During his first term, Europe saw George W. Bush as a fluke. He had won in 2000 without a majority, gaining the White House chicanery or outrageous luck, and he had been a disaster as president. Surely, given the choice of the urbane John Kerry, Americans would not re-elect this hick. But, of course, they did. Tuesday, Mr. Bush won a second term by four million votes, becoming the first president since Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 to gain re-election while picking up seats in both houses of Congress. In the Senate, the Democratic leader was defeated and Republicans widened their lead to 10 seats from two. Mr. Bush won despite 1,000 American deaths in Iraq, an economy that is generating new jobs at a tepid pace, a faltering performance in the presidential debates and the nearly unanimous opposition of the media. It was a triumph, and Europeans needs to recognize that its effects will probably endure. The Republican party of Ronald Reagan, which followed a half-century of Democratic dominance in American politics, is consolidating its power. The best advice I can give Europeans is: Live with it! President Bush is no fluke, and there's no wishing him away. The good news is that Mr. Bush isn't devious or unpredictable. He's entirely open and obvious. A major theme of his campaign was that he does what he says. For example, in March 2001, he rejected the Kyoto Protocol on climate change as "fatally flawed." For nearly four years, Europeans have acted as if Mr. Bush didn't believe what he said, or that they could apply enough moral suasion to change his mind. Won't happen. A smarter policy would have been to find a new approach to mitigating the possibility of global warming--one with a sounder scientific basis and a lower economic cost. Bribing Russia to join Kyoto is not going to sway George Bush one inch. The caricature of President Bush the unilateralist is inaccurate. He went to the United Nations before invading Iraq, and he assembled an international coalition to fight the war. But Europeans should recognize that Mr. Bush scored points in the campaign when he derided Sen. Kerry's suggestion that the U.S. needed a permission slip from the U.N., France and Germany before defending itself, and Bush went out of his way during the debates to criticize the International Criminal Court. Americans don't want to pull out of the U.N.; to the contrary, they want it to be effective. A survey by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations found that 87% of the public favors "working through the United Nations to strengthen international laws against terrorism." Expect, however, that the administration will take a close look at U.N. institutions like the World Health Organization, which, with heavy support from American taxpayers, revel in attacking U.S. policies and businesses. But hasn't Mr. Bush been hypocritical? It's true that, during the first term, he let expediency in domestic politics influence decisions in international economics. I'm thinking of the steel tariffs he imposed in March 2002 and lifted two years later. Don't expect that sort of cynicism in the second term--since Mr. Bush can't run for a third. Instead, anticipate that Mr. Bush will push hard to open new markets and to lower barriers in the United States. He has no doubts about the benefits of free trade. The American economy is growing roughly twice as fast as Europe's. President Bush's re-election will put more pressure on EU leaders to consider adopting more business-friendly policies; it is evident that Bush's embrace of free, competitive markets, low taxes and light regulatory touch underpin the U.S.'s widening comparative advantage in the biotech and pharmaceutical sectors. In fact, the greatest challenge Mr. Bush poses to the security of European leaders is not in foreign policy but in economics. The president's top goals in the second term are to overhaul the U.S. tax and Social Security systems. If he succeeds, the gap between America's growth rate and Europe's will widen, and political pressure in Europe for free-market reforms will grow. Jeremy Rifkin, an American polemicist of the left, has just written a book that extols the "European Dream"--the good life of long vacations and "sustainable development." But this is precisely wrong. Europe is living in a fool's paradise, with huge demographic imbalances, untenable health care systems, rising crime, and high unemployment. Economic growth of 1 percent or 2 percent a year can't support the welfare state politicians have promised, and Europe can't possibly afford the economic costs that an adventure like Kyoto entails and they will have to address the heavy cost-burden of "health care for all." My own guess is that, over the next few years, the complacent EU nations (such as Germany and France) will be pushed hard by the aspiring EU nations (such as Ireland and Poland) to build a Europe that looks more like George Bush's America. And it won't be a fluke. James K. Glassman is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. |
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