A Quote by Daniel Fried
Two World Wars are sufficient and we are the ones who supported this notion of a united Europe, so there would never be another set of civil wars in Europe again, ever. That was a fabulous success. It was so fabulous that people now take it for granted.
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For many years prior to the 1990s, European integration was embraced and supported by a large majority of citizens. A united Europe, bound by commonly-held democratic values, was perceived as an essential and effective buffer against the Soviet empire. A united Europe made a repeat of the First and Second World Wars almost unthinkable.
And always we had wars, and more wars, and still other wars - all over Europe, all over the world. "Sometimes in the private interest of royal families," Satan said, "sometimes to crush a weak nation; but never a war started by the aggressor for any clean purpose - there is no such war in the history of the race."
The United States, working closely with the United Kingdom and others, established the liberal world order in the wake of World War II. The goal was to ensure that the conditions that had led to two world wars in 30 years would never again arise.
Europe is so much the home of Horror, with its myths of vampires, werewolves, witchcraft and the undead, yet it's like those myths were exported to Hollywood, leaving Europe the room to develop a new tradition as a way of processing its traumas, particularly the two world wars.
Taxation, the very thing that had triggered the British civil wars, would do so again, this time in America. The taxes may have been different, but the result would once again be disaster. What happened in America was really round two of those wars - the civil war of the British Empire, with the Hanoverians playing the part of the Stuarts, and the Americans the heirs of the revolutionaries, of Cromwell and of William III, the inheritors of a true British liberty, that had somehow got lost in its own motherland.
All American wars (except the Civil War) have been fought with the odds overwhelmingly in favor of the Americans. In the history of armed combat such affairs as the Mexican and Spanish-American Wars must be ranked, not as wars at all, but as organized assassinations. In the two World Wars, no American faced a bullet until his adversaries had been worn down by years of fighting others.
In a nuclear war, even if one side were to come out ahead by systems analytical standards, both sides would be so weakened, that it would - they would be in the position of Europe after the two World Wars.
We've gone thorough religious wars and civil wars. America has gone through slavery, we've all gone through two world wars, segregation. Ultimately it's been a bloody, trying, wasteful, but eventually positive struggle.
I think that if a United States of Europe were to be formed, it would be in our interests to fight for it, as all our old traditions would remain in such a united Europe, whereas if we were to start now as part of the Russian Empire, everything that had ever been in Germany would disappear.
Granted, it's a long time ago, it's in the 1940s, and, granted, it's warfare that we hopefully will not conduct in a similar fashion ever again, but it is crucially important. And that act, the storming of the Normandy beaches, coupled with the Battle of the Bulge, ending the spread of Nazism throughout Europe, saved the world and it saved the world for freedom. And it was the United States that did it. And it was a bunch of 19- and 20- and 21-year-old people who did it.
We in America have learned bitter lessons from two world wars: It is better to be here [in Europe] ready to protect the peace, than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom is lost. We've learned that isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments with an expansionist intent.
For Europe to play a part in the world on the scale of its wealth and its population and its capacities, Europe has to be united in some way, and Europe is not united.
There has never been a century that has not had a systemic war - a systemic war, meaning when the entire system convulses. From the Seven Years' War in Europe to the Napoleonic Wars of the 19th century to the World Wars, every century has one.
Think of Europe in the 20th century. Two World Wars generated by nationalism. France, Germany, Britain fighting with each other.
I prefer to concentrate on my task of leading Europe to the success that our citizens expect. We have to look forwards now because what is at stake is what makes Europe Europe.
All wars of interference, arising from an officious intrusion into the concerns of other states; all wars of ambition, carried on for the purposes of aggrandizement; and all wars of aggression, undertaken for the purpose of forcing an assent to this or that set of religious opinions; all such wars are criminal in their very outset, and have hypocrisy for their common base.
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