The US Is Now All-In for European Nationalism
American leadership in the old continent.
Photographer: David Gannon/AFP via Getty Images
As I re-read the frightening section on Europe in the new National Security Strategy of the United States, I couldn’t help but recall, with a rueful chuckle, a book titled The Postnational Constellation, by one of Europe’s most influential contemporary philosophers, Juergen Habermas.
Published in German in 1998, that text now sounds like the echo of utopian shibboleths favored by the postwar elites of what an American defense secretary once derided as “Old Europe” (in this context, the six founding members of what later became the European Union). That post-national vision is now dead or dying, and America, Europe’s erstwhile protector and benefactor, is offering burial services.