V-E DAY AND THE FOUNDING OF A NEW WORLD ORDER:

The war also started a new chapter in the debate over nationalism. Although many Americans despise that term, American nationalists like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln maintained that the Americans were one people whose unity advanced the cause of freedom. World War II proved them right. In war movies, it became cliché to include a New Yorker, a Texan, and representatives of other parts of America in any given military unit. These people would not walk into a bar together, but they would fight their way across Europe.

The Europeans saw things differently. In Western Europe, many concluded that nationalism was a dead end. The nation states of Europe either fell prey to fascism or were not strong enough to defeat it: some had fought for God and country long after their homes were occupied, but the majority acquiesced to Nazi rule. The war paused Central and Eastern Europe’s dream for national liberation. Those countries effectively lost their independence to the Russians and only regained their sovereignty after the Iron Curtain fell. For them, 1989 gave them a new chance at life.

This confusion lies at the heart of Europe’s problems today. The Western Europeans largely want the European Union to transcend national sovereignty, but the Central and Eastern Europeans joined to protect it. They don’t much like the fussy bureaucrats in Brussels, but they vastly prefer the pinstriped busybodies to the killers in the Kremlin.

It has also led the United States into a dilemma. American power prevented Communism from overrunning Europe and, after the Soviets collapsed, kept the Europeans from settling their differences the old-fashioned way. But it has also left the Europeans soft-headed and woolly-eyed. They have not thought seriously about their national survival in over three decades, and even the second great Russian invasion of Ukraine has not fully roused them from their slumber. Some of their most prominent thinkers are so strategically inept that the threat of tariffs has induced them to run to Beijing cap in hand.

This sort of intellectual impoverishment helped create Europe’s great failure and subsequent decline.

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