An Alliance That Sees Eye to Eye

The Washington Post

Jan. 24, 2001

Henry Kissinger

The uneasy reaction of European media and political leaders to the American election, ascribed to a desire for continuity, actually involved a remarkable paradox. Whey continuity when Atlantic relations have been far from harmonious?

Our allies, Britain largely excepted, have been dissociating, often demonstratively, from sanctions against Cuba, Iran, or Iraq, and from American policy on the Arab-Israeli conflict and in the Taiwan Straits. They have disagreed publicly with the concept of a national missile defense, which French President Jacques Chirac attacked at a news conference at the side of Russian President Vladmir Putin, explicitly on behalf of all of Europe. The European Union is in the process of creating a military force institutionally distinct from NATO. Since the end of the Cold War, common policy toward the Soviet Union has been replaced by allies seeking their own “special relationship” with Moscow.

The disagreements in the economic field are even more visible. The United States has threatened retaliation against Europe over bananas and beef, and the European Union has threatened the United States over American taxation of exports. The two sides are deadlocked on how, or even whether, to launch a new multilateral trade negotiation. Another dispute over energy policy looms, especially if oil prices remain high.

Equally striking is the weakening of the emotional bond. More Americans and Europeans are visiting each others’ continents than ever before. But they travel in the cocoon of their preconceptions or of their professional relationships, without acquiring knowledge of the history and politics of the other side. On the other hand, the Unitized States, as depicted in European mass media, ad defined by the death penalty, the lack of a system of free medical insurance, the vast American prison population and other comparable stereotypes. In this atmosphere, many advocates of European integration are urging unity as and exercise in differentiation from, if not opposition to, the United States.

The Clinton administration has left a legacy of unanswered questions: Is the Atlantic alliance still at the heart of transatlantic relations? If so, how does it define its purpose in the post-Cold War world? If not, what can be put in its place to undergird transatlantic relations?

The paradox is that personal relations among the leaders of the Atlantic nations during the 1990s remained remarkable close. But they were based less on shared policy views than on shared personal experiences as the first group of leaders who had grown up at World War II. The founding generation of the alliance presumed the benevolence of American power and the importance of allied unity. Their sons and daughters, growing up during the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s, developed a profound distrust of American power; at a minimum, they wanted America to use its power only for universal causes transcending the national interest.

The founding generation viewed the alliance as the point of departure for a union of democracies. The generation governing in the 1990s viewed NATO as a relic of the Cold War, if not an obstacle to overcoming it. Its goal was less to strength the alliance than to “erase dividing lines.” Thus, in a news conference with Russian President Boris Yeltsin in March 1997, President Clinton described the “old NATO as basically a mirror image of the Warsaw Pact, “equating a voluntary association of democracies with what the Soviet Union had imposed on subjugated countries.

The key to the paradox is that, throughout the West, foreign relations are more than ever a function of domestic politics. Since the European center-left governments have disappointed the radical wings of their parties by implementing economics reform based on the market, they are reluctant to inflame these further by implementing national security policies identified with the United States. On the other hand, the domestic opposition to President Clinton’s foreign policy came generally from the right. Because of the difference in domestic politics, European leaders saw no contradiction between their person admiration—and even affection—for Clinton and vocal opposition to policies they conceived as having been partly imposed on him.

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