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Cold War is over, President Bush told European leaders in Brussels
at the start of his five-day tour, "and we must change our thinking
to meet the demands of the new age." How right he is. Patiently,
Bush laid out the case for missile defense and explained that the
Kyoto treaty threatens the American economy, and therefore everyone
else's. Europe, he said in the language of a polite guest, should
be "whole and free," and "the stronger Europe is, the better it
is for America."
He had hardly finished speaking before President Chirac of France
was accusing him of starting a new arms race and being indifferent
to the fate of the planet. The French press did its duty, one newspaper
describing Bush as the 3-B man, the B's being "the Bible, baseball,
and barbecue." The press throughout the continent took the coincidental
execution of Timothy McVeigh as the pretext for a much wider sermon
on American barbarism. Next stop was Gothenburg in Sweden, for a
summit with the European Union. There the Swedish prime minister,
Goran Persson, who is also the temporary president of the EU, greeted
him with the observation that the EU is "one of the few institutions
we can develop as a balance to U.S. world domination." A less restrained
man than Bush might have given this the retort it deserved.
The noise that can be heard is the sundering of old ties and old
assumptions. For about a decade now, it has been evident that the
EU is projecting itself as a bloc in rivalry with America. "Whole
and free" in this view means centralized government, common foreign
and defense policies, a single currency, and a leadership willing
to entertain a new, supposedly more benign, cold war. Already well
on the way to militarization, the EU ideology is divisive and dangerous
because it is anti-American — and in the last resort antidemocratic.
Mr. Persson's eagerness to champion this new cold war stands in
astonishing contrast with his country's neutrality throughout other
peoples' struggles against Nazism and Communism. Outside, in the
streets of Gothenburg, some 25,000 people were demonstrating —
incoherently, to be sure — against the EU, the United States,
capitalism, and anything else under the sun. Opening fire, the Swedish
police shot three demonstrators, and arrested over 600. Nobody sees
fit to contrast the execution of the mass-murderer McVeigh after
a long judicial process with the indiscriminate use of live ammunition
against civilians by the Swedish police.
Europeans as a whole do not wish to participate in this new cold
war. But they have no say in their future; their leaders pay not
the least attention to them. Unusually, the Irish were allowed a
referendum, and they voted against current plans for extending the
EU and its powers. This result in no way chastened the EU leaders.
The referendum is to be ignored, or cynically held again until the
Irish come up with the right vote. The Kremlin of the earlier cold
war set an example of how to erect democratic facades.
In Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia, Bush at last met the Russian
president Putin. Today's Russia cannot afford the pretensions of
the EU, and may instead be developing the realistic view that rivalry
with the U.S. brings no conceivable gain. What a measure of change
it is that Bush had a more useful and a more civil meeting with
Putin than with Europeans, who once made common cause with the United
States. A new age is indeed upon us, and we are all going to have
to change our thinking.
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