8 world’s oil supplies provided an additional in­centive for diplomatic unity. The unity produced by such a coincidence of factors is rare, as the widespread opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq demonstrates. Unfortunately, the Iraq War is more likely to be typical of future U.S. inter­ventions than the Gulf War. Even the Kosovo War, supported by most of America’s NATO allies, was opposed by Russia and China and therefore was not authorized by the Security Council. The rising great powers of the twenty-first century like Asia and India are likely to prefer America’s vision of world order to Europe’s. Like the U.S., they are jealous of their sover­eignty. And unlike the nations of Western Europe, they have no experience of regional in­stitutions. Indeed, their neighbors tend to be their worst enemies. Supporting this contention is the fact that the international criminal court was opposed not only by the U.S. but also by the non- or quasi-European powers: Russia, China and India. The contemporary European ideal of multi­lateralism, then, will find few supporters out­side of Europe in the twenty-first century. The real debate, in the U.S. and other extra-European great powers, will be between a more modest liberal internationalism and a quasi-imperial unilateralism. Both liberal internationalism and unilateralism will share the assumption that the nation-state will and should remain the primary unit in world affairs. As for the use of military force, this is not so much a disagreement between the U.S. and Eu­rope as it is one within Europe. For historical reasons the British and French tend to have a much greater willingness to employ force in in­ternational affairs than the Germans or Scan­dinavians. The aging of the population of the U.S., by putting a premium on the labor of young people, is likely to make it even more difficult for the U.S. military to obtain recruits. Manpower shortages, already manifested as a result of the small wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, will force the U.S. to rely to a greater degree on proxies and on technology. Already neoconservative proponents of an aggressive, expansive American foreign policy are suggesting a new draft. But the draft, FES Analyse: USA abolished in 1973, will not be reinstated in the U.S., and military service has little appeal to most Americans. The U.S. remains a deeply civilian society. In dealing with these military manpower challenges, the U.S. will be in the same position as other aging, civilian, industrial democracies like those of Western Europe and Japan. Eclipse of the Atlanticists These kinds of disagreements over both goals and methods between the U.S. and Europe are bringing about the end of the Western alliance in its familiar form. The idea of the West or the Atlantic Community was devised to rationalize the NATO alliance of the U.S. and Western Europe against the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. Samuel Huntington’s definition of the West as including the U.S. and Canada and Protes­tant and Catholic- but not Orthodox- Europe reflects this idea. Never plausible, this concep­tion of the West is now obsolete. From the eighteenth century until World War I, Americans either thought of themselves as uniquely modern inhabitants of“the New World” or as an offshoot, along with Britain, of the Germanic Protestant community. Between World War I and the early years of the Cold War, the American elite dropped the idea of a Ger­manic Protestant group of nations and fostered the myth of a secular liberal West founded on the Enlightenment ideals of the American and French revolutions. The US-Britain-Germany trinity was replaced by a US-British-French trinity. Inter­estingly, the Catholic heritage of Europe was minimized in both the Germanic Protestant the­ory and the liberal Western theory. Americans in both the Reformation and Enlightenment tradi­tions have usually feared and distrusted the Catholic Church. In the United States, the idea of the liberal West was spread to the college-educated elite by courses in“Western Civilization” which traced a direct line from ancient Greece and Rome to the American and French Revolutions and the mo­dern West. Aspects of European history which did not fit the Athens-to-Brussels paradigm, like Hellenistic and Roman imperialism and medie­val Christendom, were treated as embarrassing