The article starts with this:

As the American Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, arrives in Europe, it is instructive to look at the areas where her country’s interests clash with those of the EU. They fall into six broad categories: Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Israel, China and what one might loosely call “supra-nationalism” - that is, the power of the UN, the Kyoto process, the International Criminal Court and so on. These disputes are not unrelated; they are linked by a common ideological thread. In each case, the United States is pro-democracy, the EU pro-stability.

And ends with this:

But Miss Rice should be careful. Forty years of solid Washington support for the EU have not led to any reciprocal pro-Americanism in Brussels. As she has found before, and will find again, Europeans often exhibit a psychotic desire to bite the hand that freed them.

In between, the Telegraph article asserts that the US has been reliably pro-democracy everywhere around the world with the exception of with the EU, which it sees as a drift away from democratic principles into a different kind of an aristocracy.

There is at least a bit of the truth in this; the United States is more likely to be pro-democracy than the EU leadership (and in those cases, I would argue, the US is taking the longer view where the EU trades future gains for what it hopes would be immediate stability). But the US still makes compromises. Russia and China stand out as countries where the politics can’t be described as particularly liberal where the US has taken a mild approach to diplomacy. Throughout the Middle East the US has applied open pressure (military or diplomatic) selectively.

Every nation has to pick and choose which battles are most meaningful, which battles are winnable, and which battles have nothing but an unhappy outcome attached. It is nice to see the US portrayed in a positive light in any mainstream European media outlet, and I think the author of the article is right in at least one area: the EU does represent a drift away from direct democracy locally (although, the drift is happening with the complicity and votes of huge chunks of Europe--proving that the desire to have a say in one’s own governance is hardly universal) and democratic principles abroad.

But what does the US gain with more openly opposing the EU? Where is the winnable scenario for the US in pressuring the EU and the European states to be more open with its own people? Or, even, to be supportive of efforts to peacefully bring down regimes in places like Cuba? What exactly can the United States do with European allies who are not particularly friendly to our goals and often openly unfriendly to this administration? Courting them won’t bring them back in line and challenging them will just broaden the anti-American sentiment.

I suggest that America is doing precisely what it needs to do: trying to establish more friendly bonds with emerging democracies in the region like Poland. France and Germany are treated like the countries that they are: diminishing in power abroad and less than vital to America’s new policy needs.

In Europe, as in Iraq, the American response should be “Stay the course.”

Read the article.

Update: And, if you don’t check out the trackbacks, allow me to point you to The Colossus who has thoughts on this article, too. His thoughts on China seem particularly appropriate.