http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-europe-no-longer-matters/2011/06/15/AG7eCCZH_story.html

It is hard not to feel a certain welling contempt when reading Mr. Richard Haas’ latest opinion piece ‘Why Europe no longer matters’ in The Washington Post. Here is a public intellectual, the president of the council of foreign Relations and the director of policy and planning at the State Department from 2001 to 2003. Mr. Haas is a well connected establishmentarian thinker and writer, but the Olympian tone of the expert is here obvious and ill serves his argument, that Europe is no longer important to American Interests, to NATO, to projection of American power and the guarding of American interests in the region. Those interests might have been thought of as mutually self serving, if not for the American penchant to wage war at the drop of a hat. Why would the Europeans be reluctant to follow America’s lead in its quixotic, self destructive, murderous policy blundering, to put in bluntly? The fact of two world wars fought on the very territory they call home might be a clue, to their reluctance to follow our war making lead. A war has not been fought on American soil since the Civil War, a vivid touchstone of American History but not a memory of the realities of its utter destructive carnage. We are so distant from the realities of war, the Europeans are not and do not share that distance, it is too close in the memory of too many to be the subject of a corrupt, misplaced romanticism and the ethical distortions that  brings to the matter of policy, i.e. war.   

In the larger context of American politics we can look at Neo-Conservatism as a transitional step from the post cold war to a more aggressive and violent form of American Imperialism, this can act as a rhetorical/historical frame for his essay. The question then becomes what of the 5 wars that America is now involved in, with the tacit or implicit consent of Public Intellectuals like Mr. Haas, and his coven of Intellectual rationalizes and enactors of American Exceptionalist ‘ideal’. Mr. Haas, as spokesman for a discredited intellectual elite, will now write off our European allies, as no longer worthy of our policy concerns and actions, on the dubious grounds of changing, evolving demographics and a skepticism about the notion of a common defense as defined  by the reality of endless warfare.

Political Observer