George Bush begins a week-long visit to Europe today. James Schlesingertakes a critical look at European attitudes towards the US Presidentand American foreign policy
George Bush's visit to Europe this week provides an opportunity to reduce the evident rift that has developed in the transatlantic relationship.
Much has changed since September 11th and the transitory wave of sympathy and support for America that followed. US policy is once again regularly trashed in the European press. The ambivalence among European elites has been matched by a growing exasperation in the US. As an old Atlanticist, I am saddened. Yet reducing this rift will be more of a challenge to Europe than to the US.
Welcome as it is, the demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact has ended any serious direct military threat to western Europe. With this has come a diminished sense of concern and responsibility. European defence budgets continue to shrink, leading to a steadily growing gap in military technology and capability, to which Britain is something of an exception.
This gap has brought an interesting division of labour: the US does the heavy lifting in combat, while Europe provides the critique. Continental Europe appears to be becoming a larger Sweden, moralising about the defects of American actions.
European criticism of policy has been matched by attacks on Mr Bush himself. This is part of a familiar pattern in the past quarter-century, of each incoming president being battered in the European press for various and conflicting reasons.
Mr Bush, like Ronald Reagan before him, has been portrayed as an aggressive, blundering cowboy. Jimmy Carter was seen as indecisive and foolishly moralistic. Bill Clinton was criticised for being indecisive but also for being too pushy and self-assertive. In a reflection of European ambivalence, US presidents are accused either of not demonstrating leadership or of playing the insensitive, self-assertive superpower.
It is not that any of these men has been beyond criticism. It is the seemingly automatic barrage, the initial baptism of fire. It is tiresome at best. In the US, a president starts with a honeymoon and goes downhill from there. In Europe, the opposite holds: the US president starts in the pits and his image gradually improves, in preparation for a blast at his successor.
Consider some of the charges that have been levelled against the Bush administration. First, that any tampering with the anti-ballistic-missile treaty, the supposed cornerstone of strategic stability, would ignite a new arms race. This set of critics seemed lost in a bipolar world that disappeared long ago. Instead of a new arms race, we have a bilateral arms reduction and a Russia-US relationship far healthier than in the past.
Second, that the US was being irresponsible by rejecting the Kyoto accord on global warming. On this issue, criticism of Mr Bush was particularly fervent last spring. The European criticism presupposes that the science is settled with respect to the degree to which global warming reflects the release of greenhouse gases, as opposed to solar variability.
But unlike Europe's, the population of the US continues to grow. Its economy has been growing faster than Europe's, and Kyoto would have imposed vastly greater cuts on the US than on Europe.
Whether the question is the treatment of al-Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo, the International Criminal Court, the use of landmines or capital punishment, the presumption seems to be that US policy is simply unreasonable or unreasoning, that the Americans are behaving badly.
A spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross asserts erroneously that there is no distinction between prisoners of war and unlawful combatants. Although capital punishment is generally approved of by European voters, the elites seem to have concluded that it is an indication of American savagery, separating the US from European civilisation. And some in Europe complain about American cultural imperialism!
Meanwhile, there is an expectation that Washington should be able to pull a rabbit out of the hat and resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That conflict has gone on for a long time (as Britain, the one-time mandatory power in Palestine, should know). The failure of the Camp David summit two years ago, in spite of the generous stance of Ehud Barak, then Israeli prime minister, suggests the conflict may be nigh-on irreconcilable.
The fundamental problem is that two parties are fighting over the same piece of land. The optimistically termed "peace process" should more accurately be described as the "peace hope".
Meanwhile, much of Europe treats Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority with the same naivety that once marked Europe's attitude towards Ho Chi-minh and the Viet Cong.
Apart from attitudes, there are problems in knowing which body represents Europe, the European Union, national states or NATO.
An example is the decision on Galileo, a global positioning satellite system. European transport ministers recently decided to deploy Galileo on the grounds that the US, which now provides free positioning and timing services, could not be trusted.
Unless Europe adopts GPS standards, that action could disrupt military operations as well as add greatly to costs. It also threatens NATO. Yet NATO, which includes the same governments, was not consulted or considered. The technical concerns of the US were simply brushed aside.
If the transatlantic relationship is to flourish, if the West is to remain reasonably united, these attitudes must change. Condescension, based upon a presumed greater European "sophistication", will not be conducive to unity.
James Schlesinger is a member of the US Defence Policy Board. He is a former secretary of defence and director of central intelligence