It is also the case that, because of the virtual certainty that some European states are seeking to use EU institutions to counter American leadership, many Americans are beginning to reexamine their long-standing support for European political integration.

Both authors make much of the fact that a large majority of European public opinion is uniformly opposed to American policy toward Iraq and, more broadly, to the overall American global posture. Moller is more matter-of-fact in his depiction of this matter, noting that European public opinion makes it impossible for most European leaders to pursue a muscular foreign policy, backed up by the threat to use force, while Vaisse seems quite pleased about this state of affairs. Indeed, he believes that the political costs for supporting American policy towards Iraq, to be paid by the likes of Tony Blair, Jose-Maria Aznar and Silvio Berlusconi, would either discourage these leaders from aiding the U.S. in the future or may even cause them to lose elections.  Either way, in his view, these trends may well facilitate the creation of a more anti-American, unified Europe, with President Bush as its unwitting progenitor.

Two final observations ought to be made. The first is that public opinion in democracies invariably opposes the use of force, especially when presented with a somewhat ambiguous or inconclusive threat. This problem has become particularly acute in the post-Cold War era, with domestic politics playing an ever greater role in the development of foreign and defense policies. This, however, does not mean that following vox populai invariably, or even usually, constitutes good statecraft. In this regard, if either Churchill or Roosevelt listened to public opinion, instead of doing what they felt was right and convincing the public to come along, we might well have a very unified Europe today, albeit not a very democratic one and probably one dominated by the native speakers of the German language.

Second, it is far from preordained that European leaders, scorned by Vaisse for their excessive pro-Americanism, will be unable to convince their electorates that they were right in supporting the regime change in Iraq and that it will not be leaders like Schroeder and Chirac who will eventually pay a heavy political price for their pusillanimous policies.

David B. Rivkin, Jr. is a partner in the Washington, DC office of Baker & Hostetler.  He has served in a variety of legal and policy positions in the Reagan and G.H.W. Bush Administrations.