Just 40 years ago this week, President John F. Kennedy at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt suggested that the ties between the United States and Europe were so close and so essential that they should consider not only an economic union, but possibly even a political union between these two pillars of the West. How times change.
White House officials now say the new U.S. policy toward the ever-larger European Union is "disaggregation," to distinguish between the friendly Europeans and the less reliable, or even the potentially hostile. Or as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has put it, between "Old Europe;" and the new.
A clue to what this means is on display in Iraq, where British troops have fought alongside their U.S. allies from the start. Now Polish troops are leading a new peacekeeping contingent of 7,500 troops from Denmark, Norway, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Ukraine, with NATO providing the logistic, communications, and intelligence support.
Beyond that, there is very little sign the new U.S. rhetoric of picking and choosing between Europeans means anything at all. The White House is preoccupied with the Middle East. The U.S. Trade Representative works with the European Union's Commissioner for Trade, Pascal Lamy, because the EU requires that all its members subordinate trade negotiations to him.
The State Department has yet to rethink, let alone examine, its 50-year assumption that a united Europe is by definition in U.S. interests. British officials are still told by their State Department colleagues they will be taken more seriously in Washington the more they are engaged in Brussels, the EU capital.
Try telling that to Tony Blair, who is vilified across Europe for his loyal support of President Bush over Iraq. Only last week, the Greek Bar Association began drafting war-crimes charges to haul Blair before the International Criminal Court. Forty years ago, France's President Charles De Gaulle said that Britain would be "America's Trojan Horse" inside Europe. Now the pro-American Poles, voting in a referendum this weekend to ratify the terms of accession to the EU, are dubbed "the Trojan donkey" in the French and German media.
The assumption that America can only benefit from a Europe "whole and free" and ever more integrated has been coming under increasing question. Two years ago, Henry Kissinger in his book Does America Need a Foreign Policy? suggested that it was high time to reconsider the old assumptions. He concluded that the economic ties between the United States and EU were too important to put at risk, but that a great deal more American political engagement with the Europeans would be needed.
And yet the striking characteristic of the Bush administration on Europe, as France and Germany explore an openly anti-American policy, is that outside the Pentagon there is no policy. Congress holds no hearings. Other than finally threatening legal action against the EU's scientifically unjustified barriers against genetically modified U.S. food exports, the U.S. Trade Representative explores no other options. When the Estonians are ordered by Brussels to start raising their tariffs on American goods as a condition of joining the EU, Washington is silent.
Maybe they are simply discouraged. Twice in the 1990s then-U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor and his EU counterpart, Leon Brittain, negotiated a Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement. Each time, the French vetoed it. Today, the Doha Round of world-trade liberalization is endangered by the EU's difficulty in scrapping its protectionist farm policies in the teeth of French vetoes.
The Bush administration would have allies all across Europe and the rest of the world if they openly singled out France for confrontation. The U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve would also have support is they pressed the question why the European Central Bank and the eurozone economy are stagnating and helping bring down the wider global economy. And it's odd that so few people in the U.S. media or politics wonder why not.
The U.S. Congress might find it useful to explore Kissinger's idea of joint hearings with the European Parliament into issues like farm-trade obstructionism. The price they might have to pay could be other contentious hearings on the Kyoto Protocol and global warming, or on U.S. policies in the Middle East. Fine. Bring it on. Americans have arguments here that too few Europeans have heard.
Neither Congress and the administration has yet paid much attention to the EU convention, chaired by former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, that is drafting a new European constitution. And yet in Giscard's proposals for a strong EU presidency, a common foreign and defense policy and an increasingly uniform judicial system, the implications for U.S. interests are serious.
The Bush administration began to realize over the last 12 months that the EU is becoming a problem, rather than the bright opportunity that JFK identified in Frankfurt 40 years ago. It's about time that they did something about it.
— Martin Walker is chief international correspondent for United Press International. This piece was written for UPI and is reprinted with permission.
