NOT EUROPEAN ENOUGH? :

Drifting Apart :There has been a divergence in world views among the transatlantic allies (Gerard Baker, May 24 2002, Financial Times)

Mr Bush did not recoil, as some had expected he might, from directly confronting European criticisms of his foreign policy. He repeated his characterisation of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an "axis of evil". He warned Europeans that their criticism of his plans to topple Saddam Hussein was the result of "wishful thinking" about the scale of the threat from weapons of mass destruction.

If Europeans had hoped that the Israeli-Palestinian crisis and their own objections to Mr Bush's plans to pursue rogue states aggressively would force the US to think again, they would have been disappointed. The president again promised to consult his allies before starting the next phase of the fight. But he left no doubt the US intended to act.

And although western Europeans, notably this week Gerhard Schršder, the German chancellor, made clear they had nothing to fear from closer ties between Russia and the US, there was no escaping the fact that it was in Moscow--not Berlin, Brussels, Paris, or even London - that Mr Bush had invested most of his efforts during the past year. In fact, some senior officials in the Bush administration are critical in private of what they see as a failure by the European Union to seize fully the opportunity that Russia's emergence from totalitarianism has created in Europe.

Other recent irritants in the relationship - the Kyoto treaty on climate change, the inter- national criminal court, trade disputes over steel, taxes and farming - were played down this week.

It would be wrong to see the gaps between the US and western European views of the world as simply the result of a sudden rupture since the Bush administration came to office, a break with a long period of benign convergence. The global perspectives of the two sides have been evolving in steadily divergent directions for 30 years. In the US, economic success and the American ascent to unrivalled political pre- eminence have redoubled the nation's self-confidence, its faith in the effectiveness of the nation state and the aggressiveness with which it pursues the national interest on the world stage. They have also enhanced a traditionally moral view of the US's role in the world, underpinned by ideological certainty in the justice of America's cause.

Europeans, after a century of wars and the collapse of competing ideologies in a bonfire of human destruction, have less confidence in simple frameworks of right and wrong. The world, in this view, is a moral muddle. Attempts to apply universal values are doomed to complicate it further.

At the end of the cold war, differences over the Balkans and the Middle East were smoothed over by the overwhelmingly Atlanticist approach of President Bill Clinton. But the gaps were becoming much more visible beneath the surface.

[D]oubtless some of the political leaders privately share the view expressed on one ironic banner held up in front of Mr Bush's motorcade in Berlin this week: "Berlin welcomes Bill Clinton."

It's interesting to see this theme repeated in European coverage of President Bush's trip, that he's too American and they long for Bill Clinton, who was more "European". No wonder I loathed him so. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 26, 2002 4:43 PM