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PAGE 10
PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, FEBRUARY 3, 1984
communism" speech in 1977), and then shot to the other extreme
with Mr. Reagan's apparent attempt to demolish Russia by shouting
at it (the "empire of evil" speech, and others). What Mr. Reagan
said on January 26th [that Washington desires a "better working
relationship" with Moscow ] puts Russia back, in American
rhetoric, where most Europeans reckon it belongs.
It is a
country to be feared, with a political system to be abominated,
but it is there, and it has to be negotiated with. The change is
good news, .••but it does not end the gale of disapproval that is
blowing at Europe from the American side of the Atlantic....
From we-were-right-about-Grenada bumper-stickers on American
cars to private warnings by pro-European American diplomats,
European irritation with America is being matched by mounting
American exasperation with Europe•.•• The magazine READER'S
DIGEST, which with an American circulation of 18m is a better
guide to the American temper than the East Coast dailies, reports
that its articles on Europe have started to draw bundles of
hostile letters [from American readers]
There is a reason for this,
which Europeans need to under
stand.
The Arnerican view of
the world is different from the
European
view,
because the
Americans'
history has made
them into a different sort of
people. The Americans are not,
� too many Europeans think
they are, � collection of in
termarried Europeans who happen
to have moved sideways across
the Atlantic, plus some blacks
and hispanics.
They are the
descendants,
in overwhelming
majority, of people who left
Europe because they wanted to
be free or rich and the old
world kept them squashed and
poor: so they shook Europe's
dust off their feet.
There
were semiexceptions•.•but for
most Americans the act of going
to America was a deliberate
decision by their forebears to
turn their backs on the unsat
isfactory politics of the world
they were leaving behind.
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In America's dealings with the world, the result has been a
foreign policy which swivels between two extremes.
At one
extreme, the United States ignores the world outside the Americas
because it feels it neither likes it nor needs it. At the other,
it plunges into the world to put it to rights.
From George Washington's 1796 denunciation of "permanent al
liances" (by which he meant alliances with Europeans), the first