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this rate, President Bush should fire Colin Powell, hire the French
foreign minister in his place, and move the State Department to
Brussels. Henry Kissinger has just written a book titled Does
America Need a Foreign Policy? The answer, for much of the U.S.
opinion elite, seems to be, "No — the Europeans already have
one for us."
In the glorification
of European disapproval of Bush that has filled U.S. newspapers
and magazines, there is surely an element of partisan opportunism.
It is simply an easy way to dump on a Republican president. But
there is a more troubling aspect as well, a strain of anti-Americanism
not seen since the Cold War: "My country, always wrong."
Maureen Dowd is a perfect exemplar of this counter-patriotism, with
her tiresome columns about how bumptious, crude, and selfish George
W. Bush's America is.
So, naturally,
Bush critics like Dowd assume that in any disagreements with Europe,
the United States must be wrong. It apparently never occurs to them
that America might have different interests to protect, and occasionally
a different, more sensible vision of the world than its European
allies. Bush's critics must be retroactively scandalized that the
U.S. didn't go along with the Suez adventure, that it pushed to
deploy Pershing missiles in Europe, and that it hadn't spent the
last decade coddling Qaddafi. How could any of these things be right
if Le Monde didn't approve?
What upsets
the euro-boosters is precisely the fact that Bush is exercising
leadership, which occasionally requires getting out in front of
your allies and pulling them along. This is why President Bush's
determined comments on missile defense yesterday in his press conference
with Prime Minister Aznar were so important: "The ABM Treaty
prevents our nation and other freedom-loving nations from exploring
opportunities to be able to say to those who would hold freedom-loving
peoples hostage that we're not going to let you do so."
In February,
Secretary Rumsfeld was similarly insistent at a NATO meeting that
the U.S. would deploy a missile-defense system. His evident resolve
lead, within weeks, to a remarkable change in the posture of the
allies toward missile defense.
Consider: NATO
Secretary-General George Robertson said, "Now the Europeans
have to accept that the Americans really intend to go ahead …
Now that the question of 'whether' it's going to happen has been
settled, I want an engagement inside NATO between the Americans
and other allies about the 'how' and the 'when.'" German Chancellor
Gerhard Schroeder, addressing fellow Social Democratic Party members,
said, "We should be under no illusions that that there will
be no difference of opinion with the new American leadership under
President George W. Bush. First and foremost, it won't be about
the planned National Missile Defense program but about trade policy
issues. Differences over NMD are not the decisive factor in the
German-American relationship." The German Foreign Minister
said that NMD "above all is a national decision for the United
States." Britain's Foreign Secretary said "On the question
of what happens if national missile defense proceeds; if it means
the U.S. feels more secure and therefore feels more able to assert
itself in international areas of concern to us, we would regard
that as a net gain in security." Dr. Javier Solana of Spain,
former Secretary-General of NATO and now the director of foreign
policy for the European Union, said "The United States has
the right to deploy" an NMD system. Of the ABM Treaty, the
so-called "cornerstone of strategic stability," Dr. Solana
said, "It is not the Bible."
Since then,
some of the momentum for missile defense has been lost, perhaps
partly because the administration passed on an opportunity to start
the initial work of a ground system in Alaska this year, partly
because it has seemed uncertain about exactly where it is headed
on missile defense, and partly because Joseph Biden and Carl Levin
— whose talking points could be written by an EU minister — are
now in the ascendance in Washington.
But the sheer
insistence that a system will be built and that the ABM Treaty will
be shelved can change the atmosphere again. Will Washington's need
to protect its cities from missile attack really break up the Western
alliance? No, and if it did, it raises the question: What sort of
allies are these anyway?
If the Bush
administration weathers the current storm and convinces the Europeans
that it is serious about missile defense, they will accommodate
the U.S., and move on to bitching about something else. As a NATO
official told the New York Times last week: "When you
know they are going to build it no matter what, is it really worth
the fight? I don't think so." Europe will get over missile
defense, even if Maureen Dowd and Co. never do.
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