An American foreign policy based on a national-security strategy consistent with this country’s traditions and values would have three main objectives in relation to Europe.  The first would be to promote the preservation of the Old Continent as the cradle of our common civilization, with which North America shares a similar world outlook.  The second would be to define a set of common Euro-American objectives in relation to the rest of the world.  The third would be to devise common defense mechanisms against all threats, current and anticipated, that may threaten the security, well-being, and prosperity of our societies.

On all three counts, the Bush administration is failing.  In neither its public statements nor its policies does it display any awareness of the fact that Europe is in the midst of changing her character—and changing it so profoundly that the end result, within a few decades, will be the emergence of a mutant superstate inherently inimical to America.

Two salient features of that process are the dominance of a radically post-Christian, neo-Marxist outlook among her decisionmaking elites and a demographic metamorphosis—seemingly irreversible in several key Western European countries—that may result in the replacement of native populations by predominantly Muslim immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East and by their European-born descendants.

Both processes are poised to spread to every nation that is absorbed into the European Union.  Once hailed as a mechanism for overcoming deadly rivalries and increasing economic efficiencies, the European Union is rapidly developing into a giant tool of social and political engineering.  Its constitution, including the Charter of Fundamental Rights, seeks both to abolish national sovereignty and to destroy traditional values.  The constitution pointedly excludes Christianity from the Preamble but introduces references to “equality” and “non-discrimination.”  The Charter invokes the obligation to combat “social exclusion” and respect “diversity.”  The constitution and E.U. law will have “primacy over the law of member states,” formally making the former superior to all national constitutions and legislative bodies.  Member-states can only act “to the extent that the Union has not exercised, or has decided to cease exercising, its competence.”  In case of doubt, the European Court will have the power to “ensure respect for the [E.U.] Constitution and Union law” and to rule on the implementation of the Charter.

This political and legal straightjacket imposed by Brussels makes any opposition to demographic change not only undesirable but also illegal.  Thus, by the end of the 21st century, there may be no ethnic “Europeans” who share the same language, culture, history, and ancestors and inhabit lands associated with their names.  The disappearing native populations will be conditioned to believe—or else simply forced to accept—that their self-annihilation is a blessing that enriches their culturally deprived and morally unsustainable societies.  Europe will lose the ability to define and defend herself, to the benefit of unassimilable, overwhelmingly Muslim multitudes, filled with an abiding contempt for their host organism that breeds the urge to conquer it.  The term Eurabia, introduced as an intellectual concept three decades ago by Lucien Bitterlin and his small cabal of Amerophobe Arabophiles in various French academic institutions, will have become all too real.

Far from grasping the dangers to American interests inherent in such developments (much less seeking to counter them), the Bush administration is acting as an accomplice.  Condoleezza Rice’s first tour of Europe as secretary of state last February went well beyond “rebuilding trust” after a long period of strain caused by Iraq.  Standing next to José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, she spoke of “a common agenda” shared by Washington and Brussels.  Some Europeans responded by calling Rice “the Bette Davis of diplomacy” and asserting that, “after a long, trying estrangement, Europe felt loved again.”  Back home, commentators friendly to the administration were quick to conclude that Colin Powell’s successor had successfully prepared the ground for President Bush’s February 22 summit with NATO and the E.U. leaders.  “Rice earned warm-to-glowing reviews on her fence-mending tour through Europe,” the Washington Times declared, writing of “soaring expectations” for Mr. Bush’s trip.

Such assertions signaled a major change in the European mood.  Only a few months before, Mr. Bush’s election victory was almost universally lamented in Europe as a sign that America was deeply weird at home and dangerous abroad.  “European support for strong American leadership in the world has declined significantly over the past two years, as has approval for President George Bush’s international policies,” reported the German Marshall Fund in its Transatlantic Trends 2004, based on interviews with 10,000 respondents.  The views of those Europeans, and millions of others just like them, were shaped by a media scene that only appears more diverse and interesting than that in the United States.  Its ideological assumptions are almost invariably hostile to all that they think Mr. Bush stands for.

That hostility has abated but has not completely crumbled before Miss Rice’s charms.  Some skeptical Europeans were quick to note that her repeated invitation to “partnership” actually amounted to a call for Europe to join the United States in pursuing President Bush’s “forward strategy of freedom.” An editorial in London’s Independent accused her of perpetuating “a strand of dishonesty that has permeated much U.S. (and some British) discourse” that seeks to cloak Realpolitik objectives in the messianic language of human rights and free markets.  Making much the same point from a different end of the political spectrum, the Daily Telegraph noted that, from Secretary Rice’s statements, “it was clear that America would not be deterred from pursuing its goals, were her challenge to remain unanswered.”

Significantly enough, some of the warmest compliments were paid to Secretary Rice by French bien-pensants, for her assertion that both America and France are, essentially, propositional polities built on notions, not nations.  Speaking in Paris, she claimed that both countries have inherited from the Enlightenment “the faith in freedom and the universalism of democracy.”  On this key point, Le Monde gladly agreed.  “The methods of the Bush administration can be questioned,” its editorialist wrote, “but the neoconservative creed that democracy is for all peoples and all religions, is also ours.”  He commended Rice for laying out the American vision and called on Europe—France, in particular—“to state more clearly our vision of the promotion of democracy, to be faithful to our ideals and more effective in the transatlantic framework.”

This is the kind of agreement that America and Europe can do without.  It is based on a flawed reading of history and a perverse view of nationhood.  Abroad, it leads straight to new “humanitarian interventions” à la Kosovo (the one “American” war that the French loved and supported) and to multiculturalist suicide at home.  The point that Secretary Rice and Le Monde jointly conveyed here is that, on both sides of the Atlantic, the state has become the enemy of the nation.  “France is from the outset a country of common blood,” Jean Raspail says, but the French Republic is to its rulers synonymous with the ideology of the Revolution; for its sake, they are happy to destroy the nation itself.

The mirror image of this mind-set is the neoconservative-liberal notion of a propositional American “Creed” and the concomitant rejection of Jefferson’s view of common heritage that includes common ancestry.  If the agreement defined by creeds is to be the basis of a New Grand Alliance—Robespierre meets Lincoln, the Weekly Standard merges with Le Monde—our demographic and spiritual goose is cooked.  The Euro-American identity of decrepitude will become entrenched and effectively irreversible.  Of course, Eurabia will be a friend and ally of America if America agrees to be Eurabianized.

Even those Europeans who call themselves “conservative” do not seem capable of grasping this essential point.  Le Point called the Bush Doctrine “a subtle mix of encouragement for aspirations to freedom,” which it assuredly is not, and blithely asserted that France has “a genuine opportunity to write a new chapter” by accepting the role of a second locomotive in the train of history.  The Catholic La Croix found fault in Secretary Rice’s “magisterial lecture” only insofar as “America’s strategic doctrine is the exact opposite of the UN’s universalism and multilateralism, with alliances built a la carte.”  Le Figaro enthused that “Secretary Rice’s reconciliation show is most welcome” and heralds the rebuilding of a relationship.  Nord Éclair proclaimed that Rice “reminded old Europe, tempted to forget its past and its duties, that the fight for the rights of individuals and of peoples is never finished.”  Les Dernieres Nouvelles d’Alsace opined that “even the most reluctant of America’s allies” would be hard pressed to refuse the offer of a global partnership for freedom at the risk of being marginalized.

President Bush, in the course of his European tour ten days later, went out of his way to praise the European Union as the ally of America in the global war for “freedom.”  As liberal commentator Michael Kinsley of the Los Angeles Times noted with a touch of sarcasm, he sounded “less like a Republican than a dorm-room Marxist.”  Kinsley noted revealing similarities between Mr. Bush’s paeans to global democratic revolution and those published nearly a century ago by Marxist agitator Emma Goldman in her essay “The Psychology of Political Violence,” in which she wrote that “the despair millions of people are daily made to endure” inspires them to terrorist violence.

Thanks to Secretary Rice’s and President Bush’s tours, the European opinion class’s loathing of the “Bush bacillus,” as the Sueddeutsche Zeitung memorably put it last fall, has abated, but it has not disappeared.  Their objection had never been to the President’s willingness to wage wars as such: His European detractors were almost invariably supportive of Bill Clinton’s pro-Muslim Balkan wars.  The European demand has always been for a seat at the table when those wars are plotted and for a suitably universalist banner under which they are waged.  President Bush and his team will need to go even further along the road of Jacobin universalism and One World multilateralism in order to be accepted as bona fide partners in what amounts to a project for global revolution.

This kind of partnership, which gives a totally new and unwelcome meaning to the phrase “beyond left and right,” can be resisted only if we have a backlash against Jacobinism, both here and in Europe.  Its foundation is the fact that, for the time being at least, nations still survive, in spite of what is being done to them.  The Dutch are beginning to realize that, after Theo van Gogh’s ritual slaughter by a Muslim, each one of them may soon face the choice between dhimmitude and death.  French students wantonly beaten by Arab and African thugs in the streets of Paris may discover Raspail.  And America cannot be completely de-Americanized unless her still-silent majority gives up on the vision of itself as a real nation, a distinct people with shared civilizational and religious roots.  Most Americans, if asked, still prefer the notion of “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none” to Mr. Bush’s assertion, in his Second Inaugural Address, that “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.”  Their instinctive distrust of irresponsible exceptionalism is a sign of hope.  The moral absolutism that the “benevolent global hegemonists” substitute for rational argument can be challenged, and it will be, although a lot of blood may be shed and a lot of fortune squandered before that happens.

If and when it does happen, the objective of U.S. foreign policy will be, once again, to maintain the security and freedom of this country and to uphold her traditions and authentic values.  In relation to Europe, this will mean that the billions spent on supporting Yushchenko’s sordid circus in the Ukraine, the KLA in Kosovo, Izetbegovic’s jihadists in Bosnia, and countless other Sorosite pet projects everywhere else in Eastern Europe will be redirected to America’s true friends and natural allies.

The notion of the National Endowment for Democracy actually helping democracy by supporting Slovakia’s Christian Democrats, Poland’s anti-abortionists, British Euroskeptics, German anti-immigrationists, or activists opposed to the Hague Tribunal in Serbia may sound far-fetched—but not more so than the notion of the United States intervening in the Balkans on the side of Islam would have sounded two or three decades ago.  The new imperium, of which the Project for a New American Century and the European Union are insignificantly distinct varieties, demands docile and pliant subjects rather than responsible citizens capable of making moral distinctions.  By acting against it, Americans will save their country and may even help save Europe from herself.