Central Asia/Russia


	May 24, 2002	atimes.com

Central Asia/Russia

'Toxic Texan' to face poisonous reception in Europe
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - On his first visit to Europe as president a year ago, George W Bush was called the "Toxic Texan" after taking the United States out of the Kyoto Protocol to combat global warming. His second visit, on which he embarked Wednesday afternoon, takes place after a year in which Washington has been criticized for unilateral steps that have widened the gulf between the United States and Europe.

Europeans have been irked by the Bush administration's actions on a raft of issues. These include the refusal to grant detainees captured in Afghanistan prisoner-of-war status; the sabotaging of arms-control talks; the "unsigning" of the International Criminal Court (ICC) treaty; and protectionist measures for agriculture and steel.

Administration officials are framing the trip as simply the latest visit with "some of our oldest friends and most important allies", as National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice put it this week, as well as an opportunity to celebrate a much closer relationship with Russia that will be formalized by the signing in Moscow of an arms-control treaty. At the same time, however, officials here say that much of Bush's efforts will be directed at mending fences with European leaders that have been badly battered by a series of disputes, centered primarily on the US leader's conduct of his war against terrorism.

Some analysts see the US-European alliance at a critical crossroads.

"It's hard to see where the basis for a functioning alliance remains," Jeffrey Gedmin, head of the Berlin office of the Atlantic Council, wrote in the Washington Post this week after cataloguing the disputes that seem to have widened the trans-Atlantic gulf, particularly since last September's terrorist attacks in the United States. For Europe, commitment to multilateralism has become key as its Union moves closer to a geo-strategic as well as an economic reality. Under the Bush administration, Washington has become more unilateralist in its instincts and actions.

"Being subordinate, [the Europeans] can tolerate. Irrelevant, they cannot," said Charles Krauthammer, a columnist and triumphalist whose columns have sneered at European protests over Bush's renunciation of Kyoto, the ICC and several major arms treaties, his backing for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and his conduct of the anti-terror campaign. "The Afghan war, conducted without them, highlighted how America's 21st-century high-tech military made their militaries as obsolete as were the battleships of the 19th century upon the launching of the Dreadnought in 1906," Krauthammer added, referring to Great Britain's winning its naval armaments race at that time with Germany. In his view, Washington is fighting a "war for Western civilization", even if the Europeans fail to appreciate or support it.

Other analysts say Bush made considerable progress in dispelling his cowboy image when he went to Europe last year, and even in the first months after the September 11 attacks, when he waited to strike back against al-Qaeda and the Taliban while consulting widely with allies and South Asian and Middle Eastern leaders. This began to change, however, once the military campaign in Afghanistan got under way in October and after Washington spurned the offer of its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies (with the exception of Britain) of virtually unqualified support.

The major turning point came with Bush's State of the Union speech in January, in which he not only failed to mention his European allies (except Britain), but he also made clear that the war on terrorism would go beyond al-Qaeda and the Taliban to include states that might transfer to terrorist groups, or use themselves, weapons of mass destruction - his so-called "axis of evil", Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. European reaction was strongly negative; a number of leaders characterized the speech, and the doctrine that underlay it, as simplistic and counterproductive. Europe's reactions in turn provoked a counterreaction, according to Philip Gordon, a Europe specialist at the Brookings Institution, in which Washington said, "If you're not going to take us seriously and get on board, why should we consult with you?"

The tit-for-tat worsened as the two sides found themselves at odds on key trade issues and over Israel's invasion of the West Bank last month, a dispute that was further inflamed by charges from staunch administration supporters like Krauthammer that Europe's position was based on a history of anti-Semitism.

The gratuitous exaggeration of policy disagreements, and their elevation to a moral plane, has badly corroded the relationship, says Gordon. "We seem for some reason not to be able to resist taking [policy disagreement] to the next step, to suggest that anybody who dares disagree with us is an immoral appeaser who loves bad countries and supports terrorism and is racist and anti-Semitic," he says. "And then [we] turn around and say, 'By the way, we want you to spend more for NATO, which we're going to lead because we're right, and we're not only right on the pragmatics, but we're right in some sort of cosmic sense. Now help us out,'" he adds. "I just don't see how you can expect Europeans, or anyone around the world, to respond to that sort of treatment."

(Inter Press Service)