It is fair to say that the conservative right, including most of the insiders in the Bush White House, loathe the “Brussels” mentality. There is the perception that the EU is soft, almost feminine in character, and unable and unwilling to fight for itself. Whenever the conversation turns to geopolitics in Washington, invariably the comment is made that Brussels whines about U.S. strong-arm tactics and bullying behavior but appears quite comfortable letting us sacrifice our young men and women in uniform around the world to protect European security interests. Some say that the problem is that with the end of the Cold War, American and European interests have begun to diverge. The struggle to defend the West against Soviet aggression united our peoples in common cause for more than half a century. The fall of the Soviet Empire makes the American-European bond less salient. Moreover, now that the European Union rivals the U.S. in raw economic power, it’s understandable, argue “the realists,”
