It didn’t turn out that way. Over the decades, America floated in and out of Europe’s graces. Probably Washington’s darkest hour in Europe since Vietnam was the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its grim aftermath.
Iraq split the continent in two—into “old” and “new” Europe, in former U.S. Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s memorable formulation. Millions of protesters filled Europe’s boulevards. In Britain, Spain, Italy and elsewhere, governments fell or were wounded by their association with George W. Bush. At Congress Hall in Berlin, on the eve of “shock and awe” over Baghdad, Middle Eastern artists mounted an antiwar exhibit dubbed “DisORIENTation.”
Now the tables have turned again. From Iberia to the Russian border, European governments are rebuilding transatlantic bridges. Remarkably, the continent’s political elites are embracing pro-Americanism at a time when people on the street are as anti-American as they’ve been since Coalition forces rolled across Iraq. By going against the public grain at obvious political risk, Europe’s leaders are demonstrating just how determined they are to bury anti-Americanism. Thus an iconic moment last week: ensconced in the onetime capital of un-America, speaking in effect for a new generation of European leaders, French President Nicolas Sarkozy told a meeting of his ambassadors in Paris, “I am among those who believe that the friendship between the United States and France is as important today as it has been over the course of the past two centuries.”
Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are on the leading edge of the New Atlanticism. The two of them behave as if Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and President Jacques Chirac belonged to another era, with Sarkozy attempting to revive an alliance that dates back to the American War of Independence and Merkel, as the leader of the world’s largest exporter, championing what her officials call “a larger common market” with the United States.
Similarly, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe are exhibiting such rampant pro-Americanism that Moscow, their old master, is growing restive. Even Spain under Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, whose first big foreign-policy initiative was to pull his country’s troops out of Iraq, is warming to Washington—cooperating, for example, on counterterrorism matters.
The driving forces behind the decline of anti-Americanism are not hard to discern. First among them is the departure, in 500 days or so, of Bush, the most reviled American president in European memory. Second is the fading of Iraq—not as a catastrophic problem, but as a bilateral issue that has leaders lunging at each other’s throats; as French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner told NEWSWEEK, “We’re turning the page and finding a new spirit.”
But there is also a hunger for transatlantic economic cooperation at a time when China and India are on the move; a growing European dread of Al Qaeda’s terrorism; a resurgence of the European center-right, combined with the growing dominance of pragmatism over ideology, be it American neoconservatism or old-style Continental socialism. Then there’s a yearning, particularly in the old Soviet bloc, to seek U.S. protection as Vladimir Putin’s Russia flexes its muscles, giving rise to loose talk about a new cold war. Finally, there’s an understanding, however grudging, that major international challenges, from Darfur to climate change, cannot be met without Washington’s collaboration.
America has done some bridge-building of its own. Henning Riecke of the German Council on Foreign Relations notes that the Bush administration, as the Iraq debacle chipped away at America’s “our way or no way” approach to world affairs, has made small but significant steps on climate change. The promise of further steps after Bush, perhaps under a Democratic president, is heartening to Europe. Washington’s growing willingness, so far at least, to work in tandem with European governments on such issues as Iran’s nuclear ambitions and conflict in the Middle East is also welcome in European capitals. Alex Bigham of the London-based Foreign Policy Centre argues that the aftermath of Iraq has taught the United States that “a unilateral coalition does not work” and that multilateralism can be more effective.
Sidelined by Rumsfeld’s neocon Pentagon before and after the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. State Department has made a concerted effort to repair damaged transatlantic ties over the past two years. Close to the president but less tarred by Iraq fallout, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has traveled extensively in and around Europe—about 128,000 kilometers in 2007—to get European leaders back onside. “Secretary Rice’s intense travel schedule and the strategic outreach to Europe that it represents have had an obvious impact,” Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried told NEWSWEEK. “She has made clear that we—the core democratic nations of the world—are better off tackling key issues together than on our own. And she has made clear that multilateral approaches—the U.N. where possible, NATO, and the U.S. with the EU—are options of choice, not last resort.”
One of those issues is a resurgent, sometimes bellicose Russia. Indeed, Moscow’s recent saber-rattling is both a reaction to the New Atlanticism and a spur for even closer ties between America and the rest of Europe. For all Putin’s talk of restoring Russian might, Moscow’s influence has in fact severely declined across the former Soviet Union during his seven years in power. The European Union has brought in the Baltic states as new members. NATO has not only incorporated the Baltics but also sought to forge ties with Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova. U.S.-backed “color revolutions” toppled Moscow-friendly regimes in Georgia (Rose, 2003) and Ukraine (Orange, 2004).
In response, the Kremlin has behaved more and more aggressively toward its former subjects, instigating a pogrom-like shakedown of ethnic Georgians at the end of last year and a nationwide campaign of vilification of “fascist” Estonia after the removal of a monument to a Soviet soldier in April. Small wonder that remnants of the former U.S.S.R. are rushing into the arms of Europe and the United States. “Russia has tried the tools they used to scare other neighbors with—raising gas prices and then closing Russia’s internal market to us,” Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili told NEWSWEEK in July. “To everybody’s surprise, that did not make us weaker. That made us stronger … We—all Russia’s neighbors—are not Russian property but living, developing organisms. We are a new generation.”
For that new generation in particular, Europe plus America is the only equation that makes geopolitical sense. Mike Williams of the Royal United Services Institute in London says the states of Central and Eastern Europe “see the U.S. as their primary defender against Russia, especially after the cold war, and they think the older allies [of Western Europe] are too skeptical about America.” Aleks Szczerbiak of the European Institute at Sussex University in England notes that these nations, many of which are now EU members, welcome a revived transatlantic alliance: “The post-communist states have always been unhappy about being forced to choose between the U.S. and Europe. I suppose it’s like being forced to choose between your mother and your father.”
Washington has taken full advantage of the warming mood, seeking to erect a missile-defense network in Poland and the Czech Republic and constructing strategically important bases in Romania and Bulgaria. Moscow’s unhappiness has done nothing to discourage its former client states. Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek said last week that America’s military presence is “one of the pillars of the country’s foreign policy, security and transatlantic relations.”
In Central and Eastern Europe, defense issues are at the heart of the New Atlanticism. But not in Western Europe. True, Britain and the United States are formidably close on military and intelligence matters. (One of Gordon Brown’s first big defense decisions after becoming prime minister in June was to grant Washington permission to use an air base at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire as part of the controversial missile-defense system.) But France, the only other nuclear power in Western Europe, has had an on-and-off relationship with NATO, and Germany remains a hesitant military power. No, what draws Western Europe to America is the pull of history and culture, finance and trade.
Western Europe is also exceptional in that a big chunk of public opinion remains strongly opposed to America even as the leaders move in the other direction. According to the Pew Center Global Attitudes Project, European opinion of the United States—highly favorable during the post-9/11 year of 2002—nose-dived at the time of the invasion of Iraq and has only marginally recovered since then. In Germany in 2002, for example, 60 percent of the population had a favorable opinion of America. The figure sank to 25 percent in March 2003 and then rose a bit, to 30 percent, by the spring of this year.
This underscores the political difficulties that could lie ahead for leaders espousing closer and deeper transatlantic ties. Take the case of Spain, the only major European country where the public’s favorable opinion of the United States has not risen between 2003 and this year. Bound by a campaign promise and the political realities of the Spanish electorate, Zapatero infuriated the Bush administration in 2004 when he withdrew all 1,300 Spanish troops from Iraq. Zapatero’s predecessor, José María Aznar, had been one of Bush’s most stalwart supporters; in part because of that, his center-right party was thrown out of office, presaging what would happen to Silvio Berlusconi in Italy last year.
Consumed by domestic politics, Zapatero has not reached out to Washington in the way Merkel or Sarkozy has, which may help explain why Spaniards are stuck in an anti-American rut. And Spain’s relationship with the United States is further complicated by its strong ties to Cuba. On a June visit to Madrid, Condi Rice met with Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos. Talking to reporters, Moratinos and Rice sought to play down their differences. It almost worked. Then Moratinos defended his country’s ties with Fidel Castro’s government and said Rice would eventually see the merit of Spain’s ways. Rice rolled her eyes and silently mouthed to U.S. reporters accompanying her, “Don’t hold your breath.”
Given the state of public opinion, America could hardly have asked for better advocates than Merkel and Sarkozy, especially since Bush’s chief European ally, Tony Blair, was being nudged into retirement because of his closeness to the president and to U.S. Iraq policy. Merkel, an East German physicist who grew up under Soviet domination and became politically active after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, looks as much west as she does east. When she speaks of “the power of freedom,” she can sound positively Kennedyesque. As for Sarkozy, a sometimes fawning French press compares him and his young, attractive family to the Kennedys. He has never disguised his admiration for America. As he said at the Daughters of the American Revolution Hall in Washington a year ago, “No one in France dares deny the truth. The United States is the premier economic, military and monetary power in the world. Your economy is flourishing, your intellectual life is rich, research in the United States is organized such that the best researchers in the world work in your universities and quickly become American patriots.”
It’s easy to imagine Gordon Brown saying those exact words. But Britain, having been shoulder to shoulder with America for so long, is now something of an exception. Brown is trying so hard not to be Blair that he’s sending out mixed signals to Washington—the Menwith Hill decision on the one hand, the suggestion that he’s slowly disengaging from Iraq on the other. Brown is without doubt instinctively American. Vacations are no litmus test, but it’s worth noting that if Sarkozy suddenly popped up this summer in New Hampshire (a modest drive from the Bush family retreat in Maine), Brown used to vacation regularly on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Not this summer. To reinforce his Britishness, he went to the English seaside. No one would accuse Brown of anti-Americanism. But it says something when he is out-Americanized by his German and French counterparts: the Continental drift toward America is very real.
With Lorna Shaddick and Nick Hayes in London, Owen Matthews in Moscow, Christopher Dickey and Tracy McNicoll in Paris, Mike Elkin in Madrid and Katka Krosnar in Prague
