Yesterday France's Emanuel Macron called Europe's postwar peace and prosperity, 'A golden parenthesis in our history.'
Quite right.
The European techno-crat, the Jean Claude Junker, the former East German Communist Angela Merkel and the like, credit the post-war piece to European diplomacy, integration, the Common Market, the EU, etc etc.
But Macron's use of the parenthesis metaphor is apt.
The Red Army was the right side of that parenthesis. The US Army the left. That is, foreign powers, powers alien to Europe, imposed that peace.
Western Europe prospered because an American army of 300,000 men stood ready to defend that prosperity.
The European imagined that the fall of the Berlin Wall brought about Francis Fukayama's end of history, where soft power, not gunboat diplomacy would reign.
But European soft power failed to stop the Yugoslav War and Putin's invasion of Crimea. It was George W Bush and the US Navy that stopped Putin from overrunning Georgia in 2008.
European soft-power? Yeah. Sorry. No.
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