Europe’s Global Tentacles Reach You Everywhere: Trade, Law, Business, Armaments, and Military Operations

Abstract

Although the 9/11, 2001 attacks crushed Americans’ perceived invulnerability, instantaneously changing peoples’ view of the world, the attacks did little to alter people’s perspectives across the big pond.² A year later respected American Conservative, Robert Kagan, was decrying how Europe lingered in oblivion of the changed world around them, arguing that European statesmen sounded like the Americans of the eighteenth century “extolling the virtues of commerce as the soothing balm of international strife and appealing to international law and international opinion over brute force.”³ Arguments that might is power, that appeal to international law and institutions are signs of weakness, and that Europe is ungrateful and unwilling to recognize America’s military strength as being the reason it today enjoys peace and prosperity, find a receptive audience in the United States, where people’s deep-seated beliefs of exerting influence “by the muzzle of a gun” are rooted in the constitutional guarantee that your own personal weapon is your ultimate means of security, and that overwhelming American military might has enabled international dominance in all areas.