Drifting paths lead to U.S.-European split. (Commentary).

SOME cities have belching smokestacks; Washington has think tanks and cable television studios. And of the great cloud of empty verbiage released daily over the nation's capital, an unusually large share emanates from "foreign policy intellectuals," or FPIs.

Lately they have been preoccupied with the estrangement of the U.S. and Europe, particularly France, over a decision to fight a war against Iraq. Seminars have been held, talks have been given, thick position papers have been issued. And for the non-EPI, little light has been shed.

Until now. A small book called "Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order," by a certified FPI named Robert Kagan, succeeds in explaining, in plain language, why the present crisis in the Western alliance was inevitable, and why it may be irreversible.

Kagan is unmoved by the reflexive anti-Americanism coursing through Europe. As an American scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace living among the Eurocrats in Brussels, he resists as well the exuberant French-bashing that many Americans have indulged in over the past months.

In fact, the greatest virtue of his analysis is its generosity: Kagan is strongly pro-American but gives the French and other Europeans their due. Over the last generation, he notes, they have brought forth on their continent a "paradise" of peace and prosperity that no rational observer, glancing over the previous centuries of strife and bloodshed, had a right to expect.

German lion, French lamb

"Within the confines of Europe," Kagan writes, "the age-old laws of international relations have been repealed." Power politics, built on the assumption that national interests will always conflict, has been replaced by transnational commercial arrangements and friendly accommodation. A miracle has been the result: "the German lion has laid down with the French lamb."

This is an achievement of world-historical importance. Yet it has been purchased at a price. Europe has become weak. The falling defense budgets of its constituent states, and the rickety foreign-policy apparatus of the European Union, render it incapable of projecting power significantly beyond its borders.

Forgetting this, Europe has drawn precisely the wrong lesson from its idyllic success. "Freed from the requirements of any military deterrence, internal or external," Kagan writes, Europeans are convinced that "their way of settling international problems now has universal application."

Meanwhile, the U.S. has grown more powerful, commercially and militarily. Indeed, U.S. power, along with the willingness of American leaders to deploy it when necessary -- whether during the long decades of the Cold War or in regional conflicts such as Bosnia and Kosovo -- is the crucial fact that has made the European paradise possible.

Exporting the European miracle to all reaches of the globe, including to regions intimidated by rogue regimes like Iraq or North Korea, has become the mission of high-minded statesmen from France and Germany.

Though Kagan glosses over the point, Americans, too, succumb occasionally to their own misbegotten brand of idealism: the Wilsonian faith that American-style democratic capitalism is a kind of universal aphrodisiac, capable of pacifying the most hostile cultures if correctly applied.

The difference is that the U.S. is willing to use power to advance its interests and preserve the peace, while Europeans, without recourse to military power of their own, have come to see almost any use of force as a threat to peace, and as a challenge to their mission in the world.

What we have, in other words, is an irreducible clash of ideologies, each perfectly sensible on its own terms. And it is further complicated by the elementary habits of human psychology.

Europe and the U.S. stare at each other across a "power gap." Over time, the gratitude of the weak for the protection of the strong will curdle into resentment, especially when, as in the case of Europe, the weak have come to see strength itself as somehow crude and illegitimate.

So the fissure over Iraq was inevitable. Can it be repaired? Among FPIs, Kagan is perhaps the leading theorist of Wilsonian idealism, and like all idealists he is optimistic. Europe is too reliant on American power, he says, to become permanently and actively antagonistic towards it.

Perhaps. But what of the other end of the equation? The revulsion many Americans feel for France today is unprecedented in recent memory. It has even grown to the point where it is almost as vast as the revulsion the French feel for the U.S. Americans have long known that their generosity made possible the European paradise. What is new is that they no longer seem to care whether the paradise will last.

Andrew Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.