The Transatlantic World in Gone

The world as we knew it, with the Atlantic alliance as the main center of power is gone for ever. We are now in a new world where the global power is negotiated by Americans, Chinese, and some other new actors. Roger Cohen in today's NY Times:

President Obama learns with interest that Europe now has a phone number. He’s told that, responding at last to Henry Kissinger’s famous jibe, the European Union has appointed a President named Herman Van Rompuy from Belgium and given him a 24/7 phone line.

So, Obama decides to try out Europe’s phone number. Henry will be tickled. But the president forgets about the time difference and gets an answering machine:

Good Evening, you’ve reached the European Union, Herman Van Rompuy speaking. We are closed for tonight. Please select from the following options. Press one for the French view, two for the German view, three for the British view, four for the Polish view, five for the Italian view, six for the Romanian view. ...

This self-deprecating little story was told by the Finnish foreign minister, Alexander Stubb, during a meeting here last week on NATO’s future. NATO, which is to define a new doctrine this year, wants to work more closely with the E.U., but of course it would help if Europe first defined what its strategic priorities are.

The Obama presidency has been a shock to Europe. At heart, Obama is not a Westerner, not an Atlanticist. He grew up partly in Indonesia and partly in Hawaii, which is about as far from the East Coast as you can get in the United States. He’s very much a member of the post-Western world, said Constanze Stelzenmüller of the German Marshall Fund.

The great struggles of the Cold War, which bound Europe and the United States, did not mark Obama, whose intellect and priorities were shaped by globalization, and whose feelings are tied more to the Pacific and to Africa. He can make a respectable speech on a Normandy beach, but he’s probably the first U.S. president for whom the Allied landing is emotionally remote.

These truths have taken a while to sink in because Europe, in its widespread contempt for President George W. Bush, saw in Obama a savior who would restore trans-Atlantic ties. One by one European leaders have been disappointed by the president’s cool remoteness. A jilted feeling has spread.

In fact, Obama is a pure pragmatist. He wants Europe’s help, particularly in Afghanistan, but he has no misty-eyed vision of Atlanticism and sees more pressing strategic priorities in China, India, the Middle East and Russia. He is transitioning the United States to the post-Western world, which is another way of saying he is adapting America to a world in which its relative power is eroding.

It remains to be seen how Americans will respond to the sobriety of a foreign policy that is short on stirring exceptionalist narrative and long on realism. Europeans, meanwhile, are wondering what hit them.

The situation was well summarized by Jeremy Shapiro and Nick Witney in a report for the European Council on Foreign Relations that described the European attitude to the United States as basically infantile and fetishistic. By this, they meant the way European states exist in a form of obsessive dependency on the United States (even as they criticize it) that prevents them from forming strong E.U. positions.

America wants to be Europe’s partner, not its patron; but it cannot be responsible from without for weaning Europe off its client status, they wrote, adding that, an incoherent and ineffective assemblage of European states will be increasingly marginalized.

I’d say China earns more respect from Obama for its clear if confrontational sense of strategic direction than Europe does for deference in the service of disarray.

Europe needs to get over America to discover itself. That discovery might provide a basis for strong ties going forward. To use Baloo’s memorable image in The Jungle Book, the old trans-Atlantic world is gone, man, solid gone.

If the Lisbon Treaty is to mean anything, and Van Rompuy to emerge as more than an amiable figurehead, the European Union needs to develop coherent strategies for China, Russia, Middle East peace, Afghanistan and energy security, to name just five areas where it seems to have no unified position.

Now that even France has seen that E.U.-NATO rivalry is of comical silliness in a world where the West needs coherence just to hold its own, Europe must also work hard on harmonizing its military strategy.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was scathing about Europe in a recent speech, the demilitarization of Europe — where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it — has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st.

I think that was over the top. The European contribution and sacrifice in Afghanistan have been immense. I don’t see European defense budgets increasing, even if they lag the U.S. by a huge margin. But what’s essential is that duplication and waste in Europe be cut by coordinating defense spending priorities. In defense, as in foreign policy, it’s clarity, not voicemail hell, that America’s non-Atlantic president needs from Europe.


(Zoon Politikon)