Talk Is Cheap

Jonah Goldberg has an especially astute G-File on the European’s foreign policy, or lack thereof. It seems that the driving force behind European foreign policy is based on the premise that if you ignore a problem it will eventually go away. Unfortunately, this policy works about as well with foreign policy as it does with chest pains and car engines. Eventually, that kind of acquiescence will catch up with you.

Real foreign policies, like it or not, must include the credible use of force as an option — if only a rare one (consider how ineffective police deterrence would be if cops ruled out the use of force at the outset, instead promising to talk bank robbers into turning themselves in). By taking their defense for granted for so long, too many of our allies believe that talk can get them everything they need. Like the kid living off his Chevron card, they’ve come to believe the world is like a giant college campus, where conflicts may erupt in the form of debates and shouting matches but violence is simply "against the rules," and where being asked to pay your own way in the world seems an absurd injustice.

Goldberg’s right – Europe is trying to talk its way out of a situation rather than exert any effort towards fixing it. They’ve alllowed millions of Muslims to enter their country unassimilated, and now that they’ve spend decades ignoring the problem they find that synagogues across the continent are burning and the mayor of Paris has been stabbed for being gay. Now they want us to ignore the problem of Saddam Hussein in the hopes that he’ll eventually go away.

The real world doesn’t work like that – we ignored North Korea for too long and now they’re a major regional threat. We learned it in Afghanistan, a nation that we casually allowed to become a hotbed of terror. You don’t fix problems by ignoring them, you fix problems by going out there and solving them. Unfortunately Europe is still in denial about this simple fact.