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Bush's date of destiny with a resurgent Europe
by Jonathan Power
The visit to Europe of
this American president will decide whether George Bush has inherited
sufficient common sense to dig himself out of the hole he dug for
himself in his first 100 days or whether he will ignore the first law
of holes: when you are in one stop digging.
Bush is discovering that,
in William Pfaff's telling phrase, Europe “is not a used-up
civilisation”. “For four hundred years European civilisation has
dominated the world — for better or worse. It is convenient and
flattering for Americans to assume that this is all over; but it is
very rash to do so.”
There have been all number
of good reasons for the US to regard Europe as washed up, not just the
two world-shattering wars of the last century, not just, going back,
the political corruption that led to the founding of the US in the
first place, nor the ending of the great empires of Britain, France
and Holland, nor the economic sclerosis and Euro-pessimism of the
1970s and early 1980s, but the inability of the contemporary Europeans
to pull together when up against the single-mindedness and
determination of Washington. At last that has come to end, some would
add, not a moment too late.
This Europe is a Europe
that has not been so confident since the rout of Napoleon and the
Concert of Europe. Moreover, it now has, through the European Union,
the institutional strength to weather the kind of economic and
political upheavals that so unexpectedly destroyed its tranquillity in
1914 and which took the best part of forty years to put right. With
the development of the euro-currency and, hard on its heels, the
European defence initiative (and with Tony Blair re-elected in Britain
both will now get a powerful shot in the arm) Europe has discovered a
new confidence and sense of independence, one that was already well
under way once Mikhail Gorbachev made it clear the cold war was over
and that Russia saw its future home in Europe too.
Clearly the new Bush
administration has been taken back by the strength of European
resistance to its first efforts at policy making. Having thrown down
the gauntlet on a range of issues, from global warming to missile
defence, it now has indicated that it has stopped digging down.
Friday's statement by Bush was a remarkable volte-face: “Russia is
no longer our enemy and therefore we shouldn't be locked into a cold
war mentality that says we keep the peace by blowing each other up. In
my attitude, that's old, that's tired, that's stale.”
While, as a candidate,
Bush had given hints that he believed that sharp reductions in nuclear
armaments (which Clinton never seriously addressed) was a corollary of
missile defence, he never spelt it out. Neither did he when he made
his big pitch for missile defence last month. Indeed, one could say he
still hasn't. Nevertheless, this statement of last Friday, if it has
any meaning at all, is saying in effect that the US no longer needs to
maintain nuclear deterrence with Russia. In which case, yes indeed,
the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty is redundant and missile defences,
if still regarded as necessary, can be done as a collective enterprise
with Europe and Russia.
Similarly, the
administration's announcement that it is going to renew negotiations
with North Korea is another somersault of great significance. The
Clinton administration's patient footslogging negotiations with the
Stalinist regime paid off. Not only did it win a freeze on nuclear
weapons development, it made some progress on persuading Pyongyang to
slow down its sales of rockets abroad and, most important of all, it
helped break down the ice wall that divided it from South Korea. Now,
it is possible once again to think of seeing President Kim Dae Jung's
sunshine policy taking another step forward, with Kim Il Sung making a
state visit to the South and even some further steps forward on
developing more transparency in its rocket programme and nuclear
research.
One can now conceive
again, as the Clinton administration began to, of a more normal
relationship, in which anti-missile defences aimed against North Korea
would be unnecessary. This, of course, would beg the difficult
question: Are they being developed just to contain China, which is
something the Indians would like and some people, a minority, in
Taiwan and Japan, but which makes no sense to the rest of the world?
The Europeans, undoubtedly,
are going to keep pushing hard on these issues all week. At the moment,
the new policies of the Bush administration are at best skeletal, at worst
contradictory. Secretary of State Colin Powell appears to be conducting a
sophisticated, nuanced foreign policy that allows bridges to be built with
Europe. Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld appears still intent on
constructing a sledgehammer, as if the Berlin wall had never come down and
as if China had never parted company from Mao Tse-tung and his concept of
“permanent revolution”.
Bush will find all along
the road he travels this week a different Europe from the one his
father dealt with, even a different one from the early Clinton years.
Its opposition is not going to melt away; if anything, it is going to
become more severe and more independently minded as time goes on. The
question that Bush is coming face to face with this week is how much
of an antagonist does he want to make of Europe?
Mr. Jonathan Power is a syndicated
columnist and author. He contributed this article to
the Jordan Times.
Source:
by courtesy & © 2001
Jordan Times & Jonathan Power
by the same author:
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