n the aftermath of the catastrophe that struck the United States last
September 11, few things can have been more dismaying to Americans than
the attitude adopted by many of our closest European allies, whose
sympathy for the loss of life was quickly replaced by skepticism, if not
outright hostility, toward American motives and American policy. The
ensuing months seem only to have heightened rather than diminished their
animosity.
In the recent election campaign in Germany, Chancellor
Gerhard Schroeder volubly parted ways with us and our proposed
“adventure” in Iraq, promising his countrymen a “German way” of dealing
with global crises—perhaps oblivious to the unfortunate historical
echoes this phrase still awakens among millions of Americans. British
Labor politicians, ostensibly worried about a conflagration that would
draw the United Kingdom into an unending American-led war in the Middle
East, have deprecated George W. Bush as an ignorant simpleton (“The most
intellectually backward American President of my political lifetime,”
writes Labor MP Gerald Kaufman). French commentators, for their part,
are more apt to call Bush a cowboy than Saddam Hussein an outlaw.
If
the fear of Russian tanks used to unite America and Europe, are
differences over everything from greenhouse gases and Yasir Arafat now
to divide us? Josef Joffe, the editor of the German weekly Die Zeit, downplayed this already simmering hostility last year in an influential, pre-September-11 essay in the National Interest.
Dismissing European snipings as a species of “neo-ganging up,” Joffe
noted that most Europeans talk one way but tend to act another, and
recommended that the U.S. apply a little cosmetic diplomacy to soothe
ruffled Continental feathers. But now it is a year after September 11,
and the anti-American mood seems quite firmly entrenched, deriving less
from anything we have done—Americans have not used their imperial power
to acquire territory since the Spanish-American war—than from a
perception of who we purportedly are: flag-waving, gun-toting,
SUV-driving, MTV-watching, minority-electrocuting, Big-Mac-chomping
boors running amok in the world.
In the absence of in-depth
surveys it is difficult to gauge the prevalence of unease among our
European allies or its incidence across countries, classes, and groups.
Most often, evidence of animus comes to us anecdotally—Frenchmen
protesting McDonald’s restaurants, Greeks booing during a commemorative
silence in a soccer stadium at the news of September 11, Berliners
demonstrating against President Bush’s visit to Germany, and a chorus of
pundits warning us against any assault on Saddam Hussein. But we are
also reminded that Britain, for example, showed remarkable solidarity
with the United States in Afghanistan and might do so again in Iraq,
notwithstanding the unprecedented venom that pours forth from much of
the English journalistic and academic elite, and at least one
Europe-wide poll taken in early September showed conditional support for
an invasion of Iraq.
What seems beyond denial is that, from the
Atlantic coast to the Balkans, there has been a rise in the level of
truculence. Scandinavians to the north seem as mistrustful of the United
States as do the Mediterranean peoples of Greece, France, and Spain.
Has a Palestinian child been hit by a stray Israeli missile? American
F-16’s are to blame. Is Europe racked by floods? They are the effect of
global warming, set loose by a Kyoto-boycotting America. In the United
States itself, has Mumia Abu-Jamal been condemned as a murderer by a
jury of his peers and sent to death row? Paris in recompense will make
the convicted killer an honorary citizen of the city.
The new
anti-Americanism also seems to bridge the usual ideological fault lines.
Leftists and socialists indict us for the death penalty, guns, the lack
of universal health care, and grasping corporations. Right-wing clerics
and nationalists join them in bemoaning the perversion of traditional
European culture as the result of American advertising and hucksterism.
In Greece, an Orthodox priest can prove more virulently anti-American
than a diehard socialist—and for reasons that transcend our having
ousted from power his fellow Eastern Orthodox Christian, Slobodan
Milosevic. The more the European masses appear to be hooked on American
popular culture, the more bitterly their elites decry the U.S. as the
profitable but cynical pusher.
As for governments, no less
indisputable is that most of them have greeted with disapproval or
distaste nearly every major American foreign-policy initiative of the
past two years—our walking out of the Durban conference on racism, our
dismissal of the Kyoto accords, our cancellation of the ABM treaty with
the former Soviet Union, our reference to an identifiable “axis of
evil,” our strong support for democratic Israel and disparagement of the
corrupt Palestinian Authority, our refusal of International Criminal
Court jurisdiction over American GI’s, and our advocacy of capital
punishment for al Qaeda murderers. The doubts and suspicions expressed
by European officialdom encourage more extreme voices to broadcast their
invective with a new aggressiveness. Long before September 11, Polly
Toynbee, a columnist for the Guardian, wrote an essay—“America
the Horrible is Now Turning into a Pariah”—concluding that the United
States was itself “an evil empire” and a “rogue state” that had to be
“reeled in.” A week after September 11, another Guardian
columnist assured her readers that “It is perfectly possible to condemn
the terrorist action and dislike the U.S. just as much as you did
before the World Trade Center went down.”
Conversations with
individual Europeans only confirm the attitudes expressed by governments
and media. From recent visits to Europe and a number of daily
communications from acquaintances abroad, I can attest that many
Europeans take an almost perverse delight in the spectacle of a U.S. so
estranged from the universal opinion of mankind and so unpopular from
Asia to Latin America. “Welcome to the real world,” one Greek academic
scoffed to me at dinner, as he explained that Americans cannot “have it
both ways, ducking out on UN conferences and then strong-arming allies
for your war against terror.”
_____________
Where
does the new anti-Americanism come from, and what does it mean? In an
incisive and far-reaching essay that has been much discussed in Europe
and elsewhere, Robert Kagan has dissected the growing European antipathy
and pinpointed its source (“Power and Weakness,” Policy Review,
June-July). Fundamentally, Kagan writes, the distrust arises from
insecurity and envy that are in turn grounded in the present imbalance
of military power—an often embarrassing disparity that has driven the
much weaker Europeans to look to their own safety in means other than
armed strength, and correlatively to fear and censure the deployment of
armed strength by others: mainly, us.
“Today’s transatlantic problem,” Kagan writes, “is not a George Bush problem”:
It is a power problem. American strength has produced a propensity to
use that strength. Europe’s military weakness has produced a perfectly
understandable aversion to the exercise of military power.
Or as Jesse Helms more crudely remarked of Europe’s
preference for talk and mediation at the expense of military action,
“The European Union could not fight its way out of a wet paper bag.”
There
is clearly much to be said for this realist reading of the growing
crisis. Our planes, carriers, and divisions dwarf theirs; and this
asymmetry not only skews our ability to conduct joint operations with
Europeans but also creates resentment on their part and superciliousness
on ours. Jealousy among states always arises among the weak toward the
strong, and so it makes sense that a generalized resentment and its
attendant fears, rather than specific gripes over American
“exceptionalism” and “unilateralism,” could be the true cause of
European discontent.
Compounding this umbrage, as Francis Fukuyama
has pointed out in a recent public lecture, is surely the fact that
Europe’s relative impotence has nothing to do with a lack of intrinsic
material resources. The European Union (EU) will soon outstrip us in the
size both of its economy ($10 trillion to our $7 trillion) and its
population (375 million to our 280 million). But still it continues to
spend only a third the amount of our outlays on defense ($130 billion to
our current $300 billion annually and rising). European weapons
programs have not been evolving at anywhere near the same pace as
nonmilitary research and development, not to mention expenditures on
social welfare. Their various national military schools, while
illustrious, cannot compare with West Point, Annapolis, and Colorado
Springs in size, sense of mission, or resources, much less with our
academies’ ability to capture the élan of contemporary young Americans.
In Europe, military enlistment is not seen as an avenue either toward
social advancement or toward national service but as somehow
antithetical to the humane and pacific place that the EU is slated by
its Utopian charter to become.
It is hardly unheard of for states
that are themselves well heeled and yet lack commensurate military
resources to adopt a lower profile and to use guile, stealth, or money
to fend off potential bullies. And so, in lieu of the capacity to
airlift divisions to Afghanistan, bomb Iraq from carrier task forces, or
present wayward regimes like Pakistan with ultimatums, frustrated
Europeans have put their faith, mistakenly or not, in international
bodies like the United Nations and the International Criminal Court,
while pretending not to notice that American power alone is what has
permitted them to dream that they inhabit a global fairyland of
reasonable people.
When it comes to what we should do about this
growing divide, most thoughtful analysts maintain that it behooves us as
a truly mighty nation to act with maturity. Ignoring our allies’
ankle-biting and shrill charges of “brinkmanship,” we should concentrate
instead on areas of real mutual concern and advantage, and encourage
the Europeans to build up their own muscle through a greater investment
in defense. After all, the argument goes, the bases we maintain in
Germany, Spain, Italy, and Greece are critical to the worldwide
projection of American power, even as the intellectual machinery of the
European press and media is essential to the crafting of popular support
in times of crisis. In a spirit of what might be called puissance oblige,
we should strive to alleviate our weaker allies’ fretfulness at the
same time that we subtly mobilize them to assume a more assertive role
that better serves our mutual purposes.
_____________
This
argument, to whose sweep I have not begun to do justice, is surely a
persuasive one as far as it goes. But might there be additional and even
more fundamental reasons for the perplexing European disavowal of force
that so often manifests itself in visceral anti-Americanism? In
particular, is it really true that the present tension between the U.S.
and Europe results largely from a disproportion of power, and that the
way to mitigate it is to begin to redress the imbalance?
My own
feeling is otherwise: that the current state of transatlantic tension,
far from being a temporary artifact of power relations, is the more
natural condition between us—a strain based on our radically different
cultures and histories and hence unlikely to be dissipated by bigger
defense budgets there or more sensitive diplomats here. And my guess is
that this condition is likely only to worsen.
Forgotten in the
present anguish over European attitudes is our own age-old suspicion of
the Old Country, a latent distrust that once again is slowly reemerging
in the face of European carping. It helps to recall that, for millions
of Americans, doubts about Europe were once not merely fanciful but
often entirely empirical. In my own, hardly atypical family, both Europe
and Japan were seen as not very nice places that for selfish reasons
started wars, drew us in, and tended to take Hansons and Davises away
from their small vineyards and orchards, only to return them a year or
two later dead, maimed, or crazed. At family dinners, “Europe” never
meant vacations or the grand tour but evoked gruesome stories about
poison gas, “rolling” with Patton, or having one’s head exploded at
Normandy Beach.
To some of us, then, the 50-year cold war was not a
dress rehearsal for a perpetual American military alliance with Western
Europe but another of those emergency life-and-death struggles that
necessitated the temporary stationing of American troops on European
soil. When the cold war ended ten years ago, should this not have
brought us back to the more normal condition of the past? Since there
was no longer an overwhelming threat to Europe that the Europeans could
not handle, was there a need for a formal American presence in
Continental affairs at all?
These old American prejudices may no
longer be shared by the elites who make our policy, but they are not for
that reason to be dismissed. As it happens, such mistrusts are
themselves deeply rooted in essential faultlines between the American
sense of self and the European. Those differences lie in our separate
histories and national characters, our different demographies, our
different cultures, our different approaches to questions of class and
economic mobility, our different conceptions of the individual and
society, our different visions of the good life and of democracy—and our
very different attitudes toward projecting outward our versions of
freedom. All these historic antitheses may better explain the current
acrimony than an imbalance of power—often more an epiphenomenon than the
cause of rifts among nations.
Volumes have been written on each
of these subjects, but we can agree on the fundamental elements of
American exceptionalism. The experience of the frontier encouraged a
sense of self-reliance and helped to define morality in terms of action
rather than rhetoric. Having no history of monarchy, fascism, or
Communism, we retain our founders’ original optimism about republican
government, considering it not only critical to our own singular success
but a form of political organization that should be emulated by others.
The absence of a common race and religion encouraged us to treasure a
necessary allegiance to common ideas and values, an allegiance that has
so far outlasted the attenuating doctrines of multiculturalism and
“diversity.” That refugees from around the world and especially the
unwanted of Europe itself not only survived in an inhospitable country
but created history’s greatest civilization in the course of a mere
century is testament to the revolutionary success of American democratic
culture, a society that today morphs newly arrived Koreans into NASCAR
fans, transmogrifies Hmong into Country & Western addicts, and
allows the children of illegal aliens to become Ph.D.’s, electrical
engineers, and newspaper columnists.
An American might well
contend on the basis of recent history and the present state of world
affairs that his confident doctrine, so often antithetical to Europe’s,
is by far the superior: far better not only for him, but for the world
as a whole. Scholarship and practical experience alike demonstrate why,
just as immigrants have consistently voted with their feet by flooding
our shores, so too hundreds of millions around the globe, including
among Europe’s own peoples, have voted with their stomachs for the
fruits of American material abundance and with their remote controls for
the raw energy of American popular culture.
But that is a long
argument that we need not stop to adjudicate. The essential point is
this: American strength and European weakness are not just a temporary
manifestation of our spending more on guns and accepting less in social
services, while they insist on state help at the expense of navies and
armies. Thanks to our physical size and natural riches, our dizzying
diversity, and our belief that success is more often to be predicated on
talent and hard work than on ingrained social and class hierarchies, we
have become a nation both enormously rich and, especially,
strong. With military power and economic force in service to singular
values and ideas, we could not be cynical or faltering even if we wished
to, or at least not for long. Seeing things in black and white is part
and parcel of our aspiration to be moral—as much our national glue as
our very optimism and aggressiveness.
In short, far more fundamental than the absence of European military resources and its queer ramifications is the issue of why
we, and not they, have power, and how and why we are willing to use it
in ways they would not. If we gave the Europeans fifteen carriers and
twenty divisions tomorrow, we and they would still be at odds. Turn over
to them our entire multibillion-dollar B-2 fleet, and it would be
mothballed or sold for scrap while we continued as we could with our
incorrigible habit of feeding Somalis, freeing Panamanians, liberating
Kuwaitis—and, when necessary, patrolling the Mediterranean. The long
list of their complaints against us that I enumerated early on—in
essence, grievances against who we purportedly are rather than what we
do—unconsciously pays tribute to these indelible facts.
_____________
September
11 has awakened America in ways we still are not quite sure of. But as
far as Europe is concerned, it seems more than possible that we are
coming to the end of a relationship born out of the unusual
circumstances of the 20th century. Our diplomats and politicians, who so
often travel to and are educated in Europe, are just now starting to
worry about this growing specter of estrangement, but I suspect that
large numbers of Americans have not only taken it in stride but accepted
it as inevitable.
It makes a certain sense that the EU has staked
its future to international accords and its own ability to persuade or
cajole frightening regimes in Asia and Africa. One need not be
altogether cynical about this: Europe’s military unpreparedness is in
fact an inescapable problem, and Europeans have plenty to be anxious
about. Without the Atlantic and Pacific to serve as buffers, only a few
hundred miles separate a largely weak Continent from the lunocracies in
Algeria and Libya, while Syria, Iran, and Iraq are within missile range.
Rising and unassimilated populations in England, France, and Germany
round out the causes of European angst. Still, it is hard to believe
that any of these threats could not be handled by a united Europe
itself.
As for the dangers from within—lest we forget, another of
the purposes of NATO was to inhibit the aggressive impulses of any one
European country, especially Germany, against any other, specifically
France—here, too, cynicism is uncalled for. Given Western Europe’s
turbulent past, farsighted diplomats are to be congratulated for uniting
such a disparate group of nations under the aegis of some sort of
federation, and for avoiding a major war within Western Europe for more
than a half-century. But it is hard to believe that, if their
achievement is genuine, and not simply the result of a common cold-war
enemy, the United States is needed to guarantee it; or that, if it
breaks down, the United States would be able to fix it.
Hardest of all to accept in our current circumstances is that our European allies would or could join us
in any meaningful way in sustained military operations abroad that
involve real costs and risks. Indeed, we may be one unilateral action
away from the de-facto dissolution of NATO. Should the United States end
up going it alone in Iraq while Europe remonstrates, and should it
succeed both in removing Saddam Hussein from power and in fostering some
sort of consensual government there, domestic support among Americans
for any future military campaign to aid a European power is likely to be
drastically diminished. In such a world, and whatever action we took on
our own or with de-facto allies, the very idea of Americans ever again
leading a NATO crusade to banish a marauder like Milosevic seems
preposterous.
The onus to preserve the status quo of the present
alliance thus lies not on the American people, who may be returning to a
time-honored and reasonable consensus about Europe, but on those,
including among our leaders, who believe Europe still merits a special
relationship at all. By any objective standard, we have long ago ceased
being members of a true partnership, and it may be time to accept that
reality and move on. Who knows? After our separation, when we are no
longer sworn allies, we might even become better friends.
