He Didn't Start This Fire

You can't fix a problem if you don't understand it. We all know that there is a big problem in America's relations with Europe. But even now--with President Bush traveling the continent on a major trip--most reports still fail to show even minimal understanding of what the problem is or how it came to be.

THE USUAL STORY ABOUT BUSH AND EUROPE GOES SOMETHING LIKE THIS:

"In the 1990s, Europe and the United States worked well together. Then George W. Bush came into office and ripped up treaties like Kyoto and the Rome convention on an international criminal court. Despite their understandable resentment over these unilateral acts, Europeans nonetheless responded generously to the 9/11 attacks. 'We are all Americans,' said the headline on the editorial page of Le Monde."

THE USUAL STORY CONTINUES:

"Germany, France, and others supported the war in Afghanistan and the global war on terror. However, the leaders of those countries believed that the Iraq war violated international law. Fortunately, that argument is now behind us, and real co-operation is becoming possible again - if only George Bush can overcome his blindly ideological positions on Iran, Israel, the UN, etc. and co-operate with his more globally minded allies."

Does this all sound familiar? It certainly should: It's repeated often enough.

But repetition does not save the story from being rubbish.

The treaties George Bush "tore up" in 2001 were already long dead. Kyoto, for example, was signed in December, 1997, three full years before George Bush took office. In all that time, President Clinton never dared send it to the Senate for ratification - for the very good reason that the Senate had already voted 95 to nothing in July, 1997, that it would not ratify any climate-change treaty that exempted China, India and Mexico (which is just what Kyoto did). Ditto on the International Criminal Court. The Clinton administration signed that treaty in June, 1998, and likewise never sent it to the Senate. When George Bush rescinded U.S. signatures on those treaties, he was not telling Europe anything it did not know.

Nor is it exactly true that Euro-American relations were sailing along smoothly before 2001. Those were the years in which French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine was denouncing American "hyperpuissance"--and transforming the old European Community into a new European Union, with its own currency, army and constitution to rival the United States.

For that matter, let's not over-estimate the sympathy Europeans expressed after 9/11. Few go on to read the editorial beneath Le Monde's famous headline:

"[The] reality is perhaps also that of an America whose own cynicism has caught up with it. If bin Laden, as the American authorities seem to think, really is the one who ordered the Sept. 11 attacks, how can we fail to recall that he was in fact trained by the CIA and that he was an element of a policy, directed against the Soviets, that the Americans considered to be wise? Might it not then have been America itself that created this demon?"

The editorial's claim that bin Laden was some kind of American creation was flatly wrong. But it is telling that the Le Monde editorialists would choose to believe this fiction. Within a very few months, a French author would sell 300,000 copies of a book that alleged that the 9/11 attacks were actually carried out by the Pentagon in order to justify attacks upon innocent Middle Eastern nations. A similar book later won a huge audience in Germany as well.

As for Iraq, the reality is again very different from the myth. France and Germany opposed the Iraq war not out of regard for international law, but because they affirmatively preferred the Saddam Hussein regime to the likely alternatives: a preference that Saddam recognized and rewarded with the billions of dollars of oil-for-food money that he directed to French and German corporations and individuals.

The Bush administration has to begin by understanding that the fundamental cause of the transatlantic rift is the ambition of the leaders of France and Germany to build the diverse countries of Europe into a European super-state dominated by the largest member nations; that is, themselves. This project is dangerously unpopular with many European voters. To overcome that unpopularity, those leaders have needed to mobilize a countervailing emotion: anti-Americanism.

Anti-Americanism has always been present in Europe, of course. But in the past--the missile deployment crisis of 1982 for example--European elites worked to soothe anti-Americanism. In 2002, the leaders of France and Germany stoked the anger instead. And they are still at it.

Only last week, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder delivered a major speech in Munich arguing that NATO should be replaced as the foundation of the Western alliance. Instead of an alliance of the United States and 25 smaller partners, Schroeder would rather see an alliance of two great powers: the United States and an equally powerful Europe (with Canada presumably shoved to one side as a neglected junior associate).

The democratic nations face dangers enough without embarking on an unnecessary internal quarrel caused by French and German self-aggrandizement. The United States badly needs a new policy, one founded on resistance to the centralizing pretensions of the European Union. Now would be an excellent time to start.