Why the EU will never be a true world power

OP-ED: The slowly vanishing NATO, By Anne Applebaum, Washington Post, October 20, 2009

I'm not generally a fan of Applebaum, but this is a killer piece, the tag line being that NATO countries tend to talk about their boys fighting and dying for the Americans.

That, in a nutshell, is why the EU will never be a true world power in my mind. The Europeans see obligation, not responsibility, when it comes to global order.

Oh, they talk big all right.

(Via WPR Media Roundup)

Comments

[stuart abrams]

I think it is an overstatement to say that the EU will "never" be a true world power. I agree that it isn't one now, and I attribute that to its parochialism and its self-satisfied belief in European superiority, a holdover from colonialism. This will change over the next few decades as a result of massive immigration, primarily from Africa and Muslim countries, which demographics (and climate change) will make inevitable. In the short run, this will get ugly, leading to stuff like terrorism and European xenophobia, but ultimately, it will produce an EU that is a lot more like the US and a lot more globally-oriented.

[Tom Barnett]

God damned headline writers!

Bastard stuck it in the text too.

It's all about selling eyeballs to those people!