A reflexive hostility to Western religion permeates the chattering classes. If only rationality ruled the day, they argue, the world would be at peace.
Beyond the latest rows, institutional paralysis and financial incompetence, the scars of war have plainly not all been healed. Is there a deeper collapse of European self-confidence?
Last summer, Russia and Georgia came to blows. Tbilisi’s pro-American president believed NATO would protect him in a fight with the big, bad bear.
America has at times oriented itself to the East, at others to the West. But what we have always had is a sense of our manifest destiny. And now the ideals of California—nihilism with a suntan—seem to be our primary ideological export.
