The sick man is Europe

William Drozdiak is a former Washington Post foreign correspondent and the executive director of the German Marshall Fund’s Transatlantic Center in Brussels. In today’s Post, he writes, “Now that Spaniards — and in some sense all Europeans — have suffered their own mass terror tragedy, there should be a sufficient degree of mutual empathy for the United States and Europe to realize that they need to draw on each other’s strengths in order to compensate for their respective weaknesses in the struggle against global terror networks.”
However, Drodziak’s article demonstrates only European, not American, weaknesses when it comes to fighting terrorism. Drozdiak shows the shocking failure of European governments to engage in even basic sharing of intelligence. He finds that “the intensity of national rivalries and the anemic defense budgets make prospects for a European homeland security strategy rather dubious. . .And many voters will not accept a massive shift in resources from generous social welfare programs to budgets for military and security concerns.” In other words, the former Western Europe lacks the will to defend itself from terrorism. Which is why the Europeans propose to “combat” terrorism on the cheap by addressing its “root causes” through diplomacy, which mostly translates into beating up on Israel. Is this the Euoprean “strength” that Drodziak think the U.S. should draw upon?

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses