Leaders-in-waiting grope for new position on US

The old assumptions about transatlantic relations are being junked – by two men with big hopes of leading Britain and France.

Nicolas Sarkozy, who wants to win the French presidency, recently criticised his country’s “arrogance” in its dealings with Washington, earning a rebuke from Jacques Chirac, the present incumbent. And across the channel David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative opposition who currently leads in UK opinion polls, criticised Britain’s “slavish” stance towards the Bush administration – and upset US officials.

Yet the two men’s speeches, delivered a day apart last month, were hardly at odds. Indeed, certain passages were almost identical. While neither Mr Sarkozy nor Mr Cameron is assured of winning power, their thoughts cast new light on the way a generation of European politicians is groping towards a pragmatic new foreign policy for the post-Bush era.

The core of Mr Sarkozy’s address depicted the France of tomorrow as a straight-talking ally of the US. “The French will continue to be your friends – demanding friends, friends who stand on their feet,” he said. “If we lie down, we’re not really friends. You can count on me to keep telling you the truth as we see it, but as a friend.”

Mr Cameron’s words were uncannily similar: “Your long-standing friend will tell you the truth, confident that the friendship will survive.” He went on: “Your newest friend will tell you what you want to hear, eager to please so as not to put the friendship at risk.” It appeared to be a reference to the former communist countries of “new Europe” that rallied to the US’s side in the Iraq war.

Mr Sarkozy and Mr Cameron are clearly attempting to build on discontent with the leaders they hope to replace. In an obvious barb aimed at President Chirac, Mr Sarkozy spoke of “sterile grandiloquence” in French foreign policy.

Mr Cameron suggested that Tony Blair had gone further than any other British prime minister in unconditionally supporting the US, when he said: “We have never, until recently, been uncritical allies of America.” He hammered home his point this week when he told his party’s annual conference that he wanted a foreign policy that was “more independent of the White House”. But he also emphasised his support for UK troops’ controversial missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Some commentators see the makings of a profound shift in western Europe’s policy towards America. “The US and Europe are no longer fated to act together on the very biggest issues,” says François Heisbourg of the Centre for Strategic Research in Paris. “Cameron and Sarkozy are working from the same handbook, coming from different directions. Whether their paths will meet or diverge we don’t yet know . . . But we are in a post-Suez era: the cold war and the Balkan wars that sustained the old structures are over and America has met its own Suez in Iraq.”

The failure of the 1956 British-French-Israeli offensive to which Prof Heisbourg refers led London and Paris to very different conclusions and coloured the past 50 years of transatlantic relations. While Britain decided to cleave more closely to the US, France decided its future lay in greater independence and a more “European” stance – a decision that ultimately led to General Charles de Gaulle’s expulsion of Nato headquarters from French soil.

No less an authority than Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state, wrote that, in the wake of Suez, “Great Britain opted for permanent subordination to American policy”.

British prime ministers have still clashed with Washington – in the 1960s, Harold Wilson refused to send troops to Vietnam and Margaret Thatcher criticised the 1983 US invasion of Grenada.

But Mr Cameron has spelled out his belief that the UK has now gone too far in taking the junior role to the US, at the same time as Mr Sarkozy is rethinking France’s own traditional stance.

Other western European leaders are also giving themselves more room for manoeuvre than their predecessors. Gordon Brown, the Labour politician who will almost certainly succeed Tony Blair as British prime minister in the next year, has always been more guarded than Mr Blair in his support for the Iraq war, although he highlighted his pro-American credentials in his own conference speech last month.

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has returned her country to its traditional emphasis on a no-nonsense partnership with the US. Her positions on issues such as Iran’s nuclear programme and Russia’s authoritarian drift have been remarkably close to US policy. But she has also censured the Bush administration over Guantánamo Bay and its use of secret CIA prisons.

Mr Cameron and Mr Sarkozy both seek to portray themselves as more pragmatic than the incumbents in Britain and France. Mr Sarkozy has gone out of his way to criticise the idea that the EU could serve as a counterweight to Washington. On the other side, Mr Cameron has issued a detailed critique of US-style neo-conservatism.

Not everyone agrees on the imminent demise of the ideological divide. President George W. Bush has long maintained that Europe and the US have fundamentally different perceptions of al-Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in 2001. “For Europe, September the 11th was a moment; for us, it was a change of thinking,” he said this year, alluding to the divergence between the US’s war on terror and Europe’s preference for more traditional legal means to bring al-Qaeda suspects to heel.

But Mr Cameron and Mr Sarkozy both appear to be betting that the gap will narrow as Mr Bush heads for the exit. Significantly, Mr Cameron invited John McCain, a frontrunner for the 2008 presidential election, to this week’s Conservative party conference. While a vigorous supporter of the war on Iraq, Mr McCain has won friends in Europe with his dogged stand against torture.

Ron Asmus, a former Clinton administration official who now works for the German Marshall Fund, argues that the next two or three years, which will see new French and US presidents taking office, will be a rare opportunity to renew the transatlantic alliance on the basis of common values.

A Europe-wide survey for the GMF released last month revealed that Europeans and Americans have similar concerns about terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism and Iran and Iraq. It also noted that 58 per cent of Americans now disapproved of Mr Bush’s foreign policy, compared with 77 per cent of Europeans. Nevertheless, the percentage of Europeans who want US leadership in world affairs is now only 37 per cent – down from 64 per cent five years ago.

“These are differences that good diplomacy and good statecraft can bridge,” says Mr Asmus.

a decision that ultimately led to General Charles de Gaulle’s expulsion of Nato headquarters from French soil.

US needs a leader who dares to act like de Gaulle with regard to expulsion of the UN from American soil.

Eurabia is a basket case...

Yup.

And the Mohammetans are outbreeding them by about 6-to-1.

While the breeding of the Europeans is almost down to half of what it would take to replace themselves in the next generation, having a little more than one child per family, the moozies average six children per family.

By the way, we red-blooded Americans had better "get busy", too, or we will also be out-bred by the invading hoardes from the South AND the moozies.

We also must implement an imigration policy that excludes peoples who breed faster than we do, ESPECIALLY if they are members of the Mohammetan death cult.

I wonder if this time when they go under the sword of Islam will we be able to bail them out . Will they want us to. ? They seem to be giving their countries away willingly to the Muslim hordes.

By the way, we red-blooded Americans had better "get busy", too, or we will also be out-bred by the invading hoardes from the South AND the moozies.

That story about the attack on the Minute Man founder speaking at Colombia University just really sends that message home...

Your homepage about Morals replacing the awareness of sin is spot on. I have been preaching that for years!

Things are either sinful or Godly.

Europe in the final analysis has turned it's back on the living God.

He will not be mocked.

Pray for the remnant

In 1956 the US erred in not backing Israel, the UK, and France in their re-taking of the Suez Canal from Egypt's Nasser (who has stolen it). We were attempting to curry favor with Egypt and the 3rd World. Our flawed decision got us nowhere with Nasser, but it caused the fall of the British government, and a profound chnage of attitude in Paris.

I don't blame DeGaulle one bit for his analysis that the US would not stand by France (just two years earlier, we only tepidly supported them in Vietnam...and they lost at Dien Bien Phu). And post-Suez we didn't help in Algeria. If you were DeGaulle, how would you view your "ally."

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