Stardate 20040102.1327

In other words, by being European, or at least trying to seem as if we were.

His second point is equally wrong. He writes:

It never ceases to amaze me, how tyrants can "misunderestimate" America so badly. They think that because we lead free and prosperous lives, we are unwilling to defend our way of life.

The historical pattern is that people who become comfortable also become complacent and decadent. It's happened many times in the past, and it's happened now in Europe. I think it was an easy mistake to assume it had also happened to us.

Indeed, since 9/11 there have been many in the world who have demonstrated that they still don't understand our national spirit, or understand that at the core we have not become European. In fact, when we began to demonstrate that fact, many tried to convince us we should, to no avail.

Perhaps they had seen our unprecedented wealth and assumed we had become so comfortable that we would no longer be willing to make any sacrifices. Perhaps they saw how we squabble constantly about nearly everything, and how varied we are in life styles and clothing and political attitudes, and how much so many of us seem to detest one another, and assumed we could not unify in the face of a major threat.

We Americans agree to disagree. They see the disagreement, and miss the deeper agreement.

This isn't anything new. Since its founding, the US has fought a major war at least once every 30 years, in part because too often there's been an assumption by others that the American people used to be strong but had become weak and decadent. But the only reason they thought we used to be strong was that we'd proved it in the previous war, and as more and more time passed since that previous war, the easier it was to believe we were no longer willing to fight another.

Given how often Santayana's famous dictum about remembering the past so as to avoid repeating it has been used rhetorically against us, it's curious that they themselves have not realized that we had appeared just as disunited before the last major war we fought, and the one before that, and...

I do think there's one thing that's different this time. Every other time, foreign presumption of American decadence and weakness was seen as a consequence of presumed decline. The presumption of American decline derived from foreign contempt among those who thought themselves to be strong. But this time, decadence and weakness have been proclaimed to be virtues, and courage and fortitude and conviction are condemned as being flaws in our national character, or so we are being told by those who have themselves become weak. Post-modern nations aren't supposed to fight wars; they're supposed to cooperate and try to appease those who attack them. Victory comes from acting virtuously; defeating the enemy has nothing to do with it. True victory is spiritual and moral, and the way you know you've won is by the number of people who smile at you, even if they're actually smirking.

After the 9/11 attack, there was an outpouring of sympathy for us as victims, but only as long as we didn't fight back. Once it became clear we would, much of that sympathy evaporated.

That aspect of it all is new, but the tendency to underestimate America has a long and distinguished history.

We think of Winston Churchill as being the archetypal Brit. He was a descendant of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, victor of the Battle of Blenheim. And of course all through the 1930's he was probably the most vocal of opposition MP's in criticizing the government's policy of appeasement towards Germany. Churchill was more than just a leader; he became an icon of Britishness during the war.

Many people are not aware that Churchill's mother was American and that he felt considerable pride in his American heritage.

Churchill was asked by the King to become PM in a national unity government after Germany invaded Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands. He led the UK during the "Dark Days" between the fall of France and the invasion of the USSR, during which the UK stood alone against Germany and Italy. Once Germany launched Barbarossa against the USSR the UK was no longer alone, but the USSR was even more beleaguered than the UK.

Churchill had long since established a close personal relationship with Roosevelt; it is not wrong to say they had become friends. Roosevelt wanted America to become an active belligerent in the war, but it wasn't politically possible – until Pearl Harbor. In the third volume of his history of WWII, Churchill wrote about his reaction to the news of the Japanese attack:

No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. I could not foretell the course of events. I do not pretend to have measured accurately the mart