It’s Victor Davis Hanson day, and he returns to the topic of the future of NATO and the US-Europe alliance in another great column: Lovin’ Europe by Leavin’.

Meanwhile, the American people who don’t read Foreign Affairs or go to briefings at Brookings grow increasingly cynical. It is not just that they grow tired with the French, or expect predictable German ingratitude — and are disgusted by Belgian silliness, Scandinavian moralizing, or Spanish and Greek antics. No, most Americans have simply lost their old willingness to support and protect Old Europe. This is a grassroots feeling, and it is relatively new — and even the cheap anti-European rhetoric of the cable news shows does not capture the simmering anger of the American people.

Oh, we recognize our common intellectual and cultural heritage. We appreciate the need for joint action in the so-called war against terrorism. And we like visiting European capitals, and enjoy many aspects of present-day European culture. But it is for those very reasons of wishing to preserve some sort of relationship that we must abandon the status quo and think of radically new ways to relate to our friends and stewards of our common cultural ancestry.

We can begin with NATO and the so-called Atlantic Alliance. Germany is up. Russia is in. America is out. The NATO plea that Europeans would like to have helped out more in Iraq, if we had just been more diplomatic — in the way that they had deployed to Afghanistan — is a myth. There was never an impressive NATO presence in Afghanistan, at least commensurate with the forces that a continent-sized ally should mobilize. The Spanish were murdered by terrorists whose ultimate genesis lay in the madrassas of North Africa and the camps along the Afghan-Pakistani border; and yet there are few Europeans there now amid the peaks working with President Musharraf and American Special Forces to prevent more al Qaedists from plying their trade.

We lament the lack of plentiful European troops in Afghanistan and Iraq for a variety of other reasons. Almost 150,000 American sailors, airmen, and soldiers are concurrently stationed in various European countries while thin lines of Americans battle in the Afghan badlands and the Sunni Triangle — a de facto damning indictment of our entire approach to military deployment abroad.