We’ve been Europe’s security blanket for six decades. We are Japan’s security blanket. We are South Korea’s. It’s been said that were it not for us, the French would be speaking German and the Germans would be speaking Russian. In 1938, the West decided it couldn’t be Czechoslovakia’s security blanket and sold out that country in Munich, Germany. The rest, as they say, is history.
This comes from Investor’s Business Daily by way of the Instapundit by way of Books, Inq.
That, if I may say, is a very US-centric way of viewing the world. I don’t think the rest of us would see it the way that the writer does.
Yes, and it’s an overstatement too. I don’t think the French would be speaking German had WWII taken longer to fight or had the Nazis conquered France for decades, but they would have tried to eliminate French along with any resistance to the Reich. But the focus of what I read on Investor’s Business Daily was that the US military should remain in Iraq, noting how no one is complaining about forces remaining in Europe. No complaining about the failure of our efforts in Haiti either.