The Revolution in Transatlantic Affairs - by Tony Corn
Throughout the 1990s, this infatuation with globalization and a "time-space compression" in the virtual world led most Westerners to ignore the twofold epochal change taking place in the real world: the transfer of the center of gravity of the world economy from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with "three billion new capitalists" poised to put an end to three centuries of Euro-Atlantic economic primacy; and the rise of a "second nuclear age" in Asia and with it, the concomitant end of three centuries of Western military superiority
If Americans these days tend to have forgotten something as basic as the security dilemma, Europeans for their part have serious difficulties remembering something equally basic that they used to perform with undeniable virtuosity: coercive diplomacy. Be it with Iraq yesterday or Iran today, an astounding percentage of the allegedly sophisticated EU elites have the hardest time grasping what any American redneck knows intuitively: namely, that the collective threat to use force is still the best way to avoid having recourse to actual force. Fifty years of increasing focus on intra-EU politics has led EU elites to mistake "multi-level governance" (read: horse-trading by capitals in Brussels) for the whole of statecraft. But genuine diplomacy always rests on the implicit threat to use force, and the EU mantra about force as last resort should logically lead Europeans to view coercive diplomacy as their preferred weapon.
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