Do we really need to be warned about what’s happening to America by a British Member of the European Parliament who lives in Brussels? Daniel Hannan is the politician who swept to fame last year when he ripped Gordon Brown to shreds on the floor of the European Parliament. He was brought up in Peru—and has some Scottish-American cousins in Philadelphia—but otherwise he’s as British as bad teeth and awkwardness with strangers. Nevertheless, he deserves a hearing in this magisterial, if short, book—and his warning is a valid one, born of his experience of what Europeanization has done to Britain.
On recent visits to the States, he’s noticed that the deep well of American self-belief is slowly being drained. Hannan admires the sort of directness shown by, say, Donald Rumsfeld, when asked why America was using cluster bombs on militants in Afghanistan: “To try to kill them.” He takes against its reverse: the woolly, nervous fear of direct action, as typefied by the old story about a British civil servant telling a politician, “It might work very well in practice, minister, but it doesn’t work in theory.” Because of this lack of confidence, America—wanting to fit in, awkward at being the odd man out—is increasingly aping Europe: in its health system, its tax rates, its daycare, its federal structure, and its unemployment rate.
A decline in confidence in the foreign policy sphere is particularly worrying. To put it simply, American policy in recent decades has been to
