The guest speaker the other night in Washington at the annual dinner of the American Enterprise Institute was the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. But for many of the roughly 1,500 who attended, the most moving moment came when the former prime minister of Spain, Jose Maria Aznar, came to the podium. He was greeted with a lengthy and warm standing ovation.

We were among the many Americans who reacted with dismay – disgust even – to the decision of the voters of Spain to dismiss Mr. Aznar from office. The vote came in a paroxysm of appeasement after Mr. Aznar had sided with America in the war against the Islamic terrorist threat in Iraq and after the terrorists had responded with a deadly attack in Madrid.

The message we took from the warm greeting to Mr. Aznar is that those Americans who support the war for freedom in the Middle East appreciate that not all of Europe is against them. Those Europeans who fight against the continent’s old tendencies, and those who stake their political careers on the question, are our allies. They don’t deserve be lumped together with the rest of the Europeans in a kind of generalized American contempt for Spain or France or Germany. Those countries are made up of individuals, some of whom side with America and, like Mr. Aznar, deserve our applause, our admiration, our thanks.