More than an ocean separates the United States and Europe.
The psychological distance is wider now than perhaps at any time in decades. On both sides of the Atlantic, people are turning inward, not so much in isolationism as preoccupation with their own problems.
America fought two bloody world wars and a costly 40-year Cold War on European soil, but today the Pentagon is bringing home the troops that both guarded against a threatening Soviet Union and embodied the Atlantic alliance.
Western Europeans are struggling to bind themselves together economically and politically in a European Union, while the U.S. is expanding its economic ties across the borders to Canada and Mexico-and increasingly across the Pacific to the fast-growing economies of Asia.
Secretary of State Warren Christopher sent a chill through European capitals last year when he asserted that Ameican foreign policy has been too “Euro-centric.” All of this, along with public squabbling over such issues as Bosnia, has created a sense that the U.S. and Europe are drifting apart.
“With the Cold War over, some may think Europe doesn’t matter as much to our nation as it used to,” Vice President Al Gore acknowledged last week. “President Clinton says they’re wrong.”
But it won’t be easy for Clinton, who arrives Sunday in Brussels on his first presidential trip to Europe, to narrow the perception gulf. During the eight-day, five-country trip, he will meet with 23 presidents and prime ministers.
The Europeans have had to wait a year for Clinton. And when he meets Monday with his 15 NATO counterparts, America’s closest and most important military allies, he will look around the table at leaders he hardly knows.
Unlike George Bush, who cultivated foreign leaders and flew to Brussels for his first NATO summit just six weeks after taking office, Clinton has done little to build a personal relationship with the Europeans.
The perception that the Clinton administration doesn’t much care about Europe has been reinforced by many slights, real and imagined.
The German defense minister first learned from the newspapers that the U.S. and Russia planned to hold joint military exercise-in Germany. The British, who traditionally have enjoyed an especially close relationship, were shocked when Clinton publicly recounted a private conversation with Prime Minister John Major in which they disagreed about Bosnia. And several European leaders have put off visits to Washington because they couldn’t be assured of seeing Clinton, only to watch as he made time for Asian leaders.
“Part of this trip has to be to assure the Europeans that just because Asia is now more important doesn’t mean that Europe is less important,” says Lawrence Korb, a defense expert at the Brookings Institution.
The White House has invited about 200 young Europeans from several countries to Brussels Sunday night to hear Clinton’s views on U.S.-European relations. His speech will present a vision of a continent erasing the last vestiges of the old East-West division.
The next day, he will seek the all-but-assured allied endorsement of his Partnership for Peace initiative that would slowly open NATO’s door to the East, including Russia, but not provide the immediate security guarantees desperately sought by some East European nations.
American officials hope this will help inject new life into the 44-year-old NATO alliance, which has been groping for a new role since the collapse of communism.
But Clinton and the Europeans will have a tough time avoiding an argument over Bosnia, where NATO has proven impotent because of sharp disagreement about how to stop the killing just beyond its territory.
Asked about Bosnia, a senior White House official dismissed any idea that Clinton was prepared to offer new proposals. “That’s not what this summit is about,” he said.
Moving on to Prague, Czech Republic, Moscow, and Minsk, Belarus, Clinton will stress America’s interest in seeing stablility and democracy prevail in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. But the leaders there may wonder about Clinton’s ability to deliver more than generalities, given his tendency to temporize.
In Prague, Clinton will meet with the disappointed leaders of Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, the new democracies eager for NATO membership as a defense against a resurgent Russia.
The Russian elections made the East Europeans even more anxious about what they see as Washington’s “Russia First” policy. Poland’s Lech Walesa complained that the Partnership for Peace is a “shortsighted and irresponsible” approach that leaves these nations as pawns between the big powers.
Clinton said last week that moving now to bring them into NATO would risk drawing new divisions in Europe and feeding a nationalist backlash in Russia.
The unexpected success of Russian extremist Vladimir Zhirinovsky has made Washington and its European allies even more wary of alienating Russia-and of taking on new defense commitments that would make an attack on Bratislava the same as an attack on Boston.
While U.S. officials discounted the strong showing by Zhirinovsky’s ultranationalist party as mainly a protest vote, East Europeans saw in it a real peril. Asked for his reaction to Zhirinovsky’s threats to invade Poland, Polish Foreign Minister Andrzej Olechowski shot back, “I’ll get my gun.”
“I think they do fear an invasion, rightly or wrongly,” said former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger. “Not tomorrow or not under Yeltsin, but particularly after they see this election and they think a year or two down the road of a much more imperial Russian government facing them.”
In Moscow, Clinton will find Boris Yeltsin pleased by NATO’s go-slow approach. This will be Clinton’s most important stop, because officials believe that ultimately a democratic Russia is the best guarantee of European security. “This is the president’s No. 1 foreign policy priority,” said a senior White House official.
Clinton has invested more time and energy in building a relationship with the Russian president than any other leader-frequently exchanging letters and talking on the telephone at least once a month since their first summit last spring in Vancouver.
In the aftermath of the elections, said one U.S. official, “This is not the time to sit on the fence and see which way the wind is going to blow.”
But Yeltsin may be entitled to wonder about American follow-through: So far, Russia has received less than a quarter of the $4.1 billion in aid promised by the Clinton administration.
And while every effort will be made to mask disagreements from public view, the U.S. has serious concerns about signs of a more nationalist Russian foreign policy, particularly when it comes to meddling in the former Soviet republics like Georgia and Moldova.
“We are going to assert some clear principles, namely that we don’t recognize that Moscow has a sphere of influence in the former Soviet states,” said the senior White House official.
Next Saturday, Clinton will make a symbolic six-hour stopover in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, to reward that nation’s agreement to give up its inherited Soviet nuclear weapons.
An obscure country like Belarus usually wouldn’t receive such attention, but the message is really directed to its a bigger neighbor, Ukraine, which Clinton is smubbing because of its efforts to keep some nuclear weapons.
