Iowa and the Atlantic Alliance

 It is too soon to predict, on the basis of a plurality of votes cast by a sliver of eligible voters in a small state, who will eventually prevail in the nomination process. But it is not too soon to ask if the Bush Administration's unfathomably cavalier and gratuitously alienating attitude toward America's European allies will change substantially on January 20, 2009.

Commentators seem to agree that the voters who chose Obama and Huckabee felt that they were rejecting the status quo. To put the missteps of the past behind them, they apparently voted for the candidates about whom they knew the least. But exactly what status quo did they imagine they were rejecting? Upon inspection, the "politics as usual" that they apparently sought to rebuff looks nebulous. Obama has repeatedly linked Hillary Clinton, whose political team is personally and ideologically committed to wresting power from the current incumbents, to the thinking dominant in Washington from 2001 to 2007. Even more oddly, the genial and erratic Huckabee says that the Mormon former governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, represents the powers-that-be.

To focus the discussion, we can ask the following question: did the status quo rejected by those who voted for Obama and Huckabee include the deterioration of American-European relations under the presidency of George W Bush? After all, the current administration's denigration of "old Europe" was not just a rhetorical aside, but a centrepiece of its reckless approach to foreign affairs. That is why any serious break with the disastrous Bush legacy should start with rethinking and rebuilding the Atlantic Alliance. That a renewed Atlanticism would be a priority for either Obama or Huckabee is extremely doubtful, however.

Relations between the US and Europe have gone virtually unmentioned in the dozens of presidential debates held over the past six months. This is not surprising. Candidates have no incentive to focus attention on a subject, such as the strained Atlantic Alliance, that seldom if ever enters the consciousness of the average voter. Obama's failure to convene a single policy meeting of the Senate European sub-committee which he chairs (a committee that oversees, among other things, US relations with Nato and the EU) has had absolutely zero resonance among the electorate.

Why does Europe matter to the United States? Five reasons stand out.

First, Europe is as much a front-line region in the war on terror as it was during the Cold War. As last year's aborted attack on 10 airliners heading to the US from London revealed, the likelihood of a terrorist attack on American citizens emanating from a European country remains high. America may not need the French military, but it certainly needs the French intelligence services.

Second, Europeans' linguistic skills and cultural knowledge alone ensure that they can make indispensable contributions to US security. The spread of English as the world's language has had a paradoxical effect on American national security, making the United States transparent to people around the world, while making the rest of the world increasingly opaque to Americans. Europeans can supply this defect.

Third, Americans and Europeans share a common way of life and cultural commitment to tolerant individualism that is not found with the same intensity, concentration, and unchallenged dominance elsewhere. Europeans and Americans also face many of the same foreign policy challenges. These include not just terrorism, but also politically destabilising immigration pressures caused by the wealth gap between North and South, the job-destroying expansion of low-wage labour in China, and so forth. It would be culturally suicidal for "the West" not to work together to devise ways to manage these immensely difficult problems.

Fourth, Nato can not only bring important military capabilities to the table, reducing the drain on American forces in a turbulent world; it also offers a much more plausible vehicle for serious foreign-policy multilateralism than either the EU or the UN. 

Fifth, and perhaps most important, elementary human psychology teaches that individuals who shun contact with others have a weak grasp of reality. Individuals who are never criticised by companions whom they trust, and with whom they share a basic value orientation, have a hard time remaining mentally balanced. The same is true of nations. What makes allies indispensable to an effective national-security policy is the ability of like-minded nations to provide the reality checks without which a fallible superpower is, as we have regretfully seen, unable to keep its balance on swiftly evolving and treacherous international terrain.

Because 60 per cent of Huckabee's Iowa vote came from evangelicals, it still seems probable that the Republican nominee will end up being Mitt Romney, John McCain or Rudi Giuliani. All of them are strong supporters of Bush's bellicose foreign policy, and all would campaign on the premise that "fear" has a greater emotional hold on the American electorate than "hope". They may well be right.

Obama is an obviously gifted politician who, if elected president, would probably break, or attempt to break, from some frustratingly inflexible American policies, especially concerning Israel. But other candidates, notably Hillary Clinton, would be more likely to conduct an intensely Atlanticist foreign policy, placing emphasis on rebuilding America's alliance with those extraordinarily prosperous countries best positioned to help the US face the daunting challenges to global stability that lie ahead.

Stephen Holmes

Stephen Holmes is the author of "The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror".

Copyright: Project Syndicate.

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