America’s internationalist ideal is dying in Europe

There are many tangible factors in the lurch to the narrow nationalism reflected in Britain’s vote to quit the European Union, the defeat of Merkel’s conservative forces by the three-year-old Alternative for Germany party in a key state election last Sunday, and the earlier rise of such movements in Poland, Hungary, France and elsewhere.

These factors include a backlash to economic dislocation caused by globalization, the floodtide of refugees coming from Syria and other failed states on Europe’s southern periphery, and the terrorist outrages committed by the Islamic State and other jihadist forces.

But there is an intangible factor as well that merits close attention in this turbulent U.S. political season. It is the waning of the cohesion and steadying influence brought by the large U.S. military, commercial and cultural commitment to a vulnerable Europe since 1945 — the steady weakening of an American ideal of engaged internationalism that was absorbed into the intellectual bloodstream of post-war Europe as the Old and New Worlds joined to rebuild a devastated continent and confront a clear Soviet menace.