The Wall
Street Journal
A civilization that believes in nothing
will ultimately submit to anything.
La Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France, the day
after the attack
By BRET STEPHENS
At last count, members of the European Union spent more
than $200 billion a year on defense, fielded more than 2,000 jet fighters and
500 naval ships, and employed some 1.4 million military personnel. More than a
million police officers also walk Europe’s streets. Yet in the face of an
Islamist menace the Continent seems helpless. Is it?
Was France helpless in May 1940?
Let’s stipulate that a van barreling down a seaside
promenade isn’t a Panzer division, and that a few thousand ISIS fighters
scattered from Mosul to Marseilles aren’t another Wehrmacht. But as in France
in 1940, Europe today displays the same combination of doctrinal rigidity and
loss of will that allowed an Allied army of 144 divisions to be routed by the
Germans in six weeks. The Maginot Line of “European values” won’t prevail over
people who recognize none of those values.
So much was made clear by French Prime MinisterManuel
Valls, who
remarked after the Nice attack that “France is going to have to live with
terrorism.” This may have been intended as a statement of fact but it came
across as an admission that his government isn’t about to rally the public to a
campaign of blood, toil, tears and sweat against ISIS—another premature
capitulation in a country that has known them before.
Mr. Valls was later booed at a memorial service for the
Nice victims. It would be heartening to think this was because he and his boss,
President François
Hollande, have
failed to forge a strategy to destroy ISIS. But the public’s objection was that
there hadn’t been enough cops along the Promenade des Anglais to stop the
attack. In soccer terms, it’s a complaint about the failure of defense, not the
lack of a proper offense.
Then there is Germany, site of three terror attacks in a week. It seems almost
like a past epoch that Germans welcomed a million Middle Eastern migrants in an
ecstasy of moral self-congratulation, led by Angela
Merkel’s chant of “We can do it!” Last summer’s slogan now sounds as
dated and hollow as Barack
Obama’s “Yes we can!”
Now Germany will have to confront a terror threat that
will make the Baader-Meinhof gang of the 1970s seem trivial. The German state
is stronger and smarter than the French one, but it also surrenders more easily
to moral intimidation. The idea of national self-preservation at all costs will
always be debatable in a country seeking to expiate an inexpiatable sin.
Thus the question of whether Europe is helpless. At its
1980s peak, under François
Mitterrand and Helmut
Kohl, the
European project combined German economic strength and French confidence in
power politics. Today, it mixes French political weakness with German moral
solipsism. This is a formula for rapid civilizational decline, however many
economic or military resources the EU may have at its disposal.
Can the decline be stopped? Yes, but that would require a
great unlearning of the political mythologies on which modern Europe was built.
Among those mythologies: that the European Union is the
result of a postwar moral commitment to peace; that Christianity is of merely
historical importance to European identity; that there’s no such thing as a
military solution; that one’s country isn’t worth fighting for; that honor is
atavistic and tolerance is the supreme value. People who believe in nothing,
including themselves, will ultimately submit to anything.
The alternative is a recognition that Europe’s long peace
depended on the presence of American military power, and that the retreat of
that power will require Europeans to defend themselves. Europe will also have
to figure out how to apply power not symbolically, as it now does, but
strategically, in pursuit of difficult objectives. That could start with the
destruction of ISIS in Libya.
More important, Europeans will have to learn that
powerlessness can be as corrupting as power—and much more dangerous. The storm
of terror that is descending on Europe will not end in some new politics of
inclusion, community outreach, more foreign aid or one of Mrs. Merkel’s
diplomatic Rube
Goldbergs. It
will end in rivers of blood. Theirs or yours?
In all this, the best guide to how Europe can find its
way to safety is the country it has spent the best part of the last 50 years
lecturing and vilifying: Israel. For now, it’s the only country in the West
that refuses to risk the safety of its citizens on someone else’s notion of
human rights or altar of peace.
Europeans will no doubt look to Israel for tactical tips
in the battle against terrorism—crowd management techniques and so on—but what
they really need to learn from the Jewish state is the moral lesson. Namely,
that identity can be a great preserver of liberty, and that free societies
cannot survive through progressive accommodations to barbarians.
