Stardate 20020823.0712

(Captain's log): Continuing to work backwards through my mail (a process I'm probably going to give up on soon, since it would take a year to clear it all at the rate I'm going), I wanted to respond to a point several people made with regard to my comments about how overrated "international support" was. I wrote:

But I've never seen any explanation of just why it was that the US actually required "enthusiastic international cooperation", or indeed any international cooperation for this war. Because; just because.

Because if we don't, then all those chattering voices have to admit to themselves that they don't actually matter at all, that their voices are just background noise.

Jay Mazumdar's response to this was representative of the others I received:

This might literally be true today, regarding the need for military cooperation for large-scale endeavors. However, if your attitude were to represent official U.S. policy, and I think it does, words like these will ultimately come back to haunt us. One day we'll need Europe and other erstwhile allies: to fight drug wars and crime syndicates or smugglers or non-al-Qaeda terrorists, for example. We made need their help with intelligence, as their agencies are generally as competent and well-informed as ours, if not more. When we need their help, they might dig up some language like yours and tell us to take a hike. That's exactly what diplomacy is supposed to prevent.

I guess I'm too much the engineer; something is what it does. The value of a thing is its utility (except for children, who don't need any excuse).

Seems to me that a lot of the people who are holding up the banner of "international support" are seeing it as an end in itself, rather than a utilitarian means of accomplishing a goal. But despite the dreams of internationalists, I remain convinced that most international cooperation is motivated by self interest, not by friendship and definitely not by altruism

Which is why I can't see these arguments. What I come back to every time I try to analyze it is this: Just what, exactly, would we lose?

I think we would lose little or nothing of value. There are really only two kinds of things involved which are important: those which we wouldn't lose because withholding them would hurt the Europeans as much as it would hurt us, if not more, and those which we wouldn't lose because we already don't have them.

Europe won't impose a trade embargo on the US; they need our trade just as much as we need theirs. And I don't think that they'll withhold cooperation on large law enforcement operations, because they benefit from those as much as we do.

On the other hand, Europe can't withhold military support because they don't have anything substantial to offer, and even if they did we already aren't getting it.

In fact, everything involved in the relationship between the US and Europe which I would not like to lose benefit the Europeans at least as much as they benefit us, and I feel pretty confident that despite all their harrumphing and wounded pride, that the Europeans won't be willing to cut off their own noses to spite our faces.

A rocky diplomatic relationship with Europe could cause us a little trouble down the road in peripheral ways. Of that there's no question. But the cost of that is not infinite, and in the long run you have to make a cost-benefit calculation and decide what the greater expense is.

I'd rather have Europe hate us than to have one of our cities nuked by a smuggled Iraqi bomb. I'll take all the harrumphing that Europe can throw at us in preference to that.