Brussels, USA?

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...