Power, Terror, Peace, and War by Mead Walter Russell

Author:Mead, Walter Russell.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307427311
Publisher: Random House Inc.
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

CIAO EUROPA

After the war itself, the most striking element in the foreign policy of the Bush administration has been its willingness to part company with France and Germany over basic strategic matters. This is more than a quarrel over Iraq; this is a historic change, for the first time in American history, to a non-Eurocentric foreign policy for the United States. In the Bush administration, the strategic focus of the United States moved to the Middle East and Europe fell to third place (behind East Asia) in American concerns.

Traditionally, American grand strategy has viewed Europe as both America’s greatest opportunity and America’s greatest problem. Europe’s dominant position in the international economy, its significance to the United States as the overwhelmingly most important source of immigrants (with all the loyalties that resulted), and its strategic significance as the center of world politics from World War I through the Cold War all kept American attention fixed on Europe. Today, even as the ties of immigration weaken sentimental ties and Europe has receded as a source of new immigrants, Europe offers America less opportunity and represents less threat than other parts of the world. While Europe remains rich, it is a mature, slow-growing market. Few major barriers to free U.S.-European trade remain, and where they do, it is unlikely that militant and vigilant EU trade negotiators will offer the United States many significant advantages. It seems unlikely that European politics will once again lead to global problems for America. And while Europe can offer both political and military assistance for American policy outside the NATO area, such help is likely to be limited by differences in the interests and priorities of the Europeans compared to the Americans, by the divisions among the Europeans themselves, and by Europe’s failure to build significant military power.

European politics make it difficult for the continent to mobilize those resources it has. A France dedicated to limiting American power and a Germany holding the exercise of that power to extraordinarily high-minded standards will, between them, ensure that in many cases Europe is unlikely to provide even the help that it can.

More than that, the Franco-German alliance will have great difficulty identifying any positive foreign policy interests beyond containing the United States and consolidating a Franco-German hegemony in Europe. Germany wants the old games of power politics and national rivalries to end; it has been burned too badly, and both inflicted and suffered too much pain to want to venture down that ominous path again. The French elite, however, like an old and fading roué, just wants to get back in the game. It is addicted to the thrill of the game and it has lost sight of something that both Germans and Americans know: old-fashioned power politics in an era of weapons of mass destruction is a sure road to ruin. Absent a stark and immediate threat to their own security, opposition to American foreign policy is about the only global issue on which this odd couple can agree

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