The Great VDH Nails It

There is a lot of noise about the political and military relationships between countries of the Democratic West and countries in the rest of the world. Liberals in Europe and the U.S. like to talk about "soft power" as a replacement for military strength. They like using diplomacy and sanctions (well... sanctions for a little while until they start to work) and taking the use of military force off of the table. Indeed, the liberals in Congress want to enact in law the removal of even the possibility of using force against Iran at any time in the future. Of course, such approaches mean that countries using them can be ignored (but we are not supposed to say that out loud).

It also means that the UN, NATO, and the EU are now powerless.

Victor Davis Hanson quite brilliantly makes it all clear.

In Houses of Straw-The EU’s delusions about the sufficiency of “soft” power are embarrassingly revealed. he concludes;

What does the future hold if Europe does not rearm and make it clear that attacks on Europeans and threats to the current globalized order have repercussions?

If Europeans recoil from a few Taliban hoodlums or Iranian jihadists, new mega-powers like nuclear India and China will simply ignore European protestations as the ankle-biting of tired moralists. Indeed, they do so already.

Why put European ships or planes outside of European territorial waters when that will only guarantee a crisis in which Europeans are kidnapped and held as hostages or used as bargaining chips to force political concessions?

Europe is just one major terrorist operation away from a disgrace that will not merely discredit the EU, but will do so to such a degree as to endanger its citizenry and interests worldwide and their very safety at home. Islamists must assume that an attack on a European icon — Big Ben, the Vatican, or the Eiffel Tower — could be pulled off with relative impunity and ipso facto shatter European confidence and influence. Each day that the Iranians renege on their promises to release the hostages, and then proceed to parade their captives, earning another “unacceptable” from embarrassed British officials, a little bit more of the prestige of the United Kingdom is chipped away.

In the future, smaller nations in dangerous neighborhoods must accept that in their crises ahead, their only salvation, even after the acrimonious Democratic furor over Iraq, is help from the United States.

America alone can guarantee the safety of the noble Kurds, should Turkey or Iran choose one day to invade. America alone will be willing or able to supply Israel with necessary help and weapons to ensure its survival.

Other small nations — a Greece, for example — with long records of vehement anti-Americanism should take note that the choice facing them in their rough neighborhoods is essentially solidarity with the United States or the embrace of Jimmy Carter diplomacy or Stanley Baldwin appeasement.

Quite simply, there is now no NATO, no EU, no U.N. that can or will do anything in anyone’s hour of need.

Go read the whole thing for the supporting arguments. They are devastatingly conclusive.