A BAD CASE OF EURO ENVY.(American Right-wing attitudes)(Column)

I'm not sure when it hit me. Maybe it was when the Bush administration announced two weeks ago that it would not be sending the Kyoto Protocol to the U.S. Senate for ratification. Or maybe it was when the Netherlands had the world's first real gay marriage last week, with all the attendant rights of straight marriage--weeks after the Vermont House of Representatives voted to outlaw the practice. Whatever the tipping point, I have been struck recently by the huge--and growing-- gap between the political, social and cultural values of the United States and Europe. Truth be told, I've been suffering a bad case of Euro envy.

A year and a half ago, I returned to the States after more than six years as a foreign correspondent. And like many U.S. expats who come home, I've been wondering why my native land seems so out of step with the other industrialized democracies at the dawn of the 21st century. The differences with Europe, in particular, have come into sharp relief since George W. Bush took office in January--from policy issues like defense and the environment to social issues like gay rights and the death penalty. Taken together, the "values gap" threatens to undermine the Atlantic alliance and, one day, America's claim to global leadership.

Why is it surfacing now? The reasons go beyond any one American leader, to the burgeoning post-cold-war order. Bush's penchant for unilateralism hasn't helped. But Europeans have long been horrified by America's embrace of gun rights, our incidence of violent crime, our infant mortality among the poor, while Americans have criticized European dependence on the welfare state--and U.S. taxpayer dollars to equip a military that supplies their security.

The changing landscape of the post-cold-war world has both made the rifts more apparent and the Europeans less likely to ignore them. When Europe faced the Soviet Union, far more pressing issues than U.S. domestic politics worried the Old World. Today, the common military threat has faded. On the continent, says Dominique Moisi of the French International Relations Institute, "there's a sense of 'Who do you think you are?' " Crucially, just as the need for American protection waned, Europe's own sense of self grew. "We have developed a European identity, a European social agenda--we are inventing a European model," says Moisi. As a result, while European criticism of America used to center on "what America did," he says--the Vietnam War, deploying theater missiles in Germany--"now it's based on what America is."

In a globalized world, all politics are global. As Karsten Voigt, coordinator for German-American relations at the Foreign Ministry in Berlin, puts it, the global reach of the media, the Internet and NGOs means every domestic issue has the potential to become a source of international conflict. U.S. high-school shootings rivet millions of Europeans to their TV sets. Human-rights ...