The congressional cafeteria has renamed French fries “freedom fries” and French toast “freedom toast.” And why not? French diplomats work overtime to stymie the United States; Jacques Chirac pokes us in the eye daily; and meanwhile the French haven’t put up a single soldier or franc.

Maybe this is the deal we should offer: If France is so convinced four more months will bring a change in Saddam’s defiance, let’s indulge them. But in exchange, let France start paying its share of the $30 billion it is costing American taxpayers to send 250,000 troops to the Middle East and back (that’s the price tag, mind you, if they never fire a shot).

This logic should be understandable, even to the French. They want inspectors. Inspectors are in Iraq only thanks to the deployment of U.S. (and British) force. Time for the French, and the rest of Europe, to stop free-riding on American arms and treasure.

But European free-riding deserves a more subtle and empathetic analysis. “Of Paradise and Power,” an insightful new book by Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, offers this. The book, expanded from an article the Brussels-based Kagan wrote last summer, is causing a sensation in foreign policy circles on both sides of the Atlantic. Kagan’s premise is simple: With the Cold War over, America and Europe are bound to assess global threats like Iraq differently because of the dramatic disparity in military power each possesses.

This arms gap is the result of conscious choices. Europe’s collective GDP is about the same size as America’s, so Europe could, with equal effort, support American-sized armies. Yet Europe has chosen to devote a much smaller amount to military spending. Instead, the entire European project has been to transcend force as a means of resolving disputes. Nations have increasingly surrendered their sovereignty to pan-European institutions in pursuit of this vision.

This is an historic accomplishment, Kagan notes – aimed at taming “the German question” and moving past centuries of bloodshed. But it has bred a mindset in which Europeans have an outsized stake in the notion that force is passe in global affairs.

This is the “paradise” Kagan speaks of – a Europe at peace, bound by treaty and commerce and currency. The upsides are obvious. But the downside is a continent so bereft of military power that Europe couldn’t act in Bosnia, or stop ethic cleansing in Kosovo, without American intervention.

The paradox, Kagan says, is that Europe’s “paradise” is possible only because American power protects the world from dangers in the Hobbesian jungle outside. Only because we’re manning the watch in the rest of the world, in other words, does France feel free to lecture us about the virtues of transcending force.

The upshot is a predictable and understandable gap between the American psychology of strength and Europe’s psychology of weakness. America sees a danger like Saddam and says, “Well, we can remove it.” Europe, unaided, couldn’t step up to genocide in its backyard in the 1990s.

As one U.S. critic sneered to Kagan, “When you have a hammer, all problems start to look like nails.” “This is true,” Kagan notes. “But nations without great military power face the opposite danger: When you don’t have a hammer, you don’t want anything to look like a nail.”

Kagan says Europe’s passionate anxiety over President Bush’s plan to topple Saddam stems from its profound stake in the idea that man can solve international disputes without force. If this model doesn’t really fit the world beyond Europe, Kagan says, it naturally plants scary doubts in the European soul: Maybe their “paradise” isn’t sustainable after all. Given Europe’s bloody history, and all that’s been done to transcend it, this is a frightening specter, indeed.

Kagan, back from Paris, told me by phone last week that the divide is only deepening. “Chirac has never been more popular,” he said. “He’s intoxicated with the acclaim that he’s receiving.”

Keep Kagan’s analysis in mind as the Iraq endgame plays out. “On major strategic and international questions today,” he quips, “Americans are from Mars, and Europeans are from Venus.”

Matt Miller is a syndicated columnist. His e-mail address is: [email protected].