President George W. Bush’s foreign policy initiatives tend to be better received in the former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe than in most West European countries. The roots of this generally benevolent attitude can be found in the region’s past. Many people in “New Europe” philosophically oppose the idea of war, but their experiences with the likes of Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu and Hungary’s Matyas Rakosi give them little patience for dictators such as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein or Syria’s Bashar Assad. What Old Europeans perceive as American oversimplification of complex international issues, New Europeans tend to see as principled stances reminiscent of those that helped bring down the Soviet empire in the late 1980s.

When West Europeans ridiculed former President Ronald Reagan’s description of the Soviet Union as the evil empire, East Europeans understood exactly what he was talking about. And today, even as West Europeans reject Bush’s remarks about the “axis of evil,” many East Europeans listen sympathetically. Although a large number of them may not favor military intervention as a means of bringing down brutal regimes, they don’t mind too much when force is used to achieve that goal.
East and Central Europeans also feel stronger loyalty toward the United States than do their Western counterparts. Not only do they remember the U.S. role in bringing down communism, but many also remain grateful to Washington for pushing NATO expansion to the east even as the European Union (EU) was hesitating on its own enlargement. Europeans in former communist countries are more open to the idea of exporting democracy to the Middle East—a concept some West European intelligentsia dismiss as unrealistic. Eastern Europe remembers...