It looks like the Dems have backed the WRONG ideological horse for 2008. Read the whole article, I am calling out a few choice paragraphs.
If Europe is swinging more pro-America, then the Dems whole schtick of "anti-Bush, the war is lost, America is a pariah" goes the way of the baby buggy and spittoon. And they will end up looking the fools for it.
If France elects Nicolas Sarkozy, watch for the tide to turn our way. Germany already tossed out Schroeder.
One signal of new realism in Europe is a public call by the German news magazine Der Spiegel to tone down the over-the-top anti-American cat-calling that has obsessed the German press in recent years. That was followed by two major puff-pieces for Chancellor Merkel's effort to reconnect with America.
In France, Nicolas Sarkozy has started what he hopes to be his final sprint to the Presidency by criticizing the "1968 generation," which includes all the recent leaders of the EuroLeft. "1968" refers to the year of student rebellion that brought people like Schroeder and Joschka Fischer to power, just as in the United States the Sixties Left launched Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Both Merkel and Sarkozy are "welfare-state conservatives" rather than ideologically pure socialists. They can see clearly the suicidal limits of the multiculti Left, particularly its support for uncontrollable millions of anti-Western migrants, fresh dependent voters for the welfare state. They also see the looming fiscal limits of the social welfare state, as the Euro Boomer generation retires while a host of poorer nations are joining the European Union. Those nations cannot get the massive handouts that were routinely channeled to France. The money isn't there. The word "cynical" and "immoral" were used by Sarkozy recently to describe the Boomer Left. Europe's vacation from reality is reaching its natural limits, and public opinion is sobering up fast.
That does not mean that present US policy is going to work without course adjustments. The Iraq War may turn out to be much like the Korean War, a test of American resolve, and also of the limits of American commitment to an important but remote war. At the end of the Korean War, American forces withdrew from North Korea but not from the South. Because of that American willingness to hold firm, South Korea grew into a formidable bulwark against Asian Communist expansion, as it remains to this day. China's new prosperity can be attributed to the democratic capitalist successes of South Korea, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan, all of them dependent upon American support. We cannot predict the outcome in Iraq, but somewhere in the Middle East a defensible line will emerge against jihadist Iran, and perhaps against newer threats.
Europe imports far too much oil from the Gulf to evade the obvious: A vital need for a renewed alliance with the United States against totalitarian aggressors with strategic weapons.
Call it Cold War Two --- if we are lucky and keep our wits. But we must expect continental Europe to play a more active and constructive role for its own defense than it did in the last sixty years.
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