Now that all the hoopla has died down over Obama's recent trip to Europe, Janet Daley, of the UK Telegraph, has provided a sober, and insightful analysis concerning the rupture in trans-Atlantic relations. Her examination is free from the "Obama can change the world!" hype that has suffused much of the recent coverage of that event, as well as the all too convenient "Bush was despised by Europe" explanation for the rift in the Atlantic partnership. Daley instead, places responsibility for any schisms clearly at the feet of cowardly "Old Europe." Daley focuses her analysis on one of the central problems endemic to the strained relationship — the wilful failure of Europe to provide for its own defense, a problem, that long pre-dates the arrival of President Barack Obama.
Daley rightly takes to task those wishful thinkers who believe that with the departure of cowboy unilateralist George Bush, all now will be well between Europe and America because Obama is at the helm of U.S. foreign policy. This view represents the triumph of symbolism over substance. As Daley notes:
Paradoxically, what Mr Obama has succeeded in demonstrating to his own nation is that no amount of charm and flattery, no degree of self-abasement and apology for American "arrogance" is going to get any meaningful reciprocity from the Old Europeans (which is to say France and Germany, and the EU which they dominate) who could give lessons in sublime, transcendental arrogance to any American president however urbane and nuanced his message might be.
Once the despised George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld have been removed from the scene, and Europe now has the president of its dreams, the coalescence between the opinion of American liberals who loathed Bush as an unsophisticate and that of the Continental elites, now no longer matters, or can no longer be used to mask some essential truths about Old Europe, particularly its posture of continuing its parasitic relationship with the United States by relying on Uncle Sam to guarantee its security while it blithely continues with its extravagant social welfare spending. As Daley states:
So long as it was those rough and ready cowboys George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who were condemning it, Old Europe could afford to smirk – and its loathing was lapped up enthusiastically (and put to good use) by all those American liberals who saw the Bush administration as a crass international embarrassment. But now Europe has got the US president of its dreams and it has given him nothing in return for his pious declarations of global humility.
This is why, the jubilation of Obama boosters in the media notwithstanding, the trip to Europe, by any objective measure, was an ignominious failure in the sense that despite his popularity overseas, President Obama was unable to secure any particular advantages for the United States. Obama's idolaters in the media have debased themselves yet again, by assessing the success or failure of his European foray purely in terms of how well he was loved, not by whether the nation he leads was respected.
But, as Daley notes, a new president, no matter how profoundly different from his predecessor, will never be able to obscure the fundamental differences between America and Old Europe on the matter of its decadent refusal to provide for its own defense.
For American liberals, Old Europe's dismissal of the entreaties of the Bush Administration on this score was welcomed, as it stoked their hatred of our last president. Old Europe's rebuffing liberalism's New Messiah, which is exactly what happened last week, however, is an altogether different matter.
Yet, given the gross inequities in the current burden- sharing arrangement on defense matters and Old Europe's pusillanimous refusal to assist the U.S. in the War on Terror, over time, anti-European sentiment in America — even among Obama's supporters — may prove to be as fashionable as anti-Americanism has been on the Continent.
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