"We should force European governments to choose between Paris and Washington"
About this Quote
A blunt sentence designed to sound like strategy and feel like a threat. Richard Perle isn’t offering a diplomatic preference; he’s prescribing a loyalty test. The verb "force" does the heavy lifting: it signals impatience with persuasion and a belief that alliance management is best handled through pressure, not courtship. That choice of language also flatters American power by implying Europe’s real agency lies in picking a patron, not shaping outcomes.
The "Paris and Washington" framing is clever in its cynicism. It collapses a messy continent into a symbol, with Paris standing in for a certain European idea: multilateralism, restraint, and skepticism of U.S. military adventures. Washington, by contrast, becomes shorthand for hard power and unilateral initiative. Perle’s binary erases Berlin, Brussels, and the institutional EU on purpose; if Europe is reduced to France versus America, then dissent looks like vanity, not principle.
Context matters: this line reads like the post-9/11, Iraq-era worldview where hesitation was treated as moral failure and coalition-building meant separating the compliant from the recalcitrant. It’s the logic behind "Old Europe" rhetoric and the cultivation of ad hoc alliances. The subtext is disciplinary: punish European autonomy so it doesn’t become contagious. The intent isn’t unity; it’s hierarchy, enforced by making neutrality impossible and disagreement costly.
The "Paris and Washington" framing is clever in its cynicism. It collapses a messy continent into a symbol, with Paris standing in for a certain European idea: multilateralism, restraint, and skepticism of U.S. military adventures. Washington, by contrast, becomes shorthand for hard power and unilateral initiative. Perle’s binary erases Berlin, Brussels, and the institutional EU on purpose; if Europe is reduced to France versus America, then dissent looks like vanity, not principle.
Context matters: this line reads like the post-9/11, Iraq-era worldview where hesitation was treated as moral failure and coalition-building meant separating the compliant from the recalcitrant. It’s the logic behind "Old Europe" rhetoric and the cultivation of ad hoc alliances. The subtext is disciplinary: punish European autonomy so it doesn’t become contagious. The intent isn’t unity; it’s hierarchy, enforced by making neutrality impossible and disagreement costly.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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