ABSTRACT
Analysts of Western European perspectives on security questions have more in common with psychologists applying a Rorschach test than with anatomists performing a dissection. All too frequently such people draw arguments from the available evidence to support their prior inclinations rather than reaching well-grounded, let alone well-balanced, conclusions based on analysis. This is hardly surprising. In the diverse and substantial body of evidence about Western European attitudes on security matters, there is indeed the basis for a wide range of interpretations. That evidence, in sum, resembles an utterance of the oracle at Delphi more closely than a finely honed Socratic dialogue. In this chapter, I will not shrink from presenting the paradoxes and inconsistencies so easily found not only between different strands of thought in Western Europe, but also within particular strands and even within the minds of individual Western Europeans. A test of first-rate intelligence, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once put it, is the capacity to hold two opposing ideas at the same time and retain the capacity for effective action. Western European thinking about strategy in the world of the 1980s has, by general consent, no trouble meeting the first of these twin criteria. The issue, from the US vantage point, is whether it does—or will soon again—meet the second.
