If America Is Mars And Europe Venus, How's Europe Doing?

[Geee]

Investors Business Daily:

'Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus," wrote Robert Kagan in "Of Paradise and Power," published in 2003, just as the U.S. went into Iraq.

 

Americans, he said, see "an anarchic Hobbesian world," where security and a liberal order depend on military might, while Europe is moving "beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and co-operation."

 

A dozen years later, Europeans and not a few Americans have been asking how well Mars has been working out for America. But Americans and an increasing number of Europeans should also be asking how Venus is working out for Europe.

 

Not so well, is the obvious answer.

 

If America's economic growth has been sluggish, with high unemployment and withdrawal from the work force, most of Europe hasn't been growing at all, with unemployment, especially among the young, remaining high in much of the continent.