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Notes -
A tiny note on the war
In the previous thread, I got some pushback for suggesting that not only did the US strike the Iranian school in Minab, killing 170 children or something like that, but perhaps it did so intentionally (or at least without remorse for the possible consequences of erroneous targeting). I admit that wasn't fully sincere. I realize that, even morals aside, there is no perceived military value in bombing children, at least not for the US (I do think Israelis may target children of IRGC officers out of their usual Bronze Age blood feud sentiment, Oct 7, Gaza and all, seen enough of their remarks to this effect; but then again they don't operate Tomahawks).
Well now the question on it having been an American strike appears settled. As for the intent – it's not so straightforward:
Does it matter if there was no intent if the United States, as of now, also has a revealed preference to not bother with minimizing such risks, in favor of «lethality» and some zany Judeo-Christian nationalism courtesy the power-tripping macho TV host Pete Hegseth? I believe it does, but marginally; about as much as those girls matter to Lethal Pete. I rest my case.
More to the point. It's remarkable that there's so little discussion of contemporary historical events on here. I won't criticize anyone, be the change you want etc.; but what we are seeing is pretty astonishing from the culture war standpoint. Could someone like Pete be imaginable as the Secretary of War – no, Defense – in 2023? 2019, even? 2016? It looks as if the politically dominant culture of the United States changed overnight. Does everyone just like it too much to find the change worth commenting on?
There are an amazing number of people responding with, essentially, "shit happens in war", seemingly with giving any further thought to questions like "can we make shit happen less in war?", "does what we're trying to achieve justify this shit?", and "should the fact that shit happens in war make us more cautious about going to war?"
Christ
I risk sounding like a broken record here but that old Clemenceau quote is relevant again: "America Is the Only Country That Went from Barbarism to Decadence Without Civilization In Between".
When you look at things through this lens everything explains itself perfectly. The Americans as a nation have never been properly civilised, their national myth includes things like the Frontier man and the taming of the wilderness, but in one of those rather all too common twists of irony I'd say the wild has transformed Americans far more than they have ever transformed it.
Once you realize that America as a country has never had civilisation in the sense a European, a Chinese, or even dare I say, a Persian, would understand it, (I mean as a country, many many Americans are perfectly civilised people, the problem is not All Americans, the problem is Enough Americans) everything starts falling into place and making sense.
The way to deal with such a country is to treat it like it is: rather than trying to support the US or help them in their war against Iran out of some misguided gentlemanly obligation, Europe now has an excellent opportunity to twist the knife and extract huge concessions from the US on Ukraine and tariffs in return for them being allowed to use European bases to run their war. And make your demands and the concessions you get public as red meat for your domestic base. It's no different to what the Americans would have done to you had the shoe been on the other foot.
That's a nice free-form contentless rant, and like Dase I know you love sneering at Westerners, and Americans especially, as hard as we will allow, under the cope of speaking from a delusional sense of superiority. But do tell me: in what sense are Americans not (or ever) "civilized"? Non-rhetorically. Step up. What do those words mean?
Because under every definition with any non-rhetorical meaning, this is simply nonsense. It's a snarky pseudo-elite bon motte with no significance beyond the performative revulsion, the affected contempt.
What you actually mean by "civilized" is "has a culture I like and behaves in ways I approve of." And sure, everyone is entitled to like their own culture and think it is better than other cultures. You can disapprove of America and wish we were more like you all you want. But if you want to start trading cheap sneers about respective cultures and how "civilized" we are and aren't, you sure would not want us to take the mod guardrails off when talking about Pakistan, or Muslim culture writ large.
Whenever I see you toss these haughty sneers like you're an aristocrat curling your upper lip at the revolting peasants, I am just astounded at the sheer arrogance. Not offended, but genuinely astounded that you can be so lacking in perspective and awareness.
Replying to both you and @Shakes:
I'm not saying America has no achievements (obviously it does, and listing them like Shakes did doesn't refute the point). Nobody denies America has produced extraordinary things, half the things I use on a daily basis were made by them, and that's probably an underestimate (though I'd add that a lot and an increasing proportion of this is from immigrants who became Americans or their near term descendants, rather than "founding stock"). The telephone, jazz, the moon landing etc. etc. are yes, all real, all impressive. But a catalogue of inventions and monuments is not what civilisation means in the sense I'm using it, and people should get that from my post.
What I mean and what Clemenceau meant (however priggish you may call him) is something closer to what you might call institutional depth and cultural continuity: the slow accumulation of norms, restraints, and social trust that make a society self regulating rather than dependent on raw dynamism (which is something that Americans seem to prize above all else, even when it's the wrong tool for the job, hammer and nail come to mind). Europe didn't get that from being clever. It got it from centuries of catastrophe and making mistakes and importantly learning from them. The point isn't that Europeans are better people (I wouldn't even agree, even though I'd probably choose to spend an evening with a randomly chosen European over a randomly chosen American, never mind that they might not even speak English). The point is that the European political tradition, through sheer painful experience, developed a certain instinct for restraint, compromise, and institutional preservation that the American tradition never prioritised in the same way and is likely to very soon come back and bite it in the ass. America's founding myth is about breaking free of those constraints, not building them. That's not an insult, it's a description.
And the "civilised Americans exist, the problem is't All Americans but Enough Americans" line was doing work you both skipped past. I'm not painting 330 million people with one brush. I'm saying the political culture, the median and especially the current leadership of the country, trends in a direction that makes America an unreliable partner and that Europeans should act accordingly rather than sentimentally. Think Mark Carney, but with more spice.
Which brings me to the part of my post that was actually the point, and which neither of you addressed: the strategic argument. Forget whether Clemenceau was rude. Forget whether I'm being snobbish, I won't try and justify that further as I know it won't work (and no, Spengler didn't put me up to this). The question on the table is simple: should Europe give America unconditional support in its Iran campaign, or should it use its leverage: basing rights, logistics, diplomatic cover, to extract concessions on Ukraine and tariffs? The "American" would say "use the leverage", the European might say "we're all gentlemen here", except that that's no longer true, so might as well give them a taste of their own medicine.
The argument that America "pays for European defence" cuts both ways. If European bases are so essential to American force projection that Spain's wobble caused a crisis within days (which it's still not allowing to my knowledge despite what the Americans are saying), then those bases have price, and Europe is a fool not to name it.
The claim that America could walk away tomorrow and it would be Europe's problem, not the Americans well right there you're making my argument for me. If that's how America sees the relationship, then Europe has no obligation of loyalty either, and should negotiate accordingly. You can't simultaneously say "we do this for you" and "we don't need you." Pick one. The cakeism is very "American".
No, that's completely wrong. "Raw dynamism" is a very American cultural myth that Americans like to tell themselves, and it's kind of weird to see you repeating it just because it sounds like an "A-hyuck! A-hyuck!" cowboy stereotype.
America has a great deal of institutional depth and continuity. For all that we fancy ourselves to have reinvented ourselves from whole cloth in 1776, the "American project" very obviously was both something unique and designed, and something that drew on the entirety of English Common Law and Western civilization. The Founding Fathers didn't just pull the Articles of Confederation and then the Constitution out of their asses; they had as much education and "civilization" as their European contemporaries did. That America was something relatively new and different at the time does not mean it was some strange savage MMORPG environment dropped onto North America.
America has institutional norms, restraints, and social trust. Arguably, those are being hollowed out right now. Arguably, so are Europe's. Arguably, a major reason for that is... well. People who do not share those institutional norms, restraints, and social trust.
This may be true, but it's also both an observation very much of the moment (all governments change, and some governments change radically and catastrophically) and has nothing to do with whether or not America is "civilized."
Sure, that's a question Europe needs to answer, and I would expect Europe to weight European interests above American interests. But Europe has its own dysfunctions (which is a large part of the reason we're here) and is hardly in a position to be sniffing at Americans and how "unreliable" (or "uncivilized" forsooth) they are.
@Shakes is more interested in the "Europe versus America" question. I don't really care about that. I'm peering at your "civilization" quip and still trying to figure out what the hell you think you mean by it. You haven't described anything America doesn't have, just political decisions America is making that you don't like.
You say America has institutional depth and continuity, and that the Founders drew on English Common Law and the whole Western tradition and I agree. I never said otherwise and I'd have been stupid to. The US Constitution is a remarkable document (worth reading even as a non-American), the Federalist Papers are some of the best political thinking ever committed to paper, and the early Republic was built by men who were as educated and sophisticated as anyone in Europe, there's no argument to that.
But I think you're collapsing a distinction that matters: there's a difference between having institutions and having the deep cultural substrate that makes those institutions self repairing. England didn't develop parliamentary norms because someone wrote a brilliant constitution. It developed them over centuries of messy, bloody, often accidental practice until they became so embedded in the culture that violating them felt viscerally wrong to enough people to make it politically suicidal. That's what I mean by institutional depth: not the documents, not the structures, but the thickness of the cultural root system underneath them.
And you've actually conceded the key point yourself when you say they're being hollowed out right now. My reply is simply: how fast and how easily? Because that speed is itself diagnostic. If American institutional culture had the depth it lacks, what's happening right now would be much harder to do. I agree that European institutions are under strain too, especially from the hard right and parties like AfD and Reform here in the UK but they're harder, the damage is slower and meeting more resistance at every level. See how Europe managed to co opt Meloni in Italy into a standard right wing European party from the far right. Orban's getting kicked out very soon as well just to give you another data point. Europe is able to deflect and absorb the attacks to its institutions in a way the US hasn't shown any signs of doing.
Instead what we're seeing over there is that a single administration with a sufficiently bloody minded approach can hollow out norms that were supposedly two and a half centuries deep in what, a year and a half? The US has a proper full constitution and an extremely strong supreme court which could block all this with ease but it has folded like a marzipan deckchair. That's not what deep roots look like. That's what a brilliant structure built on shallow cultural soil looks like when someone finally decides to test the foundations. It sinks at the first real challenge. Compare to the UK where we don't even have a written constitution and parliament is technically sovereign and a majority can do anything they want, including reinstating slavery if they so wish and yet our institutions mean that even a government with strong support from its MPs can't do whatever it wants (as Boris Johnson found out with Brexit).
To put it differently: the Constitution told Americans what their institutions should be. What it couldn't do, because no document can, is make Americans feel that violating those norms is unthinkable rather than merely illegal. The "we don't do that" instinct, the one that in a deeply rooted institutional culture makes norm-violation politically radioactive even when it's technically possible, that's the thing I'm saying is thinner in America than Americans believe. And I don't think that's a controversial observation at this point. You yourself seem to agree the hollowing is happening. We're just disagreeing about what it reveals.
So to your final challenge "you haven't described anything America doesn't have, just political decisions you don't like" I would say that I've described exactly the thing America is currently demonstrating it doesn't have enough of. The decisions I don't like are the evidence, not the argument.
And briefly, since I've already made this case and don't want to repeat myself: this is precisely why the leverage question matters. You don't extend unconditional trust to a partner whose institutional immune system is failing this visibly. You negotiate. That's not sneering, it's prudence.
I think a lot of this is compelling, and it's true that Europe has been much more institutionally resilient and stable over recent years than the US has been.
I don't think that civilisational depth and the accumulation of norms is, however, the most parsimonious explanation for why this is the case. Australia, for example, is younger than America and has been more institutionally resilient over the past few decades of populist headwinds than Europe has largely been.
The real reason the US is falling faster towards institutional dysfunction is more prosaic: its institutions are not well designed. That unified party control across different branches of government would still let each branch effectively check the excesses of the others was a naive theory at best. Instead political will flows through the channels of least resistance and carves them deeper.
One of the Westminster system's better features, which has achieved its final perfected form in Australia, is explicitly not tying the political ambitions and fates of would-be political leaders to that of whoever sits in the chair at a given moment. If there's no real way to self-correct a year into the term, everyone is sink-or-swim through any insanity.
I love my country, but I’m a strong critic of our constitutional structure.
I believe the assumption was that Congress would be jealous of its own power, in the way that the House of Commons was jealous of its own power in comparison to the King and the Lords, but the issue is that the elected Presidency created a countervailing center of political legitimacy, and blame, that’s independent of and largely unaccountable to Congress. The framers thought impeachment would be a sufficient counterweight, but failed to take account of the fact that removing a President would be a traumatic and partisan exercise, more akin to revolution against a king than the removal of a minister.
After centuries of experience with elected assemblies, it’s now clearer that the means of survival for democratic parties is ensuring that blame for anything that goes wrong rests on the opposition, not in delivering results. As a result, all blame and accountability for anything that happens politically rests on the President, who is quite impotent to accomplish reform, while little to no power actually rests in individual Congressmen.
So people who want to wield power don’t go into Congress, and Presidents are eager to expand their power by any means necessary. The checks and balances fail. I suspect the American system is designed almost for an inverted Whig revolution, where the executive has every reason to accumulate power by taking it from the legislature.
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