Kerryphilia
The Economist has a quicky about how popular Kerry is in Europe.* It's all for superficial reasons. The man speaks French, spent time in a German boarding school, and so on. He certainly doesn't have Bush's arrogance. He is a throwback to the Empire's Europhile past. So he'll likely have a lot of goodwill with our international friends, if elected.He won't have it long. The interests of Europe and America have been moving apart for the past decade. Communism fell, and now what do we have to pull us together? Europeans distrust Israel, we distrust the Palestinians. We're obsessed with the Greater Middle East, we think the EU should take Turkey and continue to expand. Europe, not so much. There are signifigant structural diffrences in Imperial and Continental priorities.
Kerry may be able to bring a veneer of commonality to the problem; he may even address it in French. There will be a temporary peace, and a great relief from Bush's casual dismissing of the EU's concerns. But Europe will still secretly long for someone to stand up to the Americans, a British PM like Hugh Grant's in Love Actually.
We need to elect Kerry to save our short-term interests in Europe. But we also need to think about our where our long-term interests lead.
*You have to pay to get access to the article. Capitalism sucks.
