Walter Russell Mead produces smart analysis and informed wisdom at a rate that puts the rest of us to shame.

He blogs at The American Interest. Try any of his recent pieces and marvel at the breadth of his knowledge and insight. This one on the problems facing Europe caught my eye:

The euro isn’t the only governance problem that threatens the European project, but the preoccupation of European elites with their horrible currency experiment and its devastating consequences means that there is ever less political capital and will available to deal with other pressing matters. The southeast of the EU is fraying: Cyprus is looking to Moscow along with non-member Serbia, Greece is growing alienated.

Progress toward resolving the Balkan problems in Bosnia and Kosovo seems to have stopped and even gone into reverse. Corruption in Bulgaria and Romania is if anything a growing problem. The EU’s influence in Ukraine is on the wane. In Hungary and now Romania some basic legal and constitutional principles are at risk…

The political structures of both NATO and the EU mean that the degradation of democracy or the erosion of western influence in southeastern Europe is more than a local question. Any NATO member can veto joint action by the alliance. And EU members who remain in the club but are hostile to its core values and ambitions can wreak all kinds of havoc.

The bottom line: The EU is in much more trouble than the media’s focus on the euro would lead you to believe — and America’s interests are much more affected by these problems than perhaps even most of our national leaders understand.

Gripping. But how true is it?

A grand theme in literature (see eg Macbeth) is the idea that the very act of imagining doing something wicked somehow impels the person who has had that evil thought to do the deed. It’s as if we all have within us some moral constraints: by thinking the unthinkable we break our own limits and the unthinkable is not only thinkable – it is thought and then done.

So for the past 40 years or so the countries of Western Europe have not thought in any serious way at all about leaving the European Union or breaking it up to form something else. Armed with that sense of unity and (if you like) solidarity based on agreed shared purposes, the institutional basis for European integration has been widened and deepened to a remarkable extent. It was not always easy, and many of the results have been ambiguous. But we trusted each other.

Now, all of a sudden, the mood is changing.

Unease is stalking the corridors of power across Europe. What if the whole project is in fact built on wobbly if not unsound foundations? What if it starts to fray? What if there are limits on solidarity, not least limits on the willingness of the Finns/Germans/Dutch to use their hard-earned wealth to prop up others who have not worked, er, quite so hard?

What if someone suddenly cracks, jumps ship and quits the Eurozone? Could others follow? Is there a risk that we and a few other suckers will be the only ones left on board as the ship hits the rocks? Should we start making plans to jump ourselves, before it’s too late? Who in this mess really can be trusted?

That thought is horrible. The very fact that we are having it is horrible! It’s transgressive.

But having had the thought it can not be unthought.

It’s out there in our EU minds, gnawing away, waiting for its moment to pounce and drive us to do something we literally could not have imagined only a short while ago.

And everything is now different…

If good, why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
Against the use of nature?