There is a strange sort of ‘duh?’ essay in Time by Simon Robinson, wondering why Europe has not translated its apparent public utopia at home into a substantial foreign presence abroad to balance the increasing China/U.S. dichotomy. Aside from the fact China is hardly the U.S. abroad (when was the last time China inquired about human rights or addressed a world forum on the need for patent and copyright compliance?), the piece does not make the obvious conclusion that the EU’s lack of a foreign policy presence is logically because of, not despite, its socialist cradle to grave protocols at home.

The more citizens can expect an equality of result, count on lavish benefits regardless of their own degree of effort, calibrate collective success by the ability to satisfy a number of appetites, and measure their own transcendence through the ability to create a stable welfare state, then a number of foreign policy corollaries naturally follow: pacifism (let other less sophisticated worry about Neanderthal military forces); inwardness (why risk the good life for ‘them’?); depopulation (a long lunch is far better than dirty diapers); agnosticism and/or atheism (we, not God, have created a heaven on earth so why then worry about tomorrow?); and expanding socialism (we need more money for less work and can’t afford to waste any on a defense budget). Unless the current financial earthquake, or the demographic time bomb and the accompanying rise of radical Islam, bring radical changes, expecting European help abroad in extremis would be like asking the Eloi to take on the Morlocks.