The relationship between Europe and the United States, central to international order for more than a half-century, may have broken down but in theory is still reparable. Yet anyone who expects the ruffled feathers to settle along with the dust and sand of the Iraq war will be in for disappointment.
It is perhaps not premature to say we have entered an era in which the major Western institutions that have bound these two continents together are crumbling or have been rendered impotent, as though struck by bunker-busting bombs. It is a fundamentally new world in which anger, a sense of betrayal and mistrust have become the bywords between former allies.
It is a world being shaped by neoconservative ideologues in Washington, such as members of the American Enterprise Institute who gathered to celebrate “victory” just as the war was beginning–victory not on the battlefield but in the policy trenches, in the denigration of the hated United Nations, in the tussle with despised Europeans.
Those who hope to restore the status quo ante in U.S.-European relations will have to rest their slim hopes on two critical factors: the role of the United Nations, if any, in rebuilding Iraq, and the prospect that the Bush administration finally will become engaged in trying to resolve the impasse between the Israel and the Palestinians.
On neither front is the outlook encouraging.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair went to Camp David last month with the prime purpose of convincing President Bush that the governing structure in postwar Iraq must be “accepted and endorsed” by the UN, and drew a cool response. Even Secretary of State Colin Powell held that the United States, having committed blood and money to the fight against Saddam Hussein, would insist on a dominant role.
Blair spoke not just for Britain but for all of Europe in wanting a key role for the UN.
Europeans consider such a role to be vital in ensuring that the Iraqis do not see the United States as stepping into a colonial or proconsular position that would inflame Iraqis and people throughout the Arab world. But neoconservatives in Washington have been so successful in demonizing the UN in the popular American mind that assigning it the role the Europeans want probably is politically impossible.
Blair has debt to call
Bush spoke in Belfast last week of assuring a UN role in Iraq, but the details remain to be worked out, and his view may differ considerably from what most Europeans have in mind. The spirit of Jesse Helms, the retired Republican senator from North Carolina who made a career of bashing the United Nations, hovers over conservative America.
Blair remained steadfast in support of U.S. policy before and during the war, despite widespread dissent by the British electorate and much of his own Labor Party. The vital British role in the war leaves the Bush administration in his debt, despite Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s prewar assertion that British forces were not really needed. A failure to resolve the UN issue would increase pressure on Blair to begin distancing himself from the Bush administration. A failure to move forward on the Israeli-Palestinian issue might even force him to jump ship.
Blair, like virtually all other European leaders, is impatient with Bush’s blinkered support for Israel’s right-wing government. As Europeans see it, the key to resolving the impasse is American pressure to compel Israel to dismantle most of its settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip–settlements that have grown apace since Ariel Sharon became prime minister, with hardly a whimper of objection from Washington–to lay the groundwork for a viable Palestinian state.
As a sop to Blair, Bush agreed at their prewar Azores summit to publish a “road map” toward peace between Israel and Palestine. The road map has yet to appear and, as Blair noted later, there is widespread cynicism in Europe and the Arab world about that. He sought to assure cynics that he and Bush have made a genuine commitment, but that had no noticeable impact on the rage against the United States and Britain that is sweeping through the Arab nations.
For good reason. Bush has consistently supported the main thrust of Sharon’s approach to dealing with the Palestinians and has bought into the Israeli leader’s attempts to equate Yasser Arafat with Osama bin Laden in terms of the worldwide struggle against terrorism. The Palestinians, never loath to act as their own worst enemies, have played into Sharon’s hands with their deplorable suicide bombings.
Bush also has said Israel can modify the road map, which was not the understanding of those from other nations who helped draw it up.
A telling appointment
He tipped his hand in December when he appointed Elliott Abrams as his special adviser on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. He might as well have given the job to a member of Sharon’s Cabinet. Abrams is an unabashed Zionist who has opposed the Oslo peace process and condemned the “land for peace” formula that has been central to U.S. policy since 1967. In effect, he favors a peace imposed on Israeli terms, not reached through compromise.
Abrams also has no previous Middle East experience, but then neither have any of Bush’s principal conservative advisers on Iraq: Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
The gulf between Europe and the United States on the Israeli-Palestinian issue is huge and fundamental. The neoconservatives in the United States have sought to portray critical Europeans as anti-Semitic, a charge that Europeans view as demagogic even while many of them see anti-Arab racism behind American attitudes.
U.S.-British relations at stake
The handling of this issue after the Iraq war will be a major test of the British-U.S. relationship and a test of whether Blair is willing to stand by his own convictions if, as seems likely, there is no evidence of American willingness to become more evenhanded and recognize that Palestinians as well as Israelis have genuine security interests that must be met.
U.S. Mideast policy and its involvement in postwar Iraq aside, the atmospherics of U.S.-European relations have been affected, probably for a long time, by the clash of wills that occurred in the buildup to the war. Even the Russians have cast their lot with France and Germany, and the Turks have failed the test of allegiance to Washington. There is such a residue of bitterness that a deep and long-lasting freeze in this relationship may be in prospect.
Trade disputes inevitably will become envenomed, and even Britons will be embittered if their country is not given a fair share of contracts for rebuilding Iraq. The UN, NATO and the European Union all will suffer grievous harm while this new cold war lasts, and the United States, once so widely admired, may find itself even more hated than it was during the Vietnam War.
Things may change only when the Bushites come to recognize that even a hyperpower needs friends and that military force has its limits.
In the meanwhile, everyone will lose.
