Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
In France they call him "an idiot." In Germany they call him a "big bully." Forget China -- Europe could turn out to be President Bush's biggest foreign policy problem yet.
Apr 6, 2001 | If the Bush administration ends up having to apologize to China, rather than see the Hainan Island standoff turn into a drawn-out international crisis, many in Europe will privately be cheering the American comeuppance.
Even as the potentially explosive situation has dragged on, and reaction in official Washington has been generally supportive of Bush and his foreign-policy team, there has been a notable lack of support from European leaders. That silence should not be ignored. It reflects genuine alarm over what is seen as a revival of Reagan-style unilateralism and high-handedness. No one should make the mistake, that is, of taking the new European anti-Americanism as the simple, shallow, knee-jerk sentiment of past years. This is something potentially more serious.
"The Americans and the Chinese are playing Cold War with each other, which is very strange," Dominique Moisi, a French political analyst, told the New York Times this week. "No one wants to support the Chinese. But they don't want to encourage the United States either. The silence is partly a measure of indifference and partly a measure of the embarrassment of the diplomatic elite."
Only a month ago, Bush shocked many here by essentially mocking European concern about global warming. The continuing calls from Europeans for a rethinking of the Bush team's rejection of the Kyoto targets on global warming attracted mostly snickers in Washington. But in Europe, the issue has proved galvanizing. It was not just that Bush flip-flopped on a campaign pledge to cut back on CO2 emissions, or even that he came out against the Kyoto Protocol on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. It was his cavalier attitude. And the timing.
Even though many in his own administration favored a policy review before a statement was made on Kyoto, the Bush team seemed almost in a hurry to come out against Kyoto -- and made headlines by making the move on the very day that German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was due at the White House to discuss global warming. To European sensibilities this all reeked of needless provocation and caused considerable political damage. The impression came through loud and clear that this administration cares little what anyone else in the world thinks.
As the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung's environment editor, Joachim M|ller-Jung, wrote this week, with none of George W. Bush's love of brevity: "For just as it makes it absolutely clear just how far down on Mr. Bush's agenda environmental protection is, so it must seem like a slap in the face for all those who hoped that the end of the Cold War and the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro marked the dawn of not only a more peaceful, but also a more environment-friendly and ecologically sustainable world."
The issue of spying is also a sore point with Europeans. Outrage was widespread last year when details emerged on Echelon, a massive U.S. surveillance system operated by the National Security Agency. According to published reports, Echelon gives Americans the ability to monitor European phone calls, faxes and e-mails. Earlier this week, the European Parliament committee investigating Echelon held another of its hearings on the subject, and when it wraps up with a report, it's likely to generate more headlines and more distrust toward Americans.
"Everybody is very worried that this system can work without being under the law, without being under judicial mandates, and it can be a kind of attack on privacy," Carlos Coelho, the Portuguese Christian Democrat heading the committee, told me. "They are worried that there are European enterprises in the situation of having unfair chances because of this system."
Criticism of the new president in the British press has also been unrelenting. From the left-leaning Guardian to the Murdoch-owned London Times, Bush has taken more than his share of lumps from the British on everything from Kyoto to Korea.
"By simultaneously destabilizing global security in China, Korea, the Middle East and Russia, by recklessly abrogating the Kyoto climate change treaty, by bullying his allies in Europe and Asia, by pursuing a tax policy that will turn America into the most unequal society in modern history, George W. Bush is fully living up to my expectation that he would become the worst U.S. President since Herbert Hoover," writes the Times' Anatole Kaletsky.
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