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It's starting to look as if austerity undermines economic growth and leads to recessions.

The European economy shrank for a second quarter in a row, according to official data released Thursday, fulfilling a common definition of recession and signaling that the region still faces a long road to recovery.

Gross domestic product in the euro zone fell 0.1 percent in the three months through September compared to the previous quarter, according to Eurostat, the European Union statistics agency. The euro zone economy improved slightly from the second quarter, when it contracted by 0.2 percent. But it was the fourth quarter in a row of zero growth or worse.

The AP's report added that continental fears are growing that "at a time of high unemployment in many countries, there are fears that the recession will deepen, and make the debt crisis even more difficult to handle."

Domestically, the right looks at these developments and says, "See? Europe has debt crises, which is keeping Eurozone in a recession, and if we want to avoid the same fate, we need to reduce our own debt."

But the repetition of this conservative message doesn't make it less misguided. The United States doesn't have a debt crisis -- we have low inflation, low interest rates, and investors around the globe desperate to loan us money. Indeed, if there's a lesson to be learned about the Eurozone recession it's that austerity is exactly the wrong course of action given the current circumstances.

As Matt Yglesias explained this morning, "The idea of austerity is that you need to be austere. That as a society you need to squelch consumption (with higher taxes, lower social welfare payments, and lower government salaries) in order to generate the capacity to repay external debts. The fear of self-defeating austerity is that these efforts will actually serve to reduce incomes, which makes debt repayment harder. And that's exactly what we're seeing both in the eurozone writ large and especially in the key countries."

Conservatives in the U.S. believe austerity -- taking capital out of the economy, depressing demand -- would boost the domestic economy. Europe should represent a warning of how wrong they are.

American political norms, which are now in short supply, dictate that partisan disputes are supposed to end at Vandenberg's "water's edge" -- political actors are supposed to be mindful of taking our domestic disputes to an international level.

Mitt Romney's campaign is apparently ignoring these norms in new ways. We saw this in March, when the Republican condemned President Obama while the president was representing the U.S. overseas (a move that even drew a rebuke from House Speaker John Boehner), and again in May when Romney sought campaign contributions from Americans living in Hong Kong and Singapore (imagine the uproar if Obama sought campaign money from donors in China).

This, however, takes the problem to another level.

A senior economic adviser to Mitt Romney criticized President Obama and his policy toward crisis-torn Europe, and Germany in particular, in an op-ed article in a leading German newspaper on Saturday, raising the question of the propriety of taking America's political fights into international affairs.

The article -- written by R. Glenn Hubbard, the dean of the Columbia Business School and a former adviser in the Bush administration, and published in the business journal Handelsblatt -- drew a rebuke from the Obama campaign.

"In a foreign news outlet, Governor Romney's top economic adviser both discouraged essential steps that need to be taken to promote economic recovery and attempted to undermine America's foreign policy abroad," said Ben LaBolt, press secretary for the president's re-election campaign.

There are two main problems with this, and they're both pretty offensive.

The first problem here has to do with American traditions and norms -- the Romney campaign is breaking unwritten rules by attacking the U.S. president in a foreign media forum.

The second is purely substantive: the Romney campaign knows Europe's crises are hurting the American economy, but it's nevertheless going to a European outlet to push for more austerity, which is already failing miserably on a continental level.

If Eurozone policymakers take the Romney campaign's advice, they lose and we lose, but Romney's electoral odds will improve -- which for Hubbard, may be the only consideration that matters.