The gulf dividing America and Europe is one of history, not just geography

Nato is shattering into jagged shards. It is time to ask if Europe and the US now have fundamentally conflicting visions and values. Have the continents linked together by the twin tyrannies of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union – for not just my lifetime but my parents' – been blasted apart by George Bush's foreign policy?

The debate over European-American relations is being dominated by a recent essay by the US neo-conservative policy wonk Robert Kagan called Power and Weakness. He begins, provocatively: "It is time we stopped pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world." The key dividing line is over attitudes towards power.

In Europe, the shadows of Hitler, Mussolini and Vichy France darken their attitudes towards their own governments. Europeans have sublimated their national aspirations into a European Union which repudiates war between its members. The sole legitimate foreign policy tool is dialogue; violence is taboo. The founding principle of the EU is supranational – it believes that by erecting peaceful bodies that stand above nation states, we can eradicate violent conflict.

The commitment to supranationalism is so strong that the EU is seen as just one such body: the United Nations is another institutional layer that should facilitate dialogue and prevent war. Therefore, as Kagan explains, Europe "is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and co-operation". The European vision, he notes with a revealing sneer, of "a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, is the realisation of Kant's 'Perpetual Peace'." Kagan should also have pointed out that the key European value is to prevent war, at almost any cost.

In the US, the lesson drawn from the 20th century, and indeed before then, is very different. They believe that confronting "evil" (a word used without embarrassment), even at the risk of war, pays off in the end. It is only through the threat of violence that peace and freedom can ultimately prevail. The American public overwhelmingly understands their historical narrative as one of the nation fighting bravely against evil, time and again: the British empire of George III, the Third Reich, the Soviet Union and now Islamofascism. Sometimes, they admit, this has led them into mistakes, like Vietnam, but these were mistakes made in a noble cause. The key American value (in their own self-understanding, although often not in practice) is to prevent not war but tyranny – and, crucially, threats to US security.

The US therefore, in Kagan's words, "remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbseian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defence and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might". This fundamental divide "is why on major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus".

Of course, as he admits, Kagan is caricaturing vast continents, but he has hit a nerve. His very broad-brush distinction rings true. By using his model, we can see more clearly some of the flaws in the current European position towards Iraq. The Venusian vision ascribed to Europeans is, I believe, generally a good thing. I hope that, sooner or later, the European model, of regional collections of democracies pooling their sovereignty to secure peace spreads and, in time, the globe is regulated in this way.

The fundamental problem with the current European vision (and I suspect this is Blair's complaint too) is that it assumes that we can adopt the same approach both inside the EU, whose members acknowledge supranational authority, and externally, towards countries such as Iraq that repudiate all international norms, including those on genocide.

Nation-building and the spread of democracy require both an acceptance of violence as a means to an end (overthrow Saddam, build democracy) and a degree of optimism and self-confidence that Europeans seem to have lost. French culture is riddled with nihilism, from popular movies such as Irréversible to the intellectual classes who venerate the hateful and utterly bleak writings of Michel Houellebecq and the bizarre denial of reality propagated by Jean Baudrillard.

At the fag end of nationalism, as they push beyond it after seeing the damage it can bring, they find it impossible to imagine themselves back to the moment of its realisation. Their nationalism emerges only in deformed, semi-racist nostalgias such as the reveries of Jean-Marie Le Pen or Chirac's foul rants about his "sympathies with the poor French writer" who "has to put up with the noise and smell of immigrants". While American neo-conservatives, at least, have a vision of democracy for the Arab peoples – through violently overthrowing the Arab dictators who stand in its way – the French offer the oppressed Arab people nothing but a pessimistic shrug and a few million francs more for the corrupt Yasser Arafat.

Of course, there are problems with being too credulous towards US neo-cons. The current administration contains too many individuals – especially Dick Cheney – who sneer at international norms and see the US as accountable only to itself. It has refused to sign up to Kyoto and the International Criminal Court and wrecked the Convention on Biological Weapons. Even as you read this, the US is, in the name of its absurd "war on drugs", spraying Colombia with carcinogens that wreck the environment and seriously harm the health of local people. The European model is certainly preferable to this; but the solution is to try to draw the US, just like Iraq, into the web of nations.

This isn't as difficult as it sounds: 70 per cent of the American people support the International Criminal Court having jurisdiction over the US, and it is US public opinion, along with the prompting of Blair and Colin Powell, that is forcing the current administration to go as far down the UN route as possible (the UN route will probably be halted only by a French veto). Most Americans want to be part of the civilised world, although we may have to sit out the current unelected hard-right administration to experience this.

But it would be wrong, in the meantime, to oppose democracy for the Iraqi people (and the war that is the only means to achieve it, unless Saddam goes into exile) because of the flaws of the military power bringing it into place. If Europeans want more say in projects like this, they will have to do three things: develop a far more substantial military; reject the quasi-pacifism coming from the German government, that would condemn the Arab peoples to autocracy for ever; and, most importantly, if they want eventually to live on Venus, support the Martians when they constructively rebuild the world around us.

johann@johannhari.com