|
May 2, 2003 8:15 a.m. |
 |
Imagine a continent that collectively budgets very little on its own defense, instead finding protection in a distant and democratic superpower that pays rent for the privilege of basing troops, planes, and ships to stop hooligans — sometimes, as in the case of an embarrassingly impolite Mr. Milosevic, right on Europe’s doorstop.
In return, many European elites ridicule American values, naïveté, and insularity — even as their countries have raked in billions of American dollars in trade surpluses and tourism from mostly oblivious, aw-shucks Americans. We self-absorbed, parochial yokels laughed and paid little attention to the fact that some in Europe had forsaken Christianity for this weird, emerging boutique religion of anti-Americanism.
Who could take their ankle-biting seriously? Who, after all, would give up all that they had gotten so cheaply — that dream of all spoiled teenagers: to snap at and ridicule their patient and paying parents, even as they call on them in extremis for help whenever the car stalls or the rent is short?
Yet suddenly many Europeans are not talking of “Europe,” but telling us instead: “You Americans must be careful in lumping us all together as if there are not real differences among us.” Thank the crazed Chirac and his infantile Talleyrand for this new, more nationalist and “non-European” identity, now growing among Europeans in the wake of the Iraqi war.
The unease with the Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis is just beginning. In the coming year alone, troves of archives — economic, political, and military — will reveal France to have been more an enemy than a friend of the United States in the present war, and that a legion of German, French, and Russian businessmen, journalists, and politicians were on the Iraqi take, or worse. The duplicity of our so-called friends will make their deceit during the Balkan fiasco look like child’s play.
So it would be a terrible mistake to assume that our relationship with “Old Europe” will — or should — so easily get back on track. Our own Washington-New York nexus is assuring us that it was just the generation of 1968 come of age in Europe, and our own clumsiness, that led to the fallout over Iraq — as if Mr. Bush’s Texas drawl were the problem.
Yet polls continue to show that at least a third of Frenchmen, Belgians, and Germans don’t like Americans, and another third don’t trust us. Eight years of Clinton’s lip-biting and apologies du jour earned no sympathy, but did win us plenty of contempt. The problems are fundamental and transcend American presidencies.
Let us face reality at least once: We are living in the most precipitous moment of change of the last half century as we witness a tectonic shift in Europe, one that is realigning the way an entire continent operates.
Such radical changes are not unusual in European history. Remember the first New/Old World transfer of power. The 15th- and 16th-century Protestant Reformation — coupled with the rise of Atlantic exploration and trade with the New World, and the onslaught of the Ottoman Empire — helped to shift European weight from its classical foundations on the Mediterranean to the new Europe of England, northern France, Holland, and Germany.
Nor are fits of continental craziness, both real and abstract, even new. Napoleon was willing to risk the lives of millions for the idea of a pan-European dream, its scary, pretentious adages not unlike those now emanating from Brussels or from the mad M. Villepin. The rise of German Nazism, Italian fascism, and continental Marxism at times turned Europeans away from the liberal tradition and drew them to darker and more authoritarian promises, with roots from Plato’s Laws to Oswald Spengler. Too many Europeans still cherish the belief that they are close to an end to war, hunger, want, and meanness — ideals inseparable from a light work week, cradle-to-grave care, protection by an uncouth American military, and a steady stream of fertile, darker, unassimilated peoples to take out their trash and clean their toilets.
The fact is that the absence of Russian divisions has meant an end to both a common threat and unity with the United States. It is not just that Europeans have forgotten two World Wars, the Berlin Airlift, America’s willingness to expose its cities to Soviet nuclear attack to protect the continent, or our support for German reunification. They resent even the mention of past beneficence and, if history is to be contemplated, prefer to bring up Hamburg and Dresden rather than Auschwitz.
Maybe, as so many rightly remind us, it is our power and their weakness that incite jealousy and necessitate such pretence. It is an age-old phenomenon not unlike the case of the Aegean states of the Hellenic League, which preferred to pay Athens with tribute rather than ships for their own protection — and then awoke furious that the Athenian fleet was establishing its own defense policy and unchecked by multilateral constraints.
Maybe the animus comes from our radically different constitutions and the singular American experience of vast frontiers, immigration, assimilation, and the lack of a national creed or race? Or could it even be because we are optimistic about the future, and believe we can still assimilate our newcomers, grow the economy, expand our military, and promote freedom — even while they fret about stagnant growth, a demographic time bomb, and rising unassimilated minorities. Maybe, too, the angst arises because of the youth of Europe, who desire America’s popular and often crass culture enough to worry their older guardians of hallowed values? Who knows? Who cares?
The key now instead is to find remedies that are neither too weak nor too strong, and that are aimed at radically reforming rather than simply eradicating shared institutions.
We will always be friends and, as democratic liberal societies, must remain partners of some sort. But failure to react would be as disastrous as it has been in the past. First, we must distinguish French, Belgians, and German from the rest. The latter, whom we have most helped in the past, not surprisingly are the most duplicitous — resentment also being among the most powerful of all emotions.
Yet if we are subtle, the map soon may reveal who are the real odd men out. Eastern Europe does not share their distrust of America, but is more likely to remember even 1939-40, when Germans invaded as the French sat. To the south, Spain and Italy are not sympathetic to either Paris-Berlin-Moscow bullying or the unattractive trends in the EU. Nor are the U.K., Holland, Denmark, and Norway at all happy with Mr. Chirac and Mr. Schroeder.
Abroad, good luck to M. Villepin in his efforts to convince the Arabs his country is either principled or strong. I do not think a Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan cares much for French-German diplomacy to keep their neighborhood safe from nukes. M. Villepin, who claims he knows something of the latter career of his hero, Napoleon, should remember that nations can survive impotence or immorality — but not both. And that “both” is exactly the dividend of his recent pathetic gambit.
To bring back moral clarity and maturity, we must begin to establish a more reciprocal relationship with the willing. We can start by moving all our troops from Germany or relocating them in much smaller pockets in Eastern Europe. This is not just a military issue; and the generals involved there should bow out and yield to their civilian overseers, who recognize the larger political and moral issues at stake. In the post-Cold War we still need naval and air bases in the Mediterranean, but not necessarily in Spain, Italy, Greece, and Turkey. We should hold honest discussions with all four and see who wants us in and who out — and, politely and with tact, act accordingly.
Given the antics of Belgium with its wild criminal courts and anti-American rhetoric, it is a cruel joke to house NATO in Brussels. Better to move the headquarters to Warsaw or perhaps Rome. France should decide whether it is in or out of the alliance, but it can no longer be both. They, not we, have nearly destroyed NATO by abusing their own quasi-relationship, and that too must end. They will soon see that the end of the Soviet Union gives us as many options within NATO as it provides them. So as the alliance wanes — and all such leagues do, without common enemies — we should carefully establish bilateral relationships with those Europeans who know something of the history of the 20th century. It might be wise also to lift all quotas on skilled Europeans who wish expedited American citizenship — both for our own good, and to discover how many talented people might prefer leaving a creeping socialism.
Reform at the U.N. should be a centerpiece of our new policy. There is no reason why a billion people of a nuclear, democratic India, an increasingly confident Japan, or a vast country like Brazil should not be represented as permanent members of the Security Council. In addition, we must move to require democratic government for participation in the General Assembly; it makes no sense to give despots the privileges they don’t extend even to their own people. Let the U.N. become an assembly of free peoples, and allow Libya, Syria, North Korea, and Cuba to form their own United Tyrannies.
We should also seek to merge France’s veto power under EU auspices, as befits the new EU continental “nation.” The input of a Norway, Denmark, Holland, or Poland alone might make “Europe” a more credible U.N. Security Council member. Remember that we have arms and brave soldiers — and a veto in the U.N. — while France relies on the latter alone. So we ought to be more active in the U.N. to abstain, veto, or block almost everything France does that we do not find compatible with our interests. Unlike us, they have no alternatives. Perhaps America should start by offering a series of resolutions asking for aid to the Iraqi people, putting the onus of a veto on France — no more backroom deals, flattering, or cajoling to save them from expressing to the world their own naked machinations.
It is time also to quit allowing functionaries like Kofi Annan and Boutros Boutros-Ghali to assume leadership roles in the U.N. — not when there are real statesmen and moralists of free countries, like Vaclav Havel or Elie Wiesel, who have known hardship and appreciate freedom.
Our ambassadorships to European countries (especially Turkey and Greece) and the Middle East should be carefully examined to ensure that we have resolute, principled men and women there to present our new views forcefully, rather than apologizing for the United States or triangulating within the Bush administration. Now is not the hour for oil men, think-tankers who have taken or will take Saudi money, State Department apparatchiks, or Atlantic Alliance yes-men whose careers are predicated either on pleasing their bosses, making money, or hopping in and out of academia. For these radically new times, we need folk of a different nature, who are convinced the events of the last two years were not an aberration.
We must also warn Old Europe of our hesitancy about “intervening” in their own purely European affairs. Unsavory characters such as Mr. Lukashenko in Belarus, like past lunatics in Serbia, will always arise. But now they are European problems, requiring the intervention of the German navy and the French army, operating under the shield of the Belgian air force and — who knows? — perhaps Russian command and control.
Cyprus, tension in the Aegean, Turkish EU membership, Gibraltar, North African disputes — all that and more must remain exclusively Europe’s quagmires. We wish them well, but cannot under the present circumstance hope to send a single soldier to resolve a single one of their own internal crises — unless it involves the safety of our own bilateral allies: perhaps a Britain, Poland, Italy, Holland, Spain, or others in such future coalitions of the willing.
To preserve relationships with our cultural brethren will oddly require a lower profile in Europe, and a trust that after 60 years, Europeans can arm themselves and take care of their own problems without reverting to their old violent and internecine proclivities.
A final note concerning our NATO diplomats, generals in Europe, and functionaries at the State Department: It would be silly to demonize those who call for changes, as if they are naïve or parochial or worse. It was the old way of doing business that helped bring us to this impasse — whether it be the appeasement of the past decade that so emboldened terrorists and dictators, or the constant flattering of European diplomats in the face of their sustained and often dangerous anti-Americanism.
The world is not as it was: 3,000 Americans are dead. We took casualties in Iraq as a result of Turkish-French-German duplicity, and the French government had stronger military associations with Iraq than it did with us. The saner and safer, not the more precipitous, course is quietly but resolutely to change business as usual — and sooner rather than later.
|
|
|
||
|
|