The military is working to handle Germany. Defeating France is being left for other Americans in uniform.
Posted on 01/02/2004 7:51:47 AM PST by knighthawk
As we recover from New Year festivities, the customary thing for a columnist to do is to quote Robert Burns. Since my topic today is U.S. foreign policy, however, I will omit Auld Lang Syne and cite his even more apposite lines:
"The best-laid plans of mice and men
Gang oft agley." (i.e., often go wrong.)
This is not a reference to Iraq where, despite the formidable problems of establishing a sustainable democracy in the teeth of terrorist resistance, the United States and its allies seem to be gradually getting the upper hand. Nor to the "Bush doctrine" of preventive intervention against rogue states seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction which, as Libya demonstrated last week, seems to be persuading such states to abandon terror and WMDs in order to become respectable again. Nor even to the war on terror which, though likely to be as much a "long hard slog" as Iraq, has seen a string of successes in the last year with leading al-Qaeda operatives captured and terrorist plots foiled.
All in all the post-9/11 agenda of U.S. foreign policy is going reasonably well. What is ganging agley is the set of foreign policy concepts with which George W. Bush entered office in 2001.
In April of that year, Mr. Bush came to Canada where, with great fanfare, he launched the Free Trade Area of the Americas designed to unite the entire Western hemisphere in one vast trading bloc -- not unlike a looser version of the European Union. The President buttressed this initiative with a meeting with Mexican President Vicente Fox to forge closer relationships with Mexico, including a virtual amnesty for the several million illegal Mexican immigrants in the United States.
What underpinned these approaches was a vision of the world divided between several great regional blocs. And since the Europeans were integrating in the EU, and the Asians were getting together in ASEAN, the "Bush vision" was that the U.S. needed to recruit other American countries for its own regional bloc. Over time co-operation in trade and economics throughout the Americas was supposed to lead to a similar "hemispheric" outlook in foreign policy and greater diplomatic and military co-operation.
This was not an entirely original vision -- earlier strategists such as James Burnham and George Orwell had suggested versions of the same idea. But they were negative visions -- remember the warring regional superstates of Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania in 1984.
Nor was it the only geo-political strategy available to the United States --most post-1945 presidents preferred an "Atlanticist" strategy of relying on a more or less permanent alliance with European powers to help settle international problems. But as the Europeans approached ever-closer union in the EU, they seemed likely to differ increasingly with the U.S. on world problems. And Mr. Bush plainly decided that European integration was a done deal that the United States had to support -- and deal with the consequences as they arose.
What made Bush's "pan-American conservatism" (as the scholar John Fonte called it) an appealing strategy as well as a necessary one was the apparent "neo-liberal" transformation of Latin America into a more democratic and capitalist region after the Cold War. This made the sub-continent a more appropriate partner for the United States. (It also fitted in neatly with Mr. Bush's domestic political strategy of winning the Latino vote.)
The first thing to gang agley was the reaction of Latin America to Sept. 11. After the initial burst of sympathy for the United States, almost all the Latin American nations made clear that they would not support U.S. policy towards Iraq or take an active military role in the war on terror. That diplomatic setback was followed by several Latin American economic crises and the election of political leaders in major countries such as Brazil and Argentina who made it clear that they had very different ideas on trade and economic policy to Mr. Bush.
These leaders both downplayed the importance of the all-hemispheric FTAA and upgraded their own competing local trading blocs such as the Andean Community and Mercosur. Last week these two blocs announced a merger to create, in effect, an FTAA without the United States. As the New Year dawns, all that remains of Mr. Bush's vision of pan-American conservatism is the proposed amnesty for Mexican illegals which the White House is hoping to smuggle into law with Democratic support but without the voters noticing.
Yet the news from Asia suggests that the United States is facing a much greater challenge there than Mr. Bush expected when he entered the White House arguing that China was a strategic competitor rather than a strategic partner. With China's economy advancing rapidly, Japan still mired in stagnation, and the region threatened by potential nuclear crises from North Korea to Pakistan, as UPI's Martin Walker points out, the United States badly needs allies to deal both with local crises and with the emerging Chinese superpower. It has forged closer military relationships with both India and Australia. But though these alliances are helpful, they are not sufficient on their own to balance the growing influence of Beijing.
That increases the importance of NATO and the European allies in America's global calculations. NATO has already made the crucial decision to stay in business by going "out of area" in Afghanistan. And that could presumably be the beginning of NATO playing a much larger role in support of the United States in the Middle East and Asia.
But the drift of European politics -- one accepted and endorsed by Mr. Bush as noted above -- is towards a rival European federal state with its own foreign and defence policy. And since such a state would be dominated by France, Germany and their "Euro-nationalist" allies, its foreign policy would tend to be either anti-American or at the very least detached from U.S. interests.
A brief reprieve from this future was granted before Christmas when a summit of EU leaders broke up in disagreement over a proposed European constitution that would etch such a foreign and defence policy in stone. If Mr. Bush wants to ensure that the United States retains the general support of (most of) its European allies, he must abandon his own detachment from European politics, seek out allies such as the British, the Italians and the central Europeans, and persuade them that the next step in European integration should be to integrate the EU with NAFTA -- and build a common foreign and defence policy on the tried and tested foundation of NATO.
If people want on or off this list, please let me know.
Not correct. He is engaged now, just not in the way the elites think he should be. Their definition of "re-engagement" is "do what the Europeans want".
As for NATO, once the US invoked the mutual defense clause after 9/11, and the Europeans said that meant they get to veto our use of force in our own defense, NATO lost any relevance to the post-Soviet Union world. The sooner we shed ourselves of our NATO responsibilities (in favor of various alliances with real allies), the better.
Or those countries who want democracy for their citizens rather than Socialism. EU is Socialist; going broke if not already in the red; pitiful health care, citizens taxed beyond their means; everyone on the dole with nothing left for the future – cradle to the grave government care does not work. The only thing that does work is for the individual to work hard, be able to keep enough money to take care of ‘himself’. Success should be lauded, rather than be impugned, as the liberals see it.
This is just plain naive. What makes the author think that is remotely possible? If the members of the EU -- every one of which is to the left of the U.S. -- couldn't agree on economic matters, then assuming that we can somehow bind everyone together in some sort of super NAFTA is horribly naive.
And in terms of foreign policy and the military issues, we are miles apart with some of the major players in Europe. You can't overcome fundamental substantive differences just by "playing nice", because those difference are still going to result in fundamentally different policy goals.
Oooh! What needs bombing?
The military is working to handle Germany. Defeating France is being left for other Americans in uniform.
Good God, what does this guy want, another world war? The Eurinal elites have already gotten their populations whipped up into a frenzy of Bush and America hatred, claiming that we're only interested in building an empire. Does he honestly believe that these leftists wouldn't take his suggestion as an attempt to subjugate Europe to the American "hegemony"?
Any attempt to "integrate the EU with NAFTA" would almost certainly lead to massive, and probably extremely violent, street protests throughout Europe.
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