In a new op-ed for the New York Times THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN offers a critique of the European approach to the entire Iraqi issue. In the midst of this critique he raises a new question. I have no response to his assessment since I have not been exposed to this question before. In fact, the possibility had not occurred to me.

Is the notion of “the West” on the verge of collapse? If so, then Juergensmeyer, author of the The New Cold War, may have already pinpointed the cause. The perpetrators of this collapse may very well be religious nationalists.


Op-Ed Link
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/opinion/02FRIE.html


EXCERPT

What I'm getting at here is that when you find yourself in an argument with Europeans over Iraq, they try to present it as if we both want the same thing, but we just have different approaches. And had the Bush team not been so dishonest and unilateral, we could have worked together. I wish the Bush team had behaved differently, but that would not have been a cure-all — because if you look under the European position you see we have two different visions, not just tactical differences. Many Europeans really do believe that a dominant America is more threatening to global stability than Saddam's tyranny.

The more I hear this, the more I wonder whether we are witnessing something much larger than a passing storm over Iraq. Are we witnessing the beginning of the end of "the West" as we have known it — a coalition of U.S.-led, like-minded allies, bound by core shared values and strategic threats?
I am not alone in thinking this. Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister, noted to me in Brussels the other day that for a generation Americans and Europeans shared the same date: 1945. A whole trans-Atlantic alliance flowed from that postwar shared commitment to democratic government, free markets and the necessity of deterring the Soviet Union. America saw the strength of Europe as part of its own front line and vice versa — and this bond "made the resolution of all other issues both necessary and possible," said Mr. Bildt.

Today, however, we are motivated by different dates. "Our defining date is now 1989 and yours is 2001," said Mr. Bildt. Every European prime minister wakes up in the morning thinking about how to share sovereignty, as Europe takes advantage of the collapse of communism to consolidate economically, politically and militarily into one big family. And the U.S. president wakes up thinking about where the next terror attack might come from and how to respond — most likely alone. "While we talk of peace, they talk of security," says Mr. Bildt. "While we talk of sharing sovereignty, they talk about exercising sovereign power. When we talk about a region, they talk about the world. No longer united primarily by a common threat, we have also failed to develop a common vision for where we want to go on many of the global issues confronting us."