German correspondent for the weekly DIE ZEIT writes a patient Op-Ed in the Washington Post to Republican presidential contenders explaining that “Europe is the European Union, a modern entity of 27 democratic countries” and no longer the Soviet Union.

Everyone should read this. As another German journalist in the U.S. for a couple years, the reflexive fear-mongering about Europe always strikes me as very strange. Europe is an ally to the U.S. in many ways, many of its countries are members of NATO, and without European action to halt its debt crisis, the U.S. economy would likely go down the toilet right along with the European one. Rhetoric that pretends this is some Cold War foe is perplexing, particularly from the very people who want to sit at the negotiating table with those Europeans next year.