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BRET STEPHENS:
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Europe and the US: Lost in translation

In today’s world, Americans are the actors and Europeans the acted-upon

In the end, 2003 will mainly be remembered for just three words: "We got him." When US Ambassador L. Paul Bremer announced the capture of Saddam Hussein at a Baghdad press conference on December 14, it meant the story of 2003 — the overthrow of the old order in Iraq — had been brought to both a symbolic and decisive close. The story of 2004, whatever it will be, may now begin.

Yet Bremer’s were not the only words that mattered in 2003. One recalls a line from US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who was asked in March about the possibility that Britain might not join the fight in Iraq, or that Turkey might deny the US a northern staging ground. His nonchalant response: "There are work-arounds.‘ One recalls, too, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer all but shouting ’I am not convinced" as American officials pressed the case against Iraq in February.

These statements are not just about Iraq. At bottom, they are about the reach of American power, which is not only matchless but unmatchable. And they are about the unease that power engenders throughout much of the world, particularly in Europe. This tension, as much as the one that exists between the West and the Islamic world, shaped and defined the year now past.

A salty sea The Brussels-based American author Robert Kagan captures something of this in his book, Of Power and Paradise. The difference between the US and Europe, runs his argument, is that Americans have power, and believe in using it, whereas with Europeans it is exactly the reverse. On the one side, it is all Hobbes and the state of nature — a difficult and frequently brutish world the US has no choice but to police. On the other side, it is Kant and perpetual peace — a place where war is unthinkable and law, not force, governs all.

Kagan’s thesis is provocative and useful. Yet it fails to capture certain realities. To begin with, America continues to enjoy the protection of the broad seas. Even today, even after 9/11, even with 150,000 troops in the region, the Middle East remains to it a far-off place.

Not so to Europe. Across the Straits of Gibraltar, along every side of the Italian boot, the Middle East literally laps on Europe’s shores. In America, Muslims constitute fewer than one percent of the population, according to a 2001 survey. In much of Europe, the figure exceeds 12%, and growing fast. For America, the Middle East is a place that generates oil and terrorists, both of which pose potential strategic threats. For Europe, the Middle East is a place that generates hordes of destitute people, who pose an existential one.

No wonder, then, that Europe looks with skepticism on US efforts to bring democracy to Iraq: It remembers what democracy almost brought Algeria in 1992. No wonder Europe was willing to countenance Saddam Hussein: Who else could have held that fractious country together? No wonder Europe wants to give the Palestinians a state, and quickly: What else so inflames Muslim sentiments on their own streets? No wonder no French government was ever going to go along with an unpopular American war on an Arab country: Even Bush might have thought twice if Arab-Americans were as numerous in Florida as they are in Michigan.

None of this is to say that Europeans are necessarily right on the issues. It is to say that European motives aren’t so pleasingly divorced from the realities of the Hobbesian world as many observers, particularly in Israel and the US, seem to believe. The truth is that Europe generally operates according to a fairly hardboiled view of the world and its place within it; the course it has pursued for decades has been steady and consistent.

Today, by contrast, America is a revolutionary power that seeks to reshape the Middle East along more democratic lines. Even those who grant Americans the best of motives may be excused for finding this frightening. The US may be able to afford its own blunders in complicated and unpleasant places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Other countries may not so be able.

"If you are sailing in a sea of sh-t, you don’t rock the boat," goes an old Israeli saying. There’s wisdom in that.

ON THE other hand, if the craft you happen to be sailing displaces 95,000 tons, you’re likely to figure the risks differently. In 2001, the US proved it could do in six weeks, and with a few hundred soldiers, what the Soviet Union failed to do in a decade with several armored divisions: that is, securely install the government of its choice in Kabul.

This year again, the US exceeded nearly every expectation for the war in Iraq. It was predicted Saddam Hussein would sabotage his own oil infrastructure, creating an ecological nightmare. It was predicted he would draw coalition forces into savage urban fighting. It was predicted the war would cause a humanitarian catastrophe, taking as many as two million lives according to one report prepared for the German foreign ministry. It was predicted Saddam would unleash chemical and biological weapons on the invading forces, and perhaps upon Israel.

None of that happened, mainly because the US instantly neutralized Saddam’s command and control system. In three weeks, America conquered a country of 23 million people with two divisions and a few odd brigades. More than demonstrating superior firepower — "shock and awe" — it demonstrated tactical and strategic finesse.

Yet looking back on the war, the triumph seems a bit small. In part, this was a function of its relative ease. In part, too, it is because the coalition has yet to find the weapons of mass destruction for which the war was ostensibly fought. This has made George Bush and Tony Blair look foolish or disingenuous or both.

Most of all, however, the triumph seems small because possession of Iraq has awakened even those who supported the war on limited grounds to the immensity of the new task. In 2001, America set out to fight a somewhat ill-defined "war on terror," mainly meaning shady groups such as al-Qaida. In 2002, it broadened the list to include a few rogue states. In 2003, it discovered the real enemy was neither the odd terrorist nor the odd dictator, but the swamp of backwardness and fanaticism from which they emerged.

In other words, in 2003 the US discovered that war-making — at which it so excels — was just one component of the war on terror. And if there was a document spelling out the nature of the enemy, it wasn’t in some top secret Pentagon dossier. Rather, it was in the UN’s publicly available Arab Development Report.

One could almost see the older hands at Whitehall and the Quai d’Orsay nodding their heads sagely, as if to say: "You see! You sally forth to put a stop to piracy or slave trading or terrorism, and the next thing you know you have a nasty guerrilla war on your hands and you’re faced with the Hobson’s choice of either a disgraceful early withdrawal — in which case it all would have been for naught — or of 10, 20, 30 years of semi-colonial rule, from which you will certainly emerge exhausted, defeated and nearly bankrupt."

Wimps and weirdos Still, this doesn’t quite explain why tempers flared they way they did on both sides of the Atlantic. Deeper things were at work.

At the topmost level, there was a clash of political personalities. However one feels about George W. Bush, the man uniquely embodies virtually every trait opinion-shaping Europeans dislike. He’s an oilman. His favorite philosopher is Jesus. He appears perfectly uninterested in anything Matthew Arnold would have considered "culture.‘ Good and evil are favorite terms of reference. As governor of Texas, he signed dozens of death warrants. He has neither the talent nor the patience for diplomatese. He believes in military solutions. He is what Margaret Thatcher calls a ’conviction politician.‘ About the Europeans, he reportedly says: ’They tend to wilt."

As president, Bush has been likened to a CEO — setting broad directions and allowing his lieutenants to work out the details. Also like a CEO, he plays to win, demands quarterly results, and is willing to grow his business with the occasional takeover.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and French President Jacques Chirac, Bush’s chief antagonists in Europe, are cut from different cloth. Schroeder is a lawyer by training; Chirac is an "Enarque" — a graduate of the school for civil servants that trains most of France’s political elite. Politically, Chirac is a Gaullist and a man of the traditional Right, whereas Schroeder came up through the ranks of the more radical side of mainstream German politics. Yet ideologically, the two have much in common. Both have pursued policies of muscular national self-assertion. Both wish to steer Europe toward greater independence in world affairs. Neither man is a particular friend of the United States, certainly not in the way of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi or British Chancellor Gordon Brown.

Schroeder and Chirac also have this in common: they are consummate political tacticians for whom conviction and ambition are barely distinguishable. Over the years, they have tacked windward and leeward according to the prevailing breeze.

Career and conviction politicians rarely like each other even when they agree on the issues, so it was all but inevitable that Schroeder and Chirac would clash spectacularly with Bush. But the schism predates the current administration. Over the past decade, the US experienced historic economic growth while Europe all but flat-lined. Culturally, the two sides have grown distant. To many Europeans, the US has gone from being the land of the free to the land of the bizarre, with every year bringing its own weird spectacle: Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, OJ, Monica, impeachment, the Florida recount. To many Americans, Europe has come to seem both nettlesome and pusillanimous, sinking US corporate mergers such as GE-Honeywell with bravura, while abandoning Rwandans and Bosnians to their fates.

Up to a certain point, each side sees the other accurately. Yet each also tends to find what it seeks. The American critic of Europe will dwell on the Continent’s laggard economy or the inefficiency of its political institutions because he prizes economic prowess and institutional stability. The European critic of America dwells on the vulgarity of its cultural exports because he prizes a certain degree of cultural refinement. Ultimately, the criticism says more about the critic than it does about the object of his scrutiny.

LET’S RETURN to Kagan for a moment. In his reading, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus. Perhaps a better opposition is that of the shareholder and the stakeholder. America is a shareholder society. Some 50% of Americans actually own stock in publicly traded companies, either directly or via mutual funds. More broadly, Americans favor individual rights and individual initiative over communal rights and collective entitlements. Pay to Play is a quintessentially American slogan: so are "put up or shut up,‘ ’show me the money,‘ and ’lead, follow, or get out of the way."

The term "stakeholder‘ is a European buzzword: It refers to those people whose lives are fundamentally affected by some enterprise, even if they don’t have actual ’ownership" in that enterprise. For example: the woman who lives downstream from the tannery; or the assembly line worker whose job is threatened by low-cost labor overseas. Neither is likely to be represented at the annual shareholders’ meeting. Yet both, according to one theory of justice, deserve to have their voices heard.

These differences have deep philosophical roots — Locke on the one side, Rousseau on the other. Economically, it’s a case of free markets versus "social markets," of efficiency versus consensus. Politically as well as diplomatically, it’s the difference between being results-oriented and being process-oriented.

At the most fundamental level, however, the difference is this: In today’s world, Americans are the actors, and Europeans — indeed, everyone else — are the acted-upon. In 2003, the truly serious question Europe raised was whether the former should, by dint of their overwhelming power, have the effective right to dictate to the latter the kind of world in which they all must live. In other words, the question wasn’t a substantive or moral one, as in, "who’s right?‘ but a procedural and democratic one, as in ’who decides?"

Being and nothingness "The world is what it is,‘ wrote VS Naipaul. ’Men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it."

In a year when Europe was obsessed with the question of legitimacy, America was obsessed with a quest for survival. Terrorists, Bush has said consistently since the attacks of September 11, would not hesitate to detonate a nuclear bomb in Manhattan or Los Angeles if they had one. Preventing exactly that is what his presidency is about.

Thus America’s quintessentially Lockean retort to Europe: Self-preservation is a nation’s first and most inescapable priority. If this requires flouting the polite norms of international practice, so be it. "At some point we may be the only ones left,‘ said Bush on the eve of war, as the so-called Coalition of the Willing whittled down to two. ’That’s okay with me. We are America."

But beyond the assertion of sovereign prerogative, there was also a thinly veiled message of contempt. America has not achieved world mastery without foresight and sacrifice; it is not a Saudi Arabia, which owes its wealth to the happy accident of its location. Similarly, the countries of Europe had not joined the ranks of the "acted upon" because they were the blameless victims of other people’s devices. Rather, they had lost their place through their indulgence of reckless ideologies, their economic mismanagement, their willingness to let Washington bear the burdens of their defense.

In 2003, Europeans woke up to the unpleasant fact that opposition to Washington, far from creating "multipolarity,‘ consigned them to geopolitical irrelevance. To this rude awakening, the Bush administration has not been particularly solicitous; it capped the year by excluding Germany and France from business opportunities in Iraq. ’You no play’a da game, you no make’a da rules," said Earl Butts, Richard Nixon’s secretary of agriculture, in reference to some papal pronouncement on birth control. It perfectly captures Bush’s view of Europe.

For its part, Americans learned in 2003 that they fight largely alone; that their motives are constantly suspected; that their global responsibilities are growing faster than their resources; and that they can hardly afford a misstep. To assert one’s rights under the law of nature means to live by its unforgiving rules.

What happens when Iran goes nuclear, and North Korea goes ballistic? How well will the US be able to maintain the full breadth of its commitments then?

Achmad "Bung‘ Sukarno, the founder and first president of Indonesia, was notorious in his day for giving names to years, most famously 1964: The ’year of living dangerously." As America and Europe broached the subject of divorce, it can be said that 2003 was such a year, too.