-at-the-mouth anti-American who predicted that in thirty years or so the United States would have no function except the exportation of grain to Europe, like Algeria during the Roman Empire. Such a man should not be so swiftly rehabilitated by being cited in a learned publication by so eminent a person as Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Daniel Vernet's comment was the usual Le Monde self-pity about the injustice of the correlation of forces between Europe and the United States. It was surprising that so sensible a man as Christoph Bertram would make the silly claim of American "irritation over Europe's new-found confidence" and assert that Europe is getting stronger and America weaker when the reverse is true. Timothy Garton Ash was true to his customary standard of being nervous, well intentioned and more or less reasonable.

CONRAD BLACK

Chairman, Hollinger International, Inc.