Why is U.S. foreign policy so fundamentally irreconcilable with that of our European friends? Our differences are still being ignored or minimized by just about all parties, but real differences there are.

...the fact is Europeans and Americans no longer share a common view of the world. On the all-important question of power -- the utility of power, the morality of power -- they have parted ways. Europeans believe they are moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. Europe itself has entered a post-historical paradise, the realization of Immanuel Kant's "Perpetual Peace." The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international rules are unreliable and where security and the promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might.