Masters of War, by Thomas Meaney, in Harpers:
The Atlanticist is a special species of Western liberal who sees the world order as an American-led, European-assisted project that requires hard-nosed dealing with the rest of the globe, which must, whether through entreaties or force, hegemony or domination, be kept in its place. For Atlanticists, “credibility” is a word to conjure with. It means staying the course in whatever quagmire they have made—from Vietnam to Afghanistan—the idea being that rival powers will take this as a sign of steadfastness rather than the hubris of an elite that diagnoses its own citizenry’s aversion to wars abroad as a form of populist disease. Though Atlanticism began its life as Anglo-Saxonism—and the U.S.-U.K. relationship remains its kernel—its most pungent variants, and the fervor of the converted, are found in Central and Eastern Europe. The arteries of Atlanticism run across the Continent in the form of NATO academies, John F. Kennedy Avenues, and the Amerikahäuser in German cities, where you can check out a biography of Davy Crockett or The Great Depression for Dummies and gaze on the walls at posters of national parks. The Munich Conference itself is only one among a galaxy of Atlanticist institutions—the German Marshall Fund, the Federal Academy for Security Policy, the Atlantic Council, the Atlantic Initiative, the Deutsche Atlantische Gesellschaft, the Atlantic Brücke—all of which tug hard to forestall the expiry date of a worldview that has seen better days.