This new book explains the recent rift between America and some of her oldest European allies, especially with Germany and France. Particular attention is devoted to the several competing interpretations of the Euro-American rift, for example, that Europeans were taken aback when American neo-conservative leaders scornfully rejected their well-meant offers of post-9/11 assistance with expressions of disdain for the allies' backward military technology and budgets. Merkel's interpretation emphasizes America's neo-imperial, unilateralist posture and policies as contrasted to the Wilsonian internationalism that created the United Nations and established international rule of law backed up by the Security Council, a web of international treaties and international courts, including the International Court of Criminal Justice. Today's American leaders thus oppose European champions of an American-initiated international order while identifying themselves with the imperialist European doctrines and practices of another age. The emotional European resistance fastened upon three themes, democracy, plutocracy, and the nature of the good society, all clearly interlinked.
The first involves well-known recent failings of American democracy, for example the widely-observed presidential elections in Florida in 2000 and their resolution by Supreme Court fiat, and the second that American policy in the Middle East and towards the European allies seems dominated by rampant greed, especially for oil, financial benefits, and economic advantages at home and abroad. Both are perceived as corruptions of an idealized image of democracy and an important reason to balk at American leadership under Bush, especially in the Middle East. Finally, there are different visions of the good society and public values in Europe and America. Europeans still deeply believe in the welfare state as the only legitimate contemporary form of social order, a national solidary community with something for every member. The military potency of the American warfare state reflects a huge defense budget - bigger than the 17 next national defense budgets in the world - at the expense of precisely those weaker and lower parts of American society that ought to be served by a welfare state, however modified.