Thursday, August 30, 2007

"Americans are from Mars, and Europeans are from Venus" - IHT

The ANNOTICO Report

 

Journalist Paul Kennedy while vacationing in Spello, Umbria, mused about the contrasts between America and Europe  with regard to matters of war and peace. 

 

Kennedy felt that different political cultures and historical experiences may account for the two radically opposed attitudes toward conflict in today's world. He surmised that the Europeans, had grown tired of war and wished simply to enjoy the blessings of peace.

 

By contrast, Americans he felt that so long as evil and threats existed in the world, it was necessary to counter them, even in distant theaters of conflict.

 

[RAA NOTE: What about the "evils" of poverty, homelessness, and 37th ranking of health care, right here at home????

 

Re; "Even in distant theaters"  But isn't that the best place to have wars, so that our peaceful domesticity is not disrupted????

 

Besides, This myth of countering evils in the world is perpetuated by the Oligarchy as a "cover" for Imperialistic and Colonialistic adventures to benefit Corporations.  How else can you explain our "selective" pursuit of  Tyrants?

 

It would be unwise to ignore the fact that Europe is rather "mature" having been civilized for two millennium, while the US as even a 48 state country is really only a hundred years old. Oklahoma was admitted in 1907 as the 46th state. New Mexico and Arizona were admitted in 1912, as the 47th and 48th. We are literally "new kids" on the block. We still have a sort of "cowboy" mentality.

 

America has Not had the "benefit" of TWO World Wars pouring destruction and misery across your country, to take the "glamour" out of war. All our Wars after 1812 have been fought "over there" !!!!  ]

 

Our Twin Worlds of Mars and Venus

 

International Herald Tribune - France

By Paul Kennedy
Tribune Media Services

New Haven, Connecticut:

Thursday, August 30, 2007

I do not think I knew the full meaning of the word "surreal" until I took my family for a vacation in the idyllic Italian hill town of Spello, Umbria, this summer.

We lived inside the medieval walls and spent much of the time just sitting on our balcony or in terraced cafis, planning the next meal. Church bells rang frequently, men sat and played cards, old women hobbled up the street carrying the daily groceries, little kids played under the chestnut trees. It was easy to fit into this unhurried, peaceful way of life.

Every morning, however, when I returned from the store with a copy of the International Herald Tribune and sat under those chestnut trees reading it, the surreal feelings returned.

Photos of bombed-out buses in Baghdad and fenced-in areas of Gaza were joined by reports of Russian posturing under the polar ice cap, the U.S. Congress uncritically rubber-stamping enormous defense expenditures and earnest op-eds about whether the U.S. armed forces were or were not winning their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Had a Martian joined me in Spello, it would have been difficult to convince him that all this was happening on the same Planet Earth.

But it is. And what really intrigues me are the contrasts across the North Atlantic with regard to matters of war and peace - remarkable differences that cannot be explained (as one explains many things) by economics or social structures. There simply is no great socioeconomic gap between Romano Prodi's Italy and George W. Bush's America.

Instead, as the noted American foreign-affairs commentator Robert Kagan argued a few years ago in his celebrated "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus" formula, different political cultures and historical experiences may account for the two radically opposed attitudes toward conflict in today's world. The Europeans, Kagan suggested in his 2002 article, had grown tired of war and wished simply to enjoy the blessings of peace. By contrast, Americans felt that so long as evil and threats existed in the world, it was necessary to counter them, even in distant theaters of conflict.

Consequently, Europeans spent little on armaments and could do little militarily, whereas Americans spent lots on their Army, Navy and Air Force and did a lot of fighting.

Of course there are many exceptions to the Venus-Mars thesis. The British Army, with thousands of troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan and on UN peacekeeping missions, would resent the characterization; many other EU countries (Poland, France, Germany, Italy) have military forces deployed overseas.

Moreover, tens of millions of Americans are strongly opposed to the Bush administration's "forward" policies in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, and disturbed by the fact that their republic, created in rebellion against unchecked military and imperial power, nowadays spends half of the entire world's defense budget, largely in pursuit of dragons abroad.

Thus the differences between America and Europe in this matter are not starkly black and white, but of various shades of gray. Yet only someone in denial of reality would say that Kagan was completely wrong. In my own view, he is more right than wrong, and Spello reinforced that feeling.

This is a part of the world that has known 2,500 years of bloody, gruesome warfare, right through the 20th century. (Memorials in Spello record the names of 101 men who fell in the First World War, 38 who were killed in World War II and six who died in the 1944 Partisan uprising.)

No doubt the people of Umbria - and Provence, and Saxony - would fight bravely in self-defense. But there is no desire to "stand tall" and pursue missions impossible across the globe.

Kagan's view is that getting upset about this discrepancy is futile: It exists. That may be so, but it is hard not to worry about the possibilities of further long-term "drift," with the trans-Atlantic gap continuing to widen even after George W. Bush.

A world in which Europeans focus on their internal integration while Americans only trust their own resources might be fine if no third parties existed, if they alone inhabited this planet.

In fact, Europe and America contain less than one-fifth of our human population. They also have to share the earth with a cynical Russia, a fast-rising India and China, a penurious Africa, a troubled Latin America, a volatile Middle East, aspiring nuclear states and terrorist organizations bent upon disruption.

As I left Spello, I felt a fondness for its gentler way of life together with a certain unease at returning to the confused, angry American domestic debate about whether and when to get out of Iraq, and about the obsession with the war on terror.

Yet admiration for the Umbrian option does not blind me to the recognition that there exist great challenges to peace-loving peoples, threats we would ignore at our peril. And my dislike of the White House's and Congress' obsessions with military force does not make me despair that future foreign policies will never come along that are more politic and diplomatic, offer a better grand strategy for the West, and thus also help to reduce that Mars-Venus gap.

In sum, it doesn't make sense to deny Kagan's basic point. But it may also be unwise to accept this as an unalterable fact, thus letting the trans-Atlantic drift continue. Policymakers and opinion-formers on both sides have, in my view, a strong secular interest in keeping the North Atlantic alliance vibrant, especially in an era of great international uncertainties.

Despite the many obvious, visual, political and daily-life differences between them, the folks living in Spello and the folks living, say, around the U.S. military base of Fort Bragg in North Carolina still have an awful lot in common. Why walk away from a good thing?

Paul Kennedy is director of International Security Studies at Yale University. Distributed by Tribune Media Services.

 

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