Bafflement

clipped from www.victorhanson.com If ragtag jihadists can silence Europe’s self-styled courageous intelligentsia over a few cartoons or an opera, imagine what a nuclear China will soon do. When Bush spends billions on AIDS in Africa, asks the EU3 and the U.N. to deal with Iran, and relents on global warming, it earns him as much support from Europeans as generous federal spending, prescription drugs, No Child Left Behind, and immigration reform did at home from liberals. Why? Because most of the anger and outrage is not over substance so much as a sense of lost power — the Europeans of their lost world before 1939, the American Left of the halcyon days of the 1960s. But for now hold on, as the Russians get angrier, the jihadists more desperate, Mr. Ahmadinejad closer to Armaggedon, the Chinese more eager to match new power with now old money, Europe more terrified — and the United States ever more baffled by it all.