Bitter, Party of One!

Many Europeans, just like fantasy-“revolutionary” Jack-in-the-Box Juan Cole, are reacting as expected the warning-laden message in Robert Gates’ recent speech on the failure of most of the EU’s member states in the arena of supporting their defense.

Shorter SecDef Robert Gates: European members of NATO need to bankrupt themselves with military spending and wars just as the United States has done, or else the US Congress will stop being willing to support NATO's war efforts.

In these nation-states where governments typically and chillingly represent more than half of all GDP, eclipsing the capacity of civil society to work hard enough to sustain the elephant compelling them to give them a piggy-back ride, spending 2 percent of their GDP on their own security and stability is “bankrupting them”. Somehow asking them to commit 2% to receive the benefit of what is likely the effect of an 8-10% commitment is too much.

One-time Fulbright scholar and nominally pro-NATO blogger Joerg Wolf (whose position is to discuss and theoretically to promote the interest of Germany in NATO) repeats Cole’s emotional tone, resorting to citing moronic adolescent taunts typically heard at a “peace” rally:

Let's talk truth to the NYT: Europe seized the opportunity of the peace dividend after the end of the Cold War, while America's elite of neocons and liberal interventionists have turned "Perpetual War" into US ideology as James Joyner argues.

If the result of this passive-aggressive tone, and the desire to smother criticism is to be assumed to be anything, it is an attempt to have the US continue its’ “perpetual war” stance just enough to relieve the burden of Europeans having to protect the Smurf village that they conceive of their lands to be.

Don’t forget that these are the people who have tried to mask their never-ending and useless invective direct at the US as “the concern and advice of an older brother”. How do they understand one statement of objective criticism every five years or so? Exactly as you see it. Many of their public intellectuals still mad that about one minor statement about “Freedom Fires” a decade ago, and that a Hollywood script writer once fashioned a character called Hans Gruber in 1988.

As to the message “responding” to Gates’ warning? Okay. We get it. Gates doesn't have to make his point again.

The European critics of his measured warning just did it for him.