ABSTRACT
America’s security arrangement with Europe is based upon a rather common sense deduction from both the short and long-term consequences of history. 1 In this century, the US involvement in two great European wars suggests a connection binding the fates of Europe and the United States. A longer view of the historical relationship reveals that America’s political institutions, languages, and culture—measured by what we eat, how we dress, and the aesthetic pleasures derived from art—share much with what is generically described as the Western experience. Despite non-European cultural influences and what, until recently, was a geographical remoteness leaving us out of Europe’s mainstream, we are a child of Europe. Well before the age of rapid communications, the tie was maintained by regular waves of immigrants whose arrival insured a flow of correspondence across the Atlantic, visits back to the “old country,” and a sense of connection between Europe and the United States. The same connection to Europe can be found among the French-English neighbors to our north or the Spanish-Portuguese neighbors to our south, but in the 20th century the United States cast a long shadow and found it impossible to be unobtrusive. What we did or failed to 414do mattered outside of our national frontiers. The child of Europe had grown and become the head of the household.
