dailytelegraph.co.uk
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SEVERAL European diplomats observed privately during George W Bush's first European tour how different he is from Tony Blair. The Prime Minister is supremely confident in public but more hesitant in private. By contrast, the American President sometimes stumbles in public, but in private has a very clear road map of where he wants to go. He is also far better informed than much snobbish commentary had led them to suppose. The sharper contrast, however, is with Mr Bush's predecessor, Bill Clinton. Emerging tensions were papered over during the last Democratic administration, partly because Mr Clinton did not care that much about many aspects of foreign policy, and partly because he had redefined American interests in so minimalist a fashion. He had other priorities, and didn't want too much trouble. And insofar as Mr Clinton had real goals, they were procedural rather than substantive: he set great store by achieving multilateral consensus on a range of issues, often at a very high price indeed.
Mr Bush has begun the task of correcting that imbalance, but this tour was the easy bit. He benefited from low expectations and the hyperbole of the opposition. And he took further wind out of the sails of European critics of his Missile Defence programme by forging a good relationship with Russia's President Putin. If there is a measure of understanding between those two leaders, it will be harder for France and Germany to claim that the world could be on the verge of a second Cold War. But in political and diplomatic terms, these were cyclical gains, not structural ones. The underlying problem at the heart of the transatlantic relationship remains that in perfecting the EU, the European political and official classes are engaged in an act of state-building that has little unifying glue beyond resentment of American power.
Sooner or later, these Euro-isolationists will give a mighty shot in the arm to American isolationists: their behaviour will make the aim of diminishing United States influence on the continent self-fulfilling. That is why Mr Bush will need to think radically - as radically as he has done in moving beyond the Cold War doctrines that held that Mutual Assured Destruction and the 1972 ABM Treaty were the cornerstones of international stability. For much of the Cold War era, American policy-makers held that European unity was a good thing. Unity was necessary as a bulwark against Soviet expansion, but it would also be administratively more convenient to deal with an interlocutor that spoke with one voice. These rationales no longer obtain. Indeed what if the EU, as it stands, and as conceived of by its elites, obstructs the President's cherished goal - of building "a Europe whole and free"?
Two of the key themes of the EU elites are that the process of integration is (a) inevitable and (b) there is "no choice". That is why there is a desperate need for a "Bush Doctrine" - to offer transatlantic alternatives to the current models of EU integration. These should include membership of Nafta. Many millions of Europeans chafe under the trading, regulatory and fiscal constraints imposed by Brussels. They crave a much looser relationship. Others reject the outworkings of a new European political "civilisation": for instance, the EU view of the evils of capital punishment is not shared by a majority of Britons. Mr Bush, who is a far less "royalist" figure than his father, needs to reach over the heads of his European peers to the ordinary citizens of the continent in a way that no president has done since Woodrow Wilson. Far from encountering monolithic opposition, such a move would actually help to break up the official European consensus. It's a risk, but drifting along with the EU status quo will turn out to be the most dangerous of America's options. |
