The European Union is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and a dubious celebration it is.

The European Union is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and a dubious celebration it is. The milestone is an occasion for its boosters to say, again, that it has kept the peace in Europe for five decades: a claim that has everything going for it but chronology. Peace in Europe made the EU possible, not the other way around. But a mythologically glorious past beats the EU's resentful present. European populations continue to balk at the ever-tighter integration that their leaders have in mind. Hence the project has stalled. A good thing, too. It has become clearer and clearer that further integration would be inimical to American interests: A Euro-wide foreign policy would surely have prevented British participation in the Iraq War, for example. Many Europeans--especially those best disposed to us--oppose it. Which makes it all the odder that American policy still favors continued integration. Some clear-eyed Republican presidential candidate should announce a change of course; it will cost him support only at the State Department.