Category: US-EU Relations

An editorial from the New York Times – covering a topic oft covered on this blog. The growing thirst in Europe for a greater military power, to rival the United States, is something that seems to have affected the Bush administration.

The Bush administration has identified yet another threat abroad. This time it’s the proposal by France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg to create a European Union military planning and command center separate from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, declared this no less than “one of the greatest dangers to the trans-Atlantic relationship” and summoned the allies to give an emergency display of fealty in Brussels.

What so worried the Bush administration was not only more insubordination from the French and Germans, but also that Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain did not leap to Washington’s side. Last month, Blair met in Berlin with President Jacques Chirac of France and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany to talk over European defenses. Exactly what transpired is not clear, but from all indications Blair rejected a separate headquarters as unnecessary, and talked instead of letting interested EU members, Britain among them, pursue greater unity through “structured cooperation.” There’s nothing particularly radical in that. Blair and Chirac had already spoken in 1998 of a European force. Britain, moreover, has been consistently staunch in its rejection of any European structures that could weaken trans-Atlantic ties. And a separate European headquarters would never have the forces or assets to conduct more than minor operations. Yet in the aftermath of the bitter disputes over Iraq, the Bush administration saw “structured cooperation” as a potential seed for the decoupling of Europe and the United States, and lost its cool.

The Bush administration has decided to postpone enforcement of new antiterrorism regulations that had threatened to block millions of Western Europeans and citizens of other developed nations from traveling to the United States unless they obtained new, computer-coded passports, according to senior administration officials.

The new passport rules, which were supposed to take effect Oct. 1 and which were mandated by Congress as an antiterrorism measure, will not be enforced until October 2004.

I got this one via Horst, cheers!

Bob Kagan with a very lenghty essay on US-EU relations. I don’t have time to read the whole thing now, but it looks great, I will get time tomorrow. It is from June 2002, so was written long before the fallout over the UN resolution.

Meanwhile in the current issue, Frederick Kagan has what looks like another excellent essay on a great topic. How technology has affected our perception of warfare and politics.

An interesting poll in the IHT this week:

The yawning political divide between Europe and the United States that was opened by the war in Iraq has continued to widen, according to a new survey of trans-Atlantic attitudes.

Conducted in June, shortly after the end of the Iraq war, the survey showed Americans and Europeans sharing as their top five concerns: international terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, the Arab-Israeli conflict and weapons of mass destruction in North Korea and Iran.

Nick Fauchald reports on the drop in sales of French wine in the United States. This is an example of the world gone crazy, Americans boycotting French products and Europeans thinking that Americans are all fat couch potatoe morons who live in trailer parks.

Grow up! Both of you and start behaving like ordinary people!

John Vinocur is back in the Herald Tribune – with another piece on transatlantic relations. He discusses Joschka Fischers designs on becoming the EU’s first Foreign Minister, and his declaration that Germany for its own purposes does not want the EU to become a rival to the United States. Germany is instead seeking the “primacy of multilateral institutions”.

A pity the UN is dead then.

The eminent British historian Paul Johnson writes something of a polemic in Forbes magazine. In it he attempts to show that anti-Americanism is in fact latent racism. He also argues that there is no real democracy in Europe, that “European elites tend to look at Americans as a subcivilized mass, whose function is to be obedient consumers in a system run by big business.”

He concludes:

The truth is, any accusation that comes to hand is used without scruple by the Old World intelligentsia. Anti-Americanism is factually absurd, contradictory, racist, crude, childish, self-defeating and, at bottom, nonsensical. It is based on the powerful but irrational impulse of envy–an envy of American wealth, power, success and determination. It is an envy made all the more poisonous because of a fearful European conviction that America’s strength is rising while Europe’s is falling.

But what I am left wondering is what does anti-French sentiment in the US amount to? Is that not also racism?

George Monbiot wonders why the British right is not getting angry about becoming America’s doormat. He talks about recent news reports saying that British citizens may be extradited to the US, at the request of the US, without any evidence before a court. He then goes on to wonder about recent comments by Geoff Hoon, in which he suggests that the UK military may never fight a war without the US.

So why is it deemed by the right to be patriotic both to oppose the EU and to appease the US? Why has the old reactionary motto “my country, right or wrong” been so smoothly replaced with another one: “their country, right or wrong”? Why does the British right now believe it has a God-given duty to defend someone else’s empire?

American empire, unlike European convergence, is also unequivocally a project of the right; it establishes the political and economic space in which men like Murdoch and Black can work without impediment. But perhaps most importantly, our fake patriots know where real power lies. Having located it, they wish to appease it. For the very reason that the United States is a greater threat to our sovereignty than the European Union, they will not stand up to it.

William Pfaff with another excellent contribution to the transatlantic debate. Well worth the read.

France is systematically denigrated, as to a lesser extent is Germany – Germany is thought salvageable, or open to intimidation, once Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is gone. France is portrayed as suffering from “a profound pathology,” and America’s enemy. In Washington power-corridor leaks to the press, in neo-conservative magazines and on the Internet, France is said to be driven by hatred, national vanity and the personal vanity of Jacques Chirac, and as allied with the radical Arab world out of fear of France’s unassimilated Muslim population.

The argument, however, is not only a European-American one. It is an American-American debate.

How easy it was for the US to become somewhat hostile to France. And how much anti-Americanism do I come across in Europe? Lots. How much more of a step is it to go from anti-France to anti-European, or to go from anti-American to yet colder relations?

Philip Bobbit, author of the excellent Shield of Achilles writes a thought provoking piece in todays Guardian. He talks about WMD, the media and the intelligence services. He is really siding with Tony Blair on this one, is he not?

I venture no opinion on the merits of this matter. I have complete confidence in the integrity of the select committee investigating this matter, and in the statements of Scarlett and his colleagues on the JIC. And I have no opinion on the behaviour of the BBC, whose journalists have, like their counterparts in the commercial press, taken up the role of “critique” of all governments, liberal or conservative, that was once the province of the left parties. This development is unavoidable, even if its worst excesses of contempt for politicians and civil servants can perhaps be mitigated by thoughtful editors and presenters, of whom the BBC has many.