U.S. - Europe Split Is Forever, Expert Says

by Jim Lobe

Blair, who is visiting. President George W. Bush this week to focus on "how we get America and Europe working again together as partners and not as rivals," may make some progress in the short run, according to Kupchan, but larger geopolitical and domestic forces are working against him.

Kupchan, whose controversial book, 'The End of the American Era', defied the confident, imperial views of the hawks around Bush when it was released late last year, has derived a certain gloomy satisfaction out of developments over the last several months as Washington's relations with its traditional NATO allies, especially Germany and France, have plummeted to their lowest levels since WWII.

The book, which warned that the triumphalism displayed by Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, and the neo-conservative ideologues who surround them was fundamentally delusional, predicted just such a trans-Atlantic split.

"What surprises me since I wrote the book is the speed with which the change has taken place," Kupchan told IPS in his office at the Council on Foreign Relations here. "My sense is that George W. Bush has put history into fast forward."

"Never did I imagine when I sent in the galleys of the book a year ago, that what I think is an irreparable rift would have opened up with Europe, and the United States would essentially have said to the world, 'We don't care what the Security Council says' by March 2003."

Kupchan says he would have predicted the divide would develop over a decade or more.

According to the author, the kind of unilateralism that the Bush administration has put into overdrive since taking office was already evident during the Clinton administration, when, for example, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright bragged that the United States had become "the indispensable nation" because of its ability to build "coalitions of the willing" to intervene in other countries, even without Security Council approval.

But just as Clinton's "liberal humanitarianism" was derided by Republicans as "international social work," Bush's far more muscular and self-righteous assertion of unilateral U.S. prerogatives, especially after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, hides a much more deep-rooted isolationist impulse that will inevitably turn the United States inward.

Kupchan's view -- that isolationism and unilateralism are two sides of the same coin -- is often misunderstood both by U.S. and foreign politicians, who have assumed that the administration's global war on terrorism will necessarily lead Washington to broaden its international commitments, he said.

While such reasoning may appear logical -- after all, how else can one combat trans-national terrorism except with international co-operation? -- it overlooks the peculiar psychology of U.S. attitudes, particularly, as Kupchan claims, in Bush's geographical base in the South and in the Rocky Mountain West, vis-a-vis the rest of the world.

In Kupchan's words, isolationism and unilateralism "share common ideological origins in America's fear of entanglements that may compromise its liberty and sovereignty. They also share origins in the notion of U.S. exceptionalism, providing the nation an impetus to cordon itself off from the international system, but also to remake that system as America sees fit."

"It is precisely because isolationism and unilateralism are so deeply embedded in the country's political culture that they pose a dual threat to liberal internationalism, inducing the United States to retreat from the global stage even as it seeks to re-create the world in its image," he writes.

In addition, according to the author, the new imperialists around Bush underestimate the speed with which the U.S. public will tire of bearing the kind of "global policeman" burden that the administration has adopted as its grand strategy, even in the war against terrorism.

"The prevailing wisdom is, if we get hit by terrorism again, it will just reinforce our anger and determination to take the battle to all quarters of the world," he said. "But I don't think terrorism plays like that, and, if the costs to American global engagement bring terror to the homeland -- or American tourists get blown up here and there -- it's quite plausible to me that it will lead to increased isolationism, not to more and more political support for running the world."

That the main split should take place with Europe is not surprising, if only because traditional U.S. isolationism meant precisely, until Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States in December 1941, non-alignment with European powers.

Europe was seen as morally corrupt, cynical, and decadent -- all characterizations of the "Old Europe" that once again are commonly heard in Washington, particularly from the coalition of hard-right Republicans, neo-conservatives, and Christian Right leaders who support Bush's policies -- compared with the rising and redemptive power of "America."

But despite neo-conservative tracts that depict Europe as having moved to the Kantian paradise of "perpetual peace," these same forces underestimate the degree to which an increasingly unified and self-confident Europe offers an alternative pole in Washington's "unipolar world," according to Kupchan.

In the book, he compares the coming rivalry to that which developed between Rome and Constantinople after the death of the Emperor Constantine in 337 A.D.

But as Blair, as well as the leaders of Spain, Italy and other members of the "New Europe," would argue, Europe is not yet a counterweight to Washington, and Kupchan says that he would not have predicted that the Iraq crisis would have been as divisive for Europe as it has been for the trans-Atlantic alliance. "The unitary Europe that I envisaged in the book doesn't exist today."

On the other hand, he believes that the current crisis "will ultimately strengthen Europe because it has been so damaging to the Atlantic relationship that even those, like Blair, who want a Europe that's tightly bound to the U.S. will find out that that's not doable. And they will ultimately throw their weight behind a stronger and more independent Europe."

Indeed, according to the latest polls from seven European countries, including those whose leaders have backed Bush, strong majorities favor a more independent stance vis-a-vis Washington.

While Kupchan wishes the trans-Atlantic split were reparable, he thinks the Iraq crisis "will prove to be the defining turning point which effectively brought the alliance to an end."

"Instead of letting these deeper tectonic forces gradually work their way to the surface, the clash over Iraq was like an earthquake, so we could see them in plain view. It made clear that, basically, France, Germany and Russia are prepared to contemplate life after Pax Americana, that the United States is prepared to part company with its key allies on the most fundamental principles of word order, and once that happens for all to see, you can't go back."