Regarding the JPod/Krikorian spat on U.S. troops in Europe, as a famously moderate bipartisan centrist, I find myself caught in the middle between their two extremes. The U.S. military on the Continent should not “come home” for McGovernite or any other reasons: America needs to be out there, engaged in the world.

But hundreds of thousands of U.S. personnel should not be living permanently in Europe, for reasons I go into in America Alone. The problem is nicely encapsulated in a remark by Karl Peter Bruch, the then Interior Minister for Rhineland-Palatinate. When Rummy first mooted reducing the American presence and the Germans started lobbying Washington to change their minds, Herr Bruch said:

We realised that our installations are in grave danger. And then came the question, what can we do to make us more attractive?

“Our” installations? Who’s this “our,” kemosabe? These bases are built, maintained and staffed by the United States – and paid for by U.S. taxpayers. Yet Herr Bruch regards them as a permanent feature of the German landscape, like the Black Forest.

As noted here yesterday, the U.S. is not a conventional imperial power. It garrisons not ramshackle colonies but some of the wealthiest nations of the planet. Absolved of the core responsibility of sovereign jurisdictions — defense of the realm – Europe decayed, almost inevitably, into a kind of semi-non-aligned status, and persuaded itself that it had developed a higher model of nationhood, not realizing that its lavish social programs were, in effect, subsidized by the Pentagon. This has been bad for Europe – and bad for America, too, in that most of the Democratic Party would like to introduce the European model here, apparently unaware that it depends on a strong America to render it viable.

The Continentals are so insulated from reality they don’t even value the U.S. presence in strategic terms. German politicians speak of U.S. military bases mainly as an economic issue – all those German supermarkets and German restaurants that depend on American custom. At the risk of igniting old controversies, the Continentals are the defense equivalents of those wealthy S-CHIP families: They would function better as adult nations if they had to accept the responsibilities of adulthood.