To be clear, the question isn’t: What is Sweden going to do? Or, What is the Czech Republic going to do? Or, really, even, What is Germany going to do? Germany is a rich and powerful nation with a long history of military prowess, but Germans are not much inclined toward foreign interventions these days. The question is, What is the United States going to do about this? After the fall of the Soviet Union, Europeans thought they had the power to retreat into comfortable moral superpowerdom, as though the sum total of Western involvement and Western interest in the rest of the world were the construction of water-treatment facilities in sub-Saharan Africa (a fine and worthy undertaking, to be sure). We may look back (some of us conservatives with red faces) on George W. Bush and his nation-building democracy project, as unimpressive as that strategy appears in retrospect, and foreswear another adventure on those lines. But what’s the next big idea? Donald Trump dreams idly and daftly of seizing Iraqi oil fields; Senator Rand Paul is working very hard, without much in the way of persuasive results, to get his native libertarian non-interventionism to jibe with the realities of ISIS et al. The mainstream Democrats have settled upon the philosophy that they don’t need a philosophy, because everything that is wrong with the world is, and forever will be, George W. Bush’s fault, and, besides, somebody somewhere in Kansas is being rude to a homosexual or an abortionist.

Good fences make good neighbors. The Germans are wishing they had one right about now. What about us?