Eurosceptics: Victor Davis Hanson - a conservative eurosceptic who has lost touch with the reality of Europe

Victor Davis Hanson probably is on many EU-lists of conservative euro-skeptics as an intellectual who has lost touch with the reality of Europe?

In Pajamas Media he recently wrote: "The European Union was always a paradox. Its existence was predicated entirely on the notion of German guilt, translating into massive cash transfers east and south. Just as Versailles was supposed to have restrained Germany, then a divided, postwar Germany, then NATO integration and the common Soviet enemy, and then the EU — and now what next?"
 
Earlier he also wrote in the Right Wing News: "The cold war was an aberration. Note how quickly the Europeans turned on America once 400 hostile divisions were no longer on their borders. They make up a big continent with a big population that deserves pride and power commensurate with their economy and population; so it is time for both of us to recognize that, bring the troops home or redeploy them in more friendly eastern European countries, and as friends let them develop their own military identity. Keeping 200,000 troops abroad to protect a rich continent is unhealthy for all parties involved." Sounds good? Not really.

Unfortunately Mr. Hanson is not qualifying his argument, or elaborating on the reasons why successive US Administrations, Democrat and Republican alike, have kept troops on the European continent and why they are now even planning to build a missile defense shield there.  Or that most Eastern European countries are members of the EU and that any unilateral deal between the US and these countries could eventually jeopardize their membership in the EU.
 
Obviously Mr. Hanson is free to say and write whatever he likes, but one should certainly not qualify him as a reliable and balanced source of information about Europe.

Footnote: Wikipedia identifies Victor Davis Hanson as "a registered member of the Democratic Party who voted for George W. Bush in the 2000 and 2004 elections. He has been described as a "Neoconservative" by some commentators,and has stated : "I came to support neocon approaches first in the wars against the Taliban and Saddam, largely because I saw little alternative."

EU-Digest

A disturbing US perspective on Europe by Victor Davis Hanson: "Crises show new Europe still much like old Europe"

"Nearly 10 years ago, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld provoked outrage by referring to "Old Europe." How dare he, snapped the French and Germans, call us "old" when the utopian European Union was all the rage, the new euro was soaring in value, and the United States was increasingly isolated under the Bush administration!

Yet the more things change in Europe, the more they stay the same. The island of Britain usually is, and is not, a part of Europe — carefully pulling out when things heat up, terrified that it will be pulled back in when things boil over. British Prime Minister David Cameron knows the old script well, as he adamantly and publicly insists that Great Britain is still a part of the crumbling European Union while privately assuming that it is not.

Jews have always been smeared by ambivalent Europeans -- discriminated against as too clannish in their creed, without ancestral land-holding lineages and aristocratic status.

Once again Jews are now beginning to feel as unwelcome in Europe as they did in the 1930s -- or in 1543, when Martin Luther wrote his "On the Jews and Their Lies." Jewish academics are sometimes shunned at international conferences in Europe. Some suburbs in Paris or Rotterdam are no longer safe for Jews to walk about. Europe is largely anti-Israel and probably always will be.

Most European "grandees" recently felt that the American cowboys got what they deserved in Iraq and during the financial panic of 2008. Then they blamed their own fiscal meltdown on imported Wall Street "Viral Diseases and Infections" viruses -- only to appeal for bailouts when southern European defaults threatened to destroy the European Union. In response, we habitually declare our independence and isolation.

Like clockwork every few decades, some self-described European "visionaries" swear that the continent can either live in peace under utopian protocols or, more darkly, be united under one grand -- and undemocratic -- system, willingly or not. But for all the noble pretensions of the Congress of Vienna or the European Union -- or the nightmarish spread of Napoleon's Continental System and the Third Reich -- and for all the promises of European-born fascism, communism and socialism, the result is always the same: disunion, acrimony and infighting.

That "Schizophrenia" is what we should expect from dozens of cultures and histories squeezed into too small a continent full of lots of bright -- and quite proud -- people. Every new Europe always ends up as old Europe.

Note EU-Digest: A  harsh, at times objective, but mostly offensive evaluation of Europe by Victor Davis Hanson, without any positive affirmations. Most disturbing however is where Mr. Hanson compares the EU with the Third Reich. Davis Hanson is a military historian, columnist, political essayist and a former classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Sanford University in the US.

For more: Donald Rumsfeld Old Europe: Donald Rumsfeld knew Old Europe pretty well - South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com