gwb in europe

How About Some Goodwill From Europe?
February 22, 2005;

Press coverage of George W. Bush's visit to Europe this week focuses on the president's supposed need to mend trans-Atlantic relations. It is at least interesting to ask whether the Europeans have any responsibilities in this regard. Gerhard Schröder and Jacques Chirac aren't children, after all, even if their behavior is sometimes juvenile.

The standard Franco-German beef, echoed in news media on both sides of the Atlantic, is that Mr. Bush conducts a "cowboy foreign policy." He threatens nice people like Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei and Syria's Bashar Assad, merely because these two innocents support terrorism, plot mass destruction and undermine peace efforts in Iraq. He frowns on Europe selling China advanced weapons to help it become the dominant military power in Asia. He dares to suggest that Europe's embrace of a massive United Nations "global warming" tax is a fool's errand.

The American president is supposedly wrong to be concerned about the growing violence of German skinheads or French anti-Semites. Their grievances can surely be addressed by forcing the Jews to make ever- greater concessions to the Arabs, according to the catechism of those who claim to speak for "Europe."

Mr. Schröder, in full campaign mode prior to a tight electoral test of the Social Democrat-Green coalition in Schleswig-Holstein on Sunday, last week even attacked the central institution of trans-Atlantic relations, the North Atlantic Alliance. A speech read on his behalf at the annual Wehrkunde security conference in Munich proclaimed that NATO is no longer the "primary venue" for trans-Atlantic strategy discussions. Presumably, Mr. Chirac, who has made a career out of obstructing NATO, was the ventriloquist holding the German chancellor on his lap for that utterance.

On Thursday, Mr. Bush will meet with another artful dodger, Russia's Vladimir Putin, in Bratislava, Slovakia. Mr. Putin will assure him that Iran doesn't really have nuclear weapons plans, contrary to all available evidence, including assertions from the Iranians themselves that they have every right to become a nuclear power. Iran is a good customer for Russian nuclear technology and Mr. Putin sees it as his first duty to honor Iranian cash.

Mr. Bush is not the first American president to have to deal with contrariness about policies that serve European as well as U.S. interests. In 1983, Europeans, under bombardment by KGB-inspired propaganda, almost scuttled the Ronald Reagan measure that tipped the Cold War toward the West. Mr. Reagan proposed to counter a new threat to Europe from Soviet medium-range nuclear missiles by deploying U.S. Pershing II nukes in Western Europe.

According to the account of then-Secretary of State George P. Schultz in his 1993 book "Turmoil and Triumph," more than 2 million people demonstrated in Europe in the month before the scheduled November deployment of the Pershings. British women camped out around the clock near a missile site at Greenham Common, getting heavy press coverage. ABC Television waded in with a docudrama positing the U.S. going nuclear to counter a Soviet attack in Europe, with nuclear devastation the result. On Nov. 22, the day before the scheduled deployment primarily meant to protect Germany, the Bundestag gave its consent by a margin of only 60 (out of 512) votes.

Tomorrow, more than 21 years later, an American president will meet with the current German leader in Mainz to try to convince him that the trans-Atlantic alliance is still important to Germany's security, this time from terrorist attacks by Islamic radicals. European police forces directly concerned with security understand this quite well and are cooperating with U.S. security agencies. Even the Russians proudly claim they are working with the West to spot terrorist threats.

But as usual, a few politicians and the left-leaning European press are stirring up anti-Americanism. Some things don't change in 20 years. Mr. Reagan could have avoided such problems if he had remained supine in the face of Soviet threats, and Mr. Bush could have done so as well if his response to 9/11 had been mere tokenism. But both presidents wanted to use America's huge reserves of power and influence to change world politics for the better.

The beginning of the new Bush term was marked by goodwill tours of Europe by Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld. Now Mr. Bush is trying his hand directly. But the view in France and Germany seems to be that world peace is best preserved by respecting the sovereignty even of the most benighted regimes. Mr. Bush, by contrast, thinks that the cause of peace can only be advanced by helping more and more people dislodge evil-minded leaders and thereby obtain political freedom.

The Europeans would have a better case if the Bush campaign were failing, but in fact it is going dramatically well. Governments in Afghanistan and Iraq are no longer threats to their neighbors or, equally importantly, their own peoples. The liberation of Afghans and Iraqis from ugly regimes has emboldened other peoples, like the Ukrainians, to demand better government. Ronald Reagan didn't win the Cold War and demolish the Soviet police state by practicing what the French call détente. He won it by supporting the bids of captive nations for freedom.

This week, Mr. Bush won't need to extend his goodwill tour to those once-captive nations, such as Poland, Hungary, Estonia, et al. They are already in his camp. So is the United Kingdom, with its long tradition of democratic rule and a still-fresh memory of the valiant battle it fought 65 years ago against Nazi tyranny. France and Germany are important countries in Europe and it is worth the president's time to do what he can to mend fences. But they are not "Europe" and are indeed only two of 25 states in the European Union, most of which don't share their foreign policy views.

Mr. Bush has already made one concession to the "Europeans" with his tolerance of French and German participation in an effort to dissuade Iran from its nuclear course. There are no visible achievements, just as there were none in the early 1990s when the same countries were ineffective in dealing with Slobodan Milosevic's Balkan aggression. Give Mr. Bush an "E" for effort in his fence-mending effort, but don't expect miracles.