LEANING CLOSER

作者：英国《金融时报》丹尼尔•董贝(Daniel Dombey)、托尼•巴伯(Tony Barber)
In June 2002 Robert Kagan, the conservative US scholar, published a now famous article asserting that “on major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus”.
At the time, this pithy summary of US-European differences had the ring of truth. The Bush administration was accused of a martial unilateralism like none before it; the European Union appeared multilateralist to a fault, if not downright divided. Today, however, many observers believe that interplanetary unity is on the cards.
With Barack Obama's arrival in the White House a week today, differences between the US and Europe are likely to narrow on policies ranging from climate change to detention of terrorist suspects at the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. As a result, leaders on both sides of the Atlantic – the alliance that won the cold war and which still represents the most significant economic relationship in the world – are looking forward to working together more closely than they have for years.
All the same, Europe is about to discover yet again that America can be an uncomfortable ally. Strobe Talbott, former deputy secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, warns of “a very real risk of excessive expectations”. But he adds: “There will be an eagerness in many capitals around the world for President Obama to succeed . . . because of a recognition that these extraordinary, difficult and multitudinous problems are not going to be amenable to solution unless there's mutual effort and American leadership.”
On issues such as Guantánamo Bay and Afghanistan, the US is likely to make painful requests of the Europeans, requests that will be all the harder to ignore precisely because of the philosophical convergence between the two sides. Difficult strategic decisions await on topics such as Iran, the Middle East and Russia. All the time, Europe and America will have to work closer than ever on the issue Mr Obama identifies as his biggest challenge of all – the economic and financial crisis.
Officials and diplomats in both Europe and the US argue that government-to-government relations improved during George W. Bush's second term. First, the US made an effort to re- engage diplomatically with the continent; then more Atlanticist leaders emerged such as President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.
But Mr Bush himself remained deeply unpopular in European opinion surveys – constraining his influence over his European allies.
The feeling is evidently still mutual. Yesterday, the outgoing president revealed the depth of his resentment at European criticism of him, in his very last White House press conference. “In certain quarters in Europe, you can be popular by blaming every Middle Eastern problem on Israel,” he fumed. “Or you can be popular by joining the International Criminal Court. I guess I could have been popular by accepting Kyoto [the climate change protocol], which I felt was a flawed treaty.”
Mr Obama, by contrast, is about to test how much extra clout he is afforded by his extraordinary popularity across Europe, as he attempts two goals urged by Europeans for years: to close Guantánamo and to focus military efforts on Afghanistan, not Iraq.
For months, the US has been looking for countries willing to take in Guantánamo inmates cleared for release – but with limited success. In Europe, only a handful of countries, such as Portugal, Germany and the UK, have aired the possibility of taking prisoners – and Britain has emphasised that its principal interest lies in receiving a small number of detainees who were formerly UK residents.
As a result, US officials have complained that Europeans' willingness to help shutter the military base is more rhetorical than real. “When it came time for those countries that were criticising America to take some of those detainees, they weren't willing to help out,” Mr Bush complained yesterday.
Yet no symbol of a fresh start to the transatlantic relationship would be stronger than Guantánamo's closure. In an attempt to strike a compromise, two senior EU diplomats told the FT that the bloc could provide funds to help build judicial, penal and counter-terrorism capacity in Yemen, home to more than a third of the remaining 250-odd Guantánamo inmates.
“There's not an ideological policy difference here, it's a question of working out together how we handle it,” says one. Still unknown, however, is whether Mr Obama, who recently acknowledged it would be a “challenge” to close down Guantánamo in his first 100 days, would be satisfied with such an offer.
A more profound dilemma for both sides is Afghanistan, likely to be at the centre of Nato's 60th anniversary summit in April, which Mr Obama will attend as part of his first scheduled visit to Europe as president. At that event, Mr Sarkozy is poised to mark the improvement in transatlantic ties by announcing France's formal return to Nato's military structures, 43 years after Charles de Gaulle withdrew from the alliance's military command.
Despite the symbolism of such a move, however, officials on both sides acknowledge that Afghanistan has become Nato's defining issue – and that the war is not going well.
Europeans are also all too aware that Mr Obama has a standing demand for them to send more troops to a conflict many people on the continent view with increasing misgivings. “The Afghan people need our troops and your troops; our support and your support to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda,” the now president-elect told a huge crowd in Berlin, in a call that has yet to be fully answered.
Now dragging on into its eighth year, the war is becoming ever more a test of Nato unity, particularly since countries with troops in the violent south and east of Afghanistan – such as the US, Britain, Canada and the Netherlands – are looking for more military support from their European allies.
But some US Democrats note that Mr Obama's opening bid – more troops – may not be what he really wants. The US is set to send another 20,000-30,000 to the country, meeting much of the purely military need, but is looking for greater European support in areas such as military and police training, counter-narcotics and economic aid.
“We will need more coalition and Afghan security forces, including additional training teams to help develop the Afghan national army and the Afghan national police,” General David Petraeus, the head of US central command, told a Washington conference last week. “But we will also need more civilian contributions and greater international involvement to [ensure that] governments' approach . . . is unified and co-ordinated.”
As for other disputes within Nato, the outgoing Bush administration was widely perceived to have done the Obama team a favour in December when it effectively shelved its push to bring Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance's membership action plan – often seen as a path to joining. France and Germany, in particular, have deep objections to bringing in either of the ex-Soviet states.
Some European countries also had misgivings about Mr Bush's plans for missile defence bases in central Europe – but so do many Obama advisers. The proposals have excited furious objections from Russia.
Advisers to Mr Obama hope to improve the atmosphere with Moscow through a push for a new agreement to replace the strategic arms reduction treaties of the 1990s. Mr Talbott predicts that the new administration “will move quickly to work on the most important business – such as arms control; and it will consult more with allies for a more co-ordinated approach”. Such moves are backed by western European diplomats, but few are under any illusion that relations with Vladimir Putin, Russia's prime minister, and President Dmitry Medvedev will be easy.
On Iran – which Bush administraton officials say is the biggest coming challenge – Condoleezza Rice, outgoing secretary of state, told the FT last month that she was uncertain whether international sanctions would work before Tehran reached nuclear weapons capacity. “That's why it's important to, if anything, tighten even further the constraints on Iran,” she said.
But although Mr Obama also favours more sanctions on the Islamic republic – together with the possibility of diplomatic talks – countries such as Germany and Italy have proved reluctant in the past to impose tougher measures.
Some of Mr Obama's advisers are quicker than their European equivalents to see the hand of Iran behind the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, which has been embroiled in a war with Israel this year. But despite differing perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the two sides of the Atlantic, many diplomats expect Israel to have halted its offensive in Gaza by the time Mr Obama takes the oath of office – partly to avoid exacerbating international tensions further. The president-elect has also promised to begin his administration with a new push to “achieve a more lasting peace in the region” – a move that would follow long-standing European demands.
Another, still more neuralgic area of past US-European tensions is climate change. When Mr Bush first met the massed ranks of EU leaders at a summit in Sweden in 2001, relations got off to a difficult start as prime minister after prime minister denounced the US president for his opposition to the Kyoto protocol.
Mr Obama, by contrast, has already signed up to the goal of bringing US emissions down to 1990 levels by 2020 and of reducing them by another 80 per cent by 2050. And although Senate ratification of any post-Kyoto treaty will never be easy, Europeans are quick to respond to Mr Obama's green agenda.
“I'm really enthusiastic when I see the first comments of president-elect Obama,” José Manuel Barroso, the Commission president, told the FT. “I'm not pretending that we in Europe are directly inspiring him. But until recently we feared that we were preaching in the desert.” Like energy and environment policymakers at the European Commission, Mr Obama talks of the global recession as an opportunity to accelerate the switch to a low-carbon, clean-energy economy – despite some concerns in the US about possible tensions between climate goals and economic recovery.
Indeed, no issue is likely to dominate transatlantic relations for at least the next year as much as the effort to restructure the world's financial architecture and pull the US and Europe out of their economic downturn.
Just as Nato's April summit will reveal the extent of transatlantic unity on hard power, so a financial summit in London just beforehand will be the chief indicator of international co-operation on the economic crisis.
But, tellingly, the meeting is of the G20 group of nations, not of the US and the EU, nor even of the G7, in which Europe is disproportionately represented. The invitees – including countries such as India, China and Saudi Arabia – highlight how far the global crisis is beyond just Europe and America's control.
Even as Europe and the US work together, both sides are aware that the rise of Asia is unstoppable – all the more reason, some diplomats insist, to pool resources to the maximum.
As for Mr Kagan, he is waiting until after Mr Obama takes office to make known his thoughts on the new administration's impact on the planetary divide between Europe and America. But it is already clear that, despite the goals now shared, many possibilities remain for tension and discord in the months and years ahead.
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