Opinion: Henninger: Would Harry Truman Blame Paris?

The Europe of Charlemagne, Marco Polo and Churchill, after millennia of undoubted achievement, has finally spent itself to the verge of collapse and irrelevance. Witnessing this historic catastrophe, Barack Obama, the president of the United States, is complaining that it's bad for business in Pittsburgh. What electorates in Europe and here have long suspected is proven true. Ours is the age of small men.

Europe is in the grip of a financial plague wiping out a generation of wealth and opportunity for millions of its citizens and threatening the world's economies. Does anyone believe that JFK's Treasury secretary, Douglas Dillon, would, like Tim Geithner, wave toward Europe that the solution "is in their hands"? Or that former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, the architect of NATO, would have been as screamingly silent as Hillary Clinton is now? Or that Democratic President Harry Truman, who appointed George Marshall, would blame Madrid for tanking his re-election prospects in Milwaukee?

Before American public education fell into the anti-history hands of the teachers unions and politically corrected textbooks, Europe's heritage was routinely taught in the United States. Young Americans knew why Europe mattered in their lives. Music ed meant Mozart, Verdi, Bach and Beethoven. Art appreciation stretched from da Vinci to Picasso. Science was James Watt and Marconi. European literature, for those of us who fell into the writing trade, was an endless delirium.

Not that Europe's modern intellectuals or its political class, with notable exceptions, have made much effort to sustain the postwar ties that unraveled in recent years. For those Americans who were subjected to the moral condescension of European journalistic and academic elites in the years before Barack Obama abandoned them, the euro's current crisis is as good as it gets for Schadenfreude—if one is inclined to taking pleasure in the misery of others.

One problem with peace, especially in handsome Europe, is the illusion of economic prosperity. Life looks good. The restaurants are open. Nice clothing is available. If amid this seeming plenty, a profligate young man dissipated his life into ruin, all would call him a wastrel. Centuries of European schoolchildren once learned virtue and self-discipline from the fables of Aesop or Fontaine. "The Emperor's New Clothes" comes to mind. Alas, no one writes fables for nations, and so a whole continent can dissipate the productive wealth of its people year after year on wastrel public spending and no one will notice.

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The big story of the past six months isn't the debt itself but the market's disowning of European sovereign debt. Recall in January when this newspaper reported that investors were shifting out of European debt and buying instead the debt of such emerging market powers as Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa because of "economic fundamentals." That is the sound of Europe losing centuries of economic and political power.

An antique phrase on the lips of every European elite just now is "economic growth." Attending a workshop last weekend in Venice of the Council for the United States and Italy, I heard one of them sum up the problem as succinctly as a French aphorist: "The growth agenda is nice to say but difficult to fill up." Difficult but not impossible.

A young woman working as a tour guide in Siena summarized for me over lunch the long-term prospects for her generation in a no-growth world. "We all used to go out together for dinner most nights; now we eat out one night a week. We went to the seashore twice a year but never any longer than five days. My best friend has a degree in electrical engineering, and he is working at a nothing job in a hotel." I asked her where the ones who leave go. "Brazil. A lot have gone to Brazil. Or China. Or Australia."

Italy's youth unemployment rate is 36% and Spain's an almost incomprehensible 50%. Does anyone really believe that Europe's smart young people don't want to work? That its engineers, designers, business-school graduates, architects, scientists and the rest wouldn't thrive, create new companies, new jobs, and produce benefit for Italy, Spain, France or the U.K. if they had breathing room to do so and were allowed to retain their earned income rather than transfer most of it to l'état?

Here's pro-growth advice no one in Europe will take: Stop listening to the IMF bleeders and the Obama spenders. If you wish to relearn real, long-term growth, consult the U.S. governors who did that themselves. Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Mitch Daniels in Indiana and Chris Christie in New Jersey all took over states nearly as moribund as Italy and Spain and put before their publics hard but obvious choices about spending, taxes, pensions, unions and bureaucracies. Their publics voted against dying.

One may ask: Would a European electorate, if given an honest chance to choose self-salvation rather than the bleed-to-death choices they've been given the past two years, vote to save themselves? The betting here is many indeed would vote for a liberated future. Or would have.

Brazil beckons.

Write to henninger@wsj.com