Our government is pissing off most of the world. At this rate we're not going to have any allies. Being the supreme military power without any allies will be very expensive and dangerous in the long run. Calling the two most powerful states in Europe "Old Europe" is not useful.
From the BBC:
Mr Rumsfeld made the remarks in Washington after French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder agreed to work together to oppose US threats of war in Iraq."Germany has been a problem and France has been a problem," Mr Rumsfeld told Washington's foreign press corps.
"But you look at vast numbers of other countries in Europe, they're not with France and Germany... they're with the US.
"You're thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don't," he said. "I think that's old Europe."
Mr Rumsfeld pointed to the planned expansion of Nato, with seven eastern European and Baltic countries invited to join the alliance.
"If you look at the entire Nato Europe today, the centre of gravity is shifting to the east," Mr Rumsfeld said.
If the centre of gravity is shifting, it's because we're basically using U.S. tax dollars to give military hardware to the more eastern countries via favorable "loan" terms.
Meanwhile, China joins Russia, France and Germany in opposition to immediate military action against Iraq.
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Brian Eno, writing in Time Magazine(!) has it about right:
When Europeans make such criticisms, Americans assume we're envious. "They want what we've got," the thinking goes, "and if they can't get it, they're going to stop us from having it." But does everyone want what America has? Well, we like some of it but could do without the rest: among the highest rates of violent crime, economic inequality, functional illiteracy, incarceration and drug use in the developed world. President Bush recently declared that the U.S. was "the single surviving model of human progress." Maybe some Americans think this self-evident, but the rest of us see it as a clumsy arrogance born of ignorance.Europeans tend to regard free national health services, unemployment benefits, social housing and so on as pretty good models of human progress. We think it's important — civilized, in fact — to help people who fall through society's cracks. This isn't just altruism, but an understanding that having too many losers in society hurts everyone. It's better for everybody to have a stake in society than to have a resentful underclass bent on wrecking things. To many Americans, this sounds like socialism, big government, the nanny state. But so what? The result is: Europe has less gun crime and homicide, less poverty and arguably a higher quality of life than the U.S., which makes a lot of us wonder why America doesn't want some of what we've got.
