DYING PEOPLES CAN'T BE SUMMONED TO CAUSES GREATER THAN SELF:

Barack Obama faces the same problems with ‘Old Europe’ (Tom Baldwin, 3/20/09, Times of London)

[M]r Obama’s proposals to steer a new course are running into the hard rock of self-interested resistance from some of the same countries that did so much to damage the agenda of his predecessor.

Just as France and Germany led international opposition to the Iraq war seven years ago, Mr Obama is discovering that what Donald Rumsfeld once branded “Old Europe” is a significant obstacle to his ambitions for the global economy, the unfinished war in Afghanistan or reaching out to the Muslim world. And, just as Tony Blair backed Mr Bush in the fractious debates over Iraq, Gordon Brown is generally siding with Mr Obama rather than Britain’s EU partners.

Robert Kagan, a foreign policy strategist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said: “It was premature and foolish to believe that the only problem with relations between Europe and the United States was the existence of the ‘wrong American President’. That has, I think, already been demonstrated as untrue.

Why, it's almost as if Europe is the problem, not W....

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 20, 2009 6:52 AM