Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elsewhere who wrote (45722)	9/21/2002 9:07:52 PM
From: Eashoa' M'sheekha	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus. The German message about transatlantic ties. Saturday, September 21, 2002 – Just a few weeks ago, Gerhard Schroeder appeared on his way to becoming the first German chancellor since the Second World War to lose an election for a second term. Then he decided to run against the United States. Mr. Schroeder's blunt criticism of President George W. Bush's Iraq policy has struck a chord with voters. It may be just enough to return him to power in tomorrow's vote; the race against conservative challenger Edmund Stoiber is, according to polls, virtually a dead-heat. Mr. Schroeder has angered the White House. Mr. Bush feels betrayed, U.S. officials say, because the Social Democratic chancellor had promised that no decision would be made until after the election about German support for an American initiative to oust Saddam Hussein. But Mr. Schroeder saw his political opportunity and decided to go for it. Mr. Stoiber's charge that his opponent is demonizing America has fallen flat. Mr. Stoiber, too, has got into the act as the campaign winds down, suggesting he might bar U.S. forces from using German bases if Mr. Bush decided on a military campaign without United Nations approval. This political Iraq attack by the two candidates, though, has obscured some fundamental issues facing voters, even as it also illustrates the growing divide between Europe and America. Economically, Germany is now the sick man of Europe. Mr. Schroeder made some progress, including tax cuts. But his re-election campaign had languished because German growth is among the weakest in the European Union. The chancellor ran a "jobs, jobs, jobs" campaign in 1998. There remain four million unemployed, however, the same as when he took power. Reforms are needed, but neither candidate is willing to chance offending voters by offering harsh medicine. Mr. Schroeder made more progress internationally. Germany's Nazi past placed a post-war taboo on military involvement abroad. Mr. Schroeder risked his career by endorsing German participation in the 1999 Kosovo war, and in peacekeeping activities in the Balkans and Afghanistan. But Iraq is much further away from Berlin than the Balkans. And Germans' sympathy for the United States after Sept. 11 has long since worn off, as Washington followed "unilateralist" policies deeply unpopular in Europe, such as opposition to the Kyoto environmental accord and the International Criminal Court. Germany is not Europe, though the country does remain, as Mr. Schroeder says, "the [continent's] biggest, most important and economically most powerful country." Still, Mr. Schroeder's decision to seize on anti-American sentiment may be indicative of something deeper -- that the United States and Europe are drifting apart like seldom before. A symbiotic relationship forged during the Cold War likely was bound to face strain once the Soviet Union disappeared. But what is now going on may be more fundamental: that, as American analyst Robert Kagan has argued in an essay much-noticed in Europe, "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus." Mr. Bush's willingness to act alone against Iraq has aroused deep anxiety throughout Europe, as has an emerging "Bush Doctrine" -- in which protecting U.S. military supremacy becomes a core U.S. policy, and the United States shifts its military strategy toward pre-emptive action against hostile nations and terrorist groups. The United States is ever more convinced that international laws are unreliable and that the path to a safer world lies in its military might. It is the most nationalistic of Western nations. Europe, meanwhile, has spent 50 years moving beyond nationalism toward a continental union, and is rejecting the use of force in favour of a growing web of rules enforced by multilateral organizations. Washington's military spending dwarfs Europe's. As such, the United States is making the most of its strengths. Europe, in effect, is making the most of its own weakness. It also has become as sensitive as Canadians are when slighted by the United States. (The power disparity may only grow -- Western Europe had twice as many people as the United States in 1950; by 2050, the U.S. population might be more than 50-per-cent larger.) Whoever wins tomorrow -- Mr. Schroeder or Mr. Stoiber -- will do his best to improve relations with Washington. Either might still end up sending peacekeepers to Iraq after a successful U.S. invasion. Meanwhile, the Bush administration's willingness to pursue its Iraq policy through the UN shows that Washington recognizes there are some limits to its ability to act unilaterally.