America and Europe

But first - Europe does not owe us because fighting the nazis was a true and just cause, but we owe France for our independence? I don´t quite get your logic there. I´m in any case not talking about an investment, I´m talking about some lack of decency on their side.

It is also irrelevant that the Red Army did most of the fighting and dying because the Red Army, while justified in defending Russia, was also an instrument of fascism. They did not liberate the part of Europe they occupied, the western allies did.

"saved them from Communism - that is where our credibility lies" - yeah, and we got called cowboy and warmongers for our troubles. I remember the 1970s and 1980s and the vilification of Reagan (popular graffiti: USA=SA=SS) It was a loud minority back then, but it became a majority right after the Soviet Union folded. Staunch allies? When exactly did they ever make a comparable sacrifice for their freedom, never mind the freedom of others? Anyway, it is forgotten now. I know people who will tell you that the Soviets never were a threat. I seem to meet quite different people than you, but they are not just a few.

"If somethine like that happened in North America, Europe would be honor-bound to intervene as well" - intervene with what? Have you tried that line on many Europeans? Did they laugh as loud as I did? You really don´t understand that what America did was absolutely unique in human history.

of "true and free government": The EU is certainly extremely useful in spreading a semblance of law and liberal order to their new member states in Eastern Europe (liberal in the old, good sense). That is no small achievement. Of course, it was never designed as a quasi-imperial enterprise. It was sold to the people as an economic union. Now it is poised to replace the democratic nation state and that is not good.

The nation states of western Europe already had all that. They were functioning democracies with constitutions and legal systems. Now, the EU is manifestly not transparent or representative. More and more laws are made in Brussels and nobody knows by whom, or why or who pays the bill. They are replacing the national constitutional order. The fact that many people don´t seem to object to this doesn´t mean that they know where it will end. The rejected European constitution (which will be implemented on the sly) was an open-ended to-do list for politicians that would have guaranteed enormous power to the state, instead of limiting state power as the American constitution does.

Now this is speculative, but if there is an intended end state, it seems to be the "enlightened" rule by by unaccountable elites and technocrats, with some democratic elements (where it doesn´t cause trouble), over a patchwork of "regions" and group identities. A bit like the Habsburg Empire with its many peoples (with the French in place of the Austrians, or so they like to think). From that perspective, who cares if some of these "peoples" live by sharia law?

Europeans are no longer at war (for which the EU arrogantly likes to take credit) but I have no idea whether they will be able to keep their liberty or if they even care.