AMERICAN FUTURE - A Look Back . . . and Forward
By Marc Schulman on US vs. EU
From George Melleon's column in the Wall Street Journal: [$]
Mr. Bush is not the first American president to have to deal with contrariness about policies that serve European as well as U.S. interests. In 1983, Europeans, under bombardment by KGB-inspired propaganda, almost scuttled the Ronald Reagan measure that tipped the Cold War toward the West. Mr. Reagan proposed to counter a new threat to Europe from Soviet medium-range nuclear missiles by deploying U.S. Pershing II nukes in Western Europe.
According to the account of then-Secretary of State George P. Schultz in his 1993 book "Turmoil and Triumph," more than 2 million people demonstrated in Europe in the month before the scheduled November deployment of the Pershings. British women camped out around the clock near a missile site at Greenham Common, getting heavy press coverage. ABC Television waded in with a docudrama positing the U.S. going nuclear to counter a Soviet attack in Europe, with nuclear devastation the result. On Nov. 22, the day before the scheduled deployment primarily meant to protect Germany, the Bundestag gave its consent by a margin of only 60 (out of 512) votes.
Tomorrow, more than 21 years later, an American president will meet with the current German leader in Mainz to try to convince him that the trans-Atlantic alliance is still important to Germany's security, this time from terrorist attacks by Islamic radicals. European police forces directly concerned with security understand this quite well and are cooperating with U.S. security agencies. Even the Russians proudly claim they are working with the West to spot terrorist threats.
But as usual, a few politicians and the left-leaning European press are stirring up anti-Americanism. Some things don't change in 20 years. Mr. Reagan could have avoided such problems if he had remained supine in the face of Soviet threats, and Mr. Bush could have done so as well if his response to 9/11 had been mere tokenism. But both presidents wanted to use America's huge reserves of power and influence to change world politics for the better.
The beginning of the new Bush term was marked by goodwill tours of Europe by Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld. Now Mr. Bush is trying his hand directly. But the view in France and Germany seems to be that world peace is best preserved by respecting the sovereignty even of the most benighted regimes. Mr. Bush, by contrast, thinks that the cause of peace can only be advanced by helping more and more people dislodge evil-minded leaders and thereby obtain political freedom.
The Europeans would have a better case if the Bush campaign were failing, but in fact it is going dramatically well. Governments in Afghanistan and Iraq are no longer threats to their neighbors or, equally importantly, their own peoples. The liberation of Afghans and Iraqis from ugly regimes has emboldened other peoples, like the Ukrainians, to demand better government. Ronald Reagan didn't win the Cold War and demolish the Soviet police state by practicing what the French call détente. He won it by supporting the bids of captive nations for freedom.
This week, Mr. Bush won't need to extend his goodwill tour to those once-captive nations, such as Poland, Hungary, Estonia, et al. They are already in his camp. So is the United Kingdom, with its long tradition of democratic rule and a still-fresh memory of the valiant battle it fought 65 years ago against Nazi tyranny. France and Germany are important countries in Europe and it is worth the president's time to do what he can to mend fences. But they are not "Europe" and are indeed only two of 25 states in the European Union, most of which don't share their foreign policy views.
Mr. Bush has already made one concession to the "Europeans" with his tolerance of French and German participation in an effort to dissuade Iran from its nuclear course. There are no visible achievements, just as there were none in the early 1990s when the same countries were ineffective in dealing with Slobodan Milosevic's Balkan aggression. Give Mr. Bush an "E" for effort in his fence-mending effort, but don't expect miracles. |
