COMMENTARY

Spring 2010

by Vessela Tcherneva

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Kurt Volker propounds two worrying ideas: the first is that for Washington Europe has ceased to be a priority, and the second that different expectations on each side of the Atlantic now make working together very difficult.

Paradoxically, Barack Obama enjoyed support from both Europeans and Americans because both hoped he could solve these two problems. Americans expected Obama to close the gap with their traditional European allies and bring them closer to the U.S. agenda. Europeans welcomed his election because they hoped that he would be more “European” in style and sensibility.

As a recent European Council on Foreign Relations report put it, Europeans tend to believe that if Americans don't share the same position on a global issue it is because they simply don't understand it. Thus bridging disagreements is just a matter of Europe articulating its arguments better. And as Europeans prefer to use soft power instead of military means of war, they genuinely expected Obama to share that preference. Any deviation from that expectation was seen in Europe as a misunderstanding that can still be corrected.

But this European illusion must have evaporated with the last words of President Obama’s speech at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in December. Speaking of the necessity of Afghanistan as a ‘just war’, Obama noted: “I understand why war is not popular in many countries, but I also know this: The belief that peace is desirable is rarely enough to achieve it.”

Obama badly needs his fellow Americans’ support if he is to cope with the economic downturn and all its consequences. His Oslo speech of course addressed the broad international public, but it was mainly directed at mobilising domestic support for his approach to a number of complex crises at a time of America's declining role in an increasingly multi-polar world. Obama has to reassure his voters that he will act with America's partners to tackle a wide spectrum of challenges, and who these partners is no longer as straight-forward as Europe has grown used to thinking. On global finance it is China, on disarmament it is Russia and perhaps on climate the EU. On issues like North Korea, Iran and the Middle East only European countries are relevant.

Europe's inability to understand how America's interests have been diverging with its own is exacerbated by the lack of unity among EU member states, as Kurt Volker emphasises. EU disunity concerns not only transatlantic issues but also the very nature of the transatlantic relationship. A majority of European governments imagine they have a “special relationship” with Washington that affords them a particular advantage, and the trend in Europe towards the re-nationalisation of what had been EU policies areas is enhancing the natural inclination of the U.S. to engage with individual governments rather than communicating with the post-modern, inward-looking European Union.

This gloomy picture explains Kurt Volker’s pessimism about the future of the EU-U.S. relationship. Yet his prescription for remedying matters is not entirely convincing because it pre-supposes that the issues he lists would have equal priority on both sides of the Atlantic.

America’s biggest immediate test will be Afghanistan, and for Europe it will be Russia. And while the U.S. acknowledges the challenge, Europeans still prefer not to face up to the difficulties they have in engaging with Russia. Moscow prefers to build bi-lateral relationships with Berlin, Paris or Rome instead of talking to Brussels, and in Europe some EU member states have been cultivating Russia assiduously. Engaging credibly with Russia, the EU’s biggest neighbour, a substantial trading partner and key supplier of energy and other resources will be the Union's greatest foreign policy challenge.

The transatlantic link cannot be a goal in itself when the two partners' agendas no longer overlap sufficiently. Americans will ‘reset’ their relationship with Russia in line with their broader agenda. Europeans don't really support the war in Afghanistan and will in future be even less willing to participate in it. And overall, Europe will increasingly have difficulty with being the global partner of a U.S. whose "unipolar moment" as the sole superpower is gone for good. But the marginalisation of the traditional western alliance is still to come.