Europeans Are From Venus

by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, review of Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe by James J. Sheehan, The New York Times, February 10, 2008

It isn’t necessary to agree with Evelyn Waugh writing to his friend Graham Greene — “Of course the Americans are cowards. They are almost all the descendants of wretches who deserted their legitimate monarchs for fear of military service” — to see clearly that the United States isn’t a warlike country at all. In many ways it has always been more deeply peaceable in its instincts than ever Europe was.