NO TETHERED HEGEMON WE:

Time to disagree without being disagreeable (Ted Galen Carpenter, March 9 2003, Financial Times)

Neither side wants to admit the obvious: that American and European interests and perspectives are diverging on an array of issues. With the demise of the Soviet Union, there is no longer a focal point of unity in the Western alliance. It has taken more than a decade, but transatlantic relations are beginning to return to their normal pattern - the pattern that existed during the century or so before the second world war and the cold war. US and European interests may still overlap on some issues, but we are likely to find more and more instances where they do not coincide.

Both the US and the leading European powers need to adopt a more realistic and mature attitude about these developments. Too often, Europeans want an activist US that will be responsible for global security and take a leading role in resolving Europe's specific security problems, such as the Balkan crises of the 1990s. At the same time, many of those same Europeans want the US to follow the wishes of its allies passively on key policy issues. They seek a US that is powerful enough to be a hegemon, but humble enough not to exercise that awesome power unilaterally.

In essence, the European allies want the US to be a tethered hegemon. But that is an inherently contradictory and unrealistic concept. If the European countries want to be taken seriously by Washington, they must forge a cohesive foreign and security policy and back it up with serious military resources. And, if necessary, they must be willing to challenge US policy and not back down. Beyond those steps, they must ask the US to do less in the security arena while demonstrating their willingness to do more.

US policymakers and opinion leaders harbour their own illusions about the country's allies. They expect the prosperous and proud European countries to act as obedient clients of the US whenever Washington pursues an initiative. They apparently expect such deference even when the Europeans disagree with the substance of US policy and when European interests may not be served by that policy. Such expectations may have been plausible at the dawn of Nato, when a war-ravaged western Europe faced a powerful threat to its security and desperately needed the US as a protector. They are, however, woefully out of touch with reality in the 21st century.

Is it possible to seem any sillier than by simultaneously demanding that Europe make the structural changes to its welfare states that would be required to become a military power and demanding that others be more realistic? Europe is not going to change ansd, therefore, if they're going to depend on the US to handle all security issues bu itself, they are fundamentally our client states now. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 10, 2003 9:23 AM