FC:
I am ambivalent about the Suez Crisis. I think Eisenhower could have been more nuanced in his diplomacy. The problem the United States faced was that it didn’t want to get dragged into a war with the Soviet Union over the issue, a war that would have been fought on German soil. If there were a better means for the United States to express displeasure with British and French actions while avoiding getting sucked into a war with the Soviet Union, I would like to know. Please note that the Suez War was if anything more unpopular in Germany than the Iraq War is today. British and Commonwealth public opinion hardly reflected the sentiments of the Khaki Election. So, as clumsy as his diplomacy may have been, President Eisenhower was hardly alone in his opinions.
As French public opinion was far more solidly behind defeating Nasser, France has much more to complain about than Britain concerning Eisenhower’s diplomacy. There is good reason to believe that the Suez Crisis was a contributing factor leading Charles de Gaulle to move France out of NATO a decade later. I will credit him with this much – France left NATO honestly. And remember, American soldiers did leave France.
The United Kingdom, and for that matter any other European country, is welcome to leave NATO. The United States is not Athens and NATO is not the Delian League. If Spaniards truly believe the Spanish Socialist Party’s calumnies against the United States proclaiming Spain’s alliance with America as responsible for the March 11 attacks, Spain is welcome to leave NATO instead of proclaiming an alliance it doesn’t really believe in.
European polemic aside, there are things most Americans would rather do than fight wars. Americans have good reason to be annoyed by how the British Foreign Office sent us a pack of lies about bogus atrocities in Belgium during World War I. Alliances are a two-way street, and altogether too many European statesmen have looked at Americans as worthy of nothing other than cannon fodder in European wars for European interests and European reasons. At present, it is easy for an American to gain the impression that European public opinion doesn’t give a damn about defending America at all and merely regarded Americans as expendable commodities during the wars of the twentieth century.
I don’t easily forget how European statesmen talked about how important it was for American soldiers to die first in any Soviet attack on Western Europe. I don’t easily forget how many Europeans are more concerned about an “American overreaction” to the September 11 attacks than they are about actually lifting a finger to help Americans in this war.
Alliances are supposed to be a two-way street. Yet much of what I see from Europe is an intense desire to scold America for every sin in the book while systematically seeking to destroy the American economy through a combination of strategic subsidies and overloading the American taxpayer with defense responsibilities for Europe that have little to do with defending America, all the while secretly seeking to arm the Iranians and the Chinese against America. The strategy seems to be “tell the Americans we are their friends but do everything we can to sabotage their ability to fight”.
Whenever a European leader stands with the United States, he gets hounded with the epithet “American poodle”. Has it ever occurred to Europeans that this behavior causes a backlash? Has it ever occurred to Europeans that whenever they hail an American leader as wonderful, he might be regarded as a “European poodle”?
Back in the 1990’s, I kept hearing about how a “United Europe” was the highest priority for the American Secretary of State. This was idiocy. America’s highest priority must be the welfare of America, not the creation of a European superstate that will do everything within its power to undermine America. I don’t forget how the wars of Yugoslav succession were essentially a proxy war between Germany on one side and Britain & France on the other; the wave of anti-Americanism in Europe a decade later came partly because Europeans got accustomed to Americans taking care of their problems. There is something ridiculous about America becoming Europe’s nurse’s assistant, cleaning out a European bedpan every time someone else can’t control himself. If Europeans can’t take care of themselves, perhaps Europeans need to reap the consequences instead of relying upon American power to keep the peace.
Any American “imperialism” is at least as much the doing of Europeans who seek to use American power for their own purposes. After all, all a European statesman needs to do to wrap American statesmen around his finger is accuse Americans of being “isolationist” if we do nothing. If we don’t do what we are told we are called “isolationist”, if we do what we are told but then do it too well we are called “imperialist”, and if we do something other than what we are told to do we are called both “isolationist” and “imperialist”; American statesmen need to understand that there is no pleasing some people. American statesmen also need to understand that America’s capital is in Washington DC, not in Brussels. If any European state really thinks NATO is such a burden on it, it can kindly get out of NATO and stop petitioning America to use its power for its own interests. It is quite annoying to see American military power being used to defend people who seem to think America is the cause of all of their problems.
