IT’S THE 21ST CENTURY. ACT LIKE IT. Europe’s Entitlement Bird Looking for a Place to Roost.

A problem I had with most of the “foreign policy folks across the pond” that I worked with was their incredibly blinkered view of the USA, and specifically U.S. domestic politics.

Directly or indirectly their view of the USA comes from the Washington Post or the New York Times. If they have been to the USA, it is usually somewhere on the Acela Corridor or California. They have no idea not just how large the USA is, but how broad our domestic pollical scene is – and what is hard enough for Americans to understand is an undecipherable language to them.

That wouldn’t be a problem if they were self-aware of their lack of understanding, but it is just the opposite. There is a kind of aggressive weaponized ignorance that reminds me of the Norwegian Army Major who was very insistent that he understood race relations in the American South because, “I know your country. I spent a year at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.”

You can see that blinkered view on great display on the domestic U.S. coverage of political issues in The Economist. It isn’t malignant, just ignorant.

Oh, sometimes it’s malignant. Plus: “Just when Europe needs Germany to step up, she lacks not just the leadership to do so, but may not have the industry to do it even if she wanted to.”

It’s as if the leadership of the West, collectively, wants to make the West poor and weak.

Related: Europe is Whistling Past the Graveyard on Defense. “The European Union is, to put it bluntly, a bunch of states in a trenchcoat pretending to be a foreign policy superpower.”