In the wake of President Bush’s visit to Europe there has been much discussion on the diverging foreign policies of Europe and the United States. In the most recent issue of Merkur Arnulf Baring has a scathiing critique (available online) of the Red-Green foreign policy of Schröder -Fischer. Germany, Baring warns, is making the same mistake it made in the early 20th century when it aligned itself with the ethnically volatile Austro-Hungarian empire instead of the "only superpower" of the era – Great Britain. Today Germany is heading into a ruinous isolation by turning its back on the "only remaining superpower" – the United States. The golden age for Germany was the postwar era when it basked under the protective umbrella of the US.
Wir fühlten uns in ihrer neuen atlantischen Schutzzone geborgen,
einbezogen in ihre Einflußsphäre, behütet vom amerikanischen
Bündnissystem. Die Bundesdeutschen wurden, was Deutsche nie gewesen
waren: eingebettet in Nato und EU, also in zwei Allianzen, umringt von
neuen Freunden, kleine Brüder an der Hand des einen Großen. Was auch
immer die Fehler und Schwächen des europäisch-atlantischen
Bündnissystems gewesen sein mögen, es schuf eine psychische Realität,
ein neues Lebensgefühl: die Westverankerung.
But Chancellor Schröder has damaged this special relationship through his "betrayal" of President Bush. By turning to the EU to build a possible counterbalance to Washington, Germany is making a huge mistake:
Die Europäische Union ist keine belastbare Versicherung gegen künftiges
Unheil. Dieser ökonomische Zweckverband wird vermutlich nie ein
Staatenbund werden, schon gar kein Bundesstaat. Falls sogar die Türkei
– und dann natürlich auch Israel – EU-Mitglieder werden, kann dieses
zunehmend heterogene Gebilde kaum mehr als eine große Freihandelszone
sein: allerseits nützlich, aber kein Ersatz für altmodische Allianzen
weiterhin (halb-)souveräner Nationalstaaten.
Baring finds the notion that Europe – especially with Germany taking the lead – could contain the US as absurd. The "dilittantish " foreign policy in Berlin will only isolate Germany further.
Baring’s mention of the British Empire reminds us that empires rise and fall. Perhaps he is looking at the US through a rear-view mirror, and the US he views as a benign superpower no longer exisits. Jonathan Schell has a piece entitled "A Less Super Superpower" that will appear in The Nation but is already available online. Schell sees America’s imperial power in a state of decline on all fronts:
Measured by Hobbes’s test, the superpower looks less super. Its
military has been stretched to the breaking point by the occupation of
a single weak country, Iraq. Its economy is held hostage by Himalayas
of external debt, much of it in the hands of a strategic rival, China,
holder of nearly $200 billion in Treasury bills. Its domestic debt,
caused in part by the war expenditures, also towers to the skies. The
United States has dramatically failed to make progress in its main
declared foreign policy objective, the nonproliferation of weapons of
mass destruction: While searching fruitlessly for nuclear programs in
Iraq, where they did not exist, it temporized with North Korea, where
they apparently do exist, and now it seems at a loss for a policy that
will stop Iran from taking the same path. The President has just
announced that the "end of tyranny" is his goal, but in his first term
the global democracy movement suffered its greatest setback since the
cold war — Russia’s slide toward authoritarianism.
He credits Schröder for exposing a chink in the US armor in his "NATO Speech" in Munich prior to Bush’s visit:
Shortly before Bush landed in Brussels, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of
Germany quietly but firmly repudiated the President’s militarized,
US-centered approach to world affairs. NATO, he heretically announced,
should no longer be "the primary venue" of the Atlantic relationship.
Did that mean that Europe would continue to take direction from
Washington through some other venue? Hardly: He was, he said,
formulating German policy "in Europe, for Europe and from Europe." The
superpower’s penchant for military action was also rejected. The
chancellor said, "Challenges lie today beyond the North Atlantic
Alliance’s former zone of mutual assistance. And they do not primarily
require military responses."
So we have a strange concordance between the neocons in Washington and Schell’s Eurocentric visionaries. Both consider each other politically irrelevant and are determined to bypass one another in pursing their respective geopolitical objectives.
