Last summer, with several other Americans, I went to a garden reception attended by some French barristers, generals, and assorted professionals in Versailles. Most of them, conservatives and liberals alike, were quite ecstatic about the prospect of Barack Obama as the next American president — except one. He glanced around and then quietly whispered to me, “There is only room for one Obama — and, you remember, we already are the Obama.”
I think we are beginning to understand something of what he meant.
Europe went gaga over the campaign of Barack Obama — especially his serial references to multilateralism, vows to leave Iraq, eco-utopianism, and the soothing way in which he trumped Europe’s own disgust with the Bush administration.
Promises of nationalized health care, higher taxes, Kyoto redux, and more government cheered Europeans, leading them to believe that Obama would steer America on a path closer to their own. (That the French, German, and Italian governments may be slightly to the right of Obama was never mentioned — nor was the fact that in their lethargy Europeans occasionally like to come over here for a swig of old-fashioned rip-roaring America.)
Yet after the first seven weeks of the Obama administration some in Europe may be reminded of the old adage, “Be careful what you wish for.”
Take unilateralism. After the invasion of Iraq, Europe mostly lambasted Bush as a go-it-alone cowboy who ridiculed “Old Europe.” They forgot about American attempts to lead a joint effort to stop nuclear proliferation in North Korea and Iran, fight the Taliban in Afghanistan, beat back al-Qaeda, and ensure European autonomy in the face of an ascendant Russia. Tell a European that the U.S. military killed some pretty awful Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan, Waziristan, and Iraq — terrorists who liked Europeans no better than us — and he was likely to play-act that we had created such creepy killers.
But now President Obama seems to be taking Europe at its multiculturalist, multilateralist word. He asks for more European troops in Afghanistan, and yet before they even arrive he wants to open dialogue with the “moderate” elements of the Taliban — sort of like searching out reasonable Nazis around 1942, or looking for circumspect Japanese after Iwo Jima. (Apparently, he thinks the Taliban haven’t heard of his $1.7-trillion deficit and his trashing of the cowboy Bush, or read his sympathetic press rebranding the once “good” Afghan war as the “quagmire.”)
Meanwhile Obama is playing Jacques Chirac in the Middle East, seeking talks with both Bashar al-Assad and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions. His Al Arabiya interview put him squarely to the left of the old European colonialists. (It was not for nothing that he sent back the bust of Winston Churchill and offered the visiting British pith helmets some fire-sale DVDs as presidential presents.)
Recently, in a letter to Russian leaders, Obama tried his hand at Kissingerian quid pro quo, apparently offering to give up Eastern European missile defense (had the Poles and Czechs heard about that?) if Russia would help stop the nuclear program it had helped jumpstart in Iran. That would be like asking Dr. A. Q. Khan, strangely released last month from house arrest, if he might talk sense to North Korea’s rogue nuclear scientists. In any case, those missiles were expensive in times of dearth, and how can you press the reset button with Putin if those pesky Eastern Europeans insist on chest-thumping to their former overlords?
Unlike the strutting but committed free-trader Bush, Obama is far more likely to arrange some quiet protection for American industries from subsidized foreign competition. So he may well back off from open markets and free-trade leagues, just as he promised in the campaign — and just as jittery EU functionaries worry in their pro forma praises of America’s commitment to globalization. And if European technocrats come over here to bitch about new trade realities, they will surely get a dose of mellifluous “Hope and Change” and elegant denials that will shame them into never suggesting that we had become Buchanan-like protectionists.
