Here is a story in the Boston Globe this morning that summarizes what has been going on in Western Europe concerning immigration. The bottom line? A significant anti-immigrant backlash in France, the Netherlands, Germany and Great Britain. I suspect that backlash will also take hold, it if has not already, in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Belgium and Italy, which are not mentioned in the article. Since the dawn of mankind, people have consistently resisted the subversion of their "way of life" by outsiders, whether through armed resistance to foreign invaders or conquerors, or with more subtle social and political discrimination when dealing with people who have come to their lands to find economic opportunity or escape persecution. One of the truly great aspects of America is that, while we have always resisted the newcomers to a certain extent, we have a mechanism in place to assimilate those newcomers so that they adapt to our "way of life". That mechanism, the true genius of America's melting pot", is our ability to incorporate some of their "way of life" into our own. We adopt words, cuisine, traditional festivals and numerous other small parts of life from the 'mother country' that make the new arrivals and their children feel that their heritage is still important. Of course, on all the important matters, American culture prevails (freedom of speech, of religion, etc.). Western Europe has been unable or unwilling to adopt the American way when dealing with their immigrants. Today, according to the article, they are starting to adopt at least part of the equation. Unfortunately, having lived in Germany for almost three years when I was in the Army, my impression of the Germans, at least, is that they will be unable to give up their deeply held parochial beliefs about the ethnic centrality of what it is to be a German. I think the French, Dutch and others are the same. That is the key difference between Western Europe and the U.S. when it comes to assimilating immigrants. There is no such thing as an 'ethnic American'. We are all mutts, made up of the genetic material of people from all over the globe. No matter how often or passionately some members of each generation of Americans tries to advocate that there are only 'true Americans' of a certain race or creed or ethnic group, the fact is that, in the end, we adopt each new group into the fold. The Europeans may not be capable of that kind of thinking.

On a different subject, two former defense secretaries write this op-ed piece in the Washington Post advocating the creation of a conventional warhead for some of our nuclear-tipped submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Read the article. It makes perfect sense to me.

Also in the Post, Jackson Diehl writes about the efforts of Truman Democrats to fend off the power of the isolationist leftists and re-establish the democracy's credibility on defense related matters and an internationalist foreign policy.