The Oklahoman

Wishes came true for Europe, unfortunat­ely

- Victor Davis Hanson

Almost a decade ago, Europeans and many progressiv­e Americans were lamenting how the United States was going to miss out on the 21st-century paradigm symbolized by the robust European Union. Neandertha­l Americans were importing ever more oil while waging a costly “war on terror” and fighting two conflicts, in Iraq and Afghanista­n. Our budget deficit in 2003 hit $374 billion.

The EU avoided foreign conflicts and embraced soft power. Its declining military budgets and centralize­d transnatio­nal government ensured that it could address global warming and fund ever-expanding entitlemen­ts. Even the poorer Mediterran­ean nations reached new heights of prosperity. The Greek economy soared. Spain’s real estate market was to become the hottest in the world. Italy seemed to resemble Germany more than Portugal.

President George W. Bush was caricature­d as the symbol of backward free-market capitalism, rank American consumeris­m and U.S. imperialis­m abroad. Only with the election of the progressiv­e Barack Obama would Europe finally find a like-minded, sophistica­ted American president.

Yet European Union prosperity has now proved a phantom — one conjured up by accounting gimmickry, borrowed German money and corrupt EU apparatchi­ks. Neither the EU at large nor most individual European nations can sustain their present rate of redistribu­tionist entitlemen­ts.

The worry is not that Greece will implode, but whether France can remain financiall­y solvent. More realistic countries such as Germany, Latvia and Sweden are quietly drifting away from the socialist model, preferring balanced budgets, lower taxes and fewer regulation­s.

The EU may be worried that Obama’s United States is becoming more like the EU at the very time many in Europe are starting to take a second, kinder look at the old free-market model of the United States. An America of low taxes, low unemployme­nt and robust growth once meant a huge market for European goods, as the United States drove a prosperous world economy and had enough cash to protect the Western world.

All that has changed after four years of unpreceden­ted $1 trillion-plus U.S. budget deficits. National debt has hit a historic $16 trillion, with no reversal in sight. Unemployme­nt has been at 7.8 percent or above for 48 consecutiv­e months. GDP growth is calcified at an anemic 2 percent. Record numbers of Americans draw on unemployme­nt, disability and food stamps.

There is even greater irony in foreign policy. Europe blasted Bush for his cooked-up war on radical Islam and his needless interventi­ons abroad. But with the ascendancy of Barack Obama, Europe finally got a mirror image of itself. Both Iraq and Afghanista­n will have ended according to strict timetables of withdrawal, not with any lasting security on the ground.

France and Great Britain went into Libya, while America “led from behind.” Moammar Gadhafi’s dictatorsh­ip was replaced with chaos that has birthed a terrorist haven that threatens to become the new Afghanista­n. The odious antiSemite and Muslim Brotherhoo­d leader Mohamed Morsi now runs a near-bankrupt Egypt that looks a lot like Haiti. After the messes in Libya and Egypt, the West watched impotently as Syria became something like Mogadishu.

Obama has loudly promised a pivot in the U.S. security profile toward the Pacific region. That change represents the unspoken reality that socialist redistribu­tion has reduced Europe to near-irrelevanc­y. Supposedly, free-market Asian economies are the new nexus of wealth and power. Oil and gas finds in America are providing unexpected energy independen­ce from the Persian Gulf. Or perhaps the new strategic emphasis reflects the demographi­c realities of the Obama coalition of various minority groups — and fewer European-American voters.

The Hawaiian-born and Indonesiar­aised president certainly seems more interested in Asia than he does in the old colonial Mediterran­ean world of aging and shrinking European nations, Arab quagmires, oil intrigue, Islamic terrorists and the Israeli-Palestinia­n open sore.

In short, Europe got the European Union of its hopes and a changed America of its fantasies — but both are rapidly becoming its worst nightmares.

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