Truthdig: U.S. Loses Its Grip on Europe

U.S. Loses Its Grip on Europe

Posted on Oct 16, 2008
By William Pfaff


PARIS — Events since the beginning of August have made a deep impression on West European perceptions of European possibilities and European-American relations, now and in the future. Accustomed to 60 years of deference to Washington’s leadership (and sometimes its intimidation), Europeans justified this to themselves by the overall success of the American economic system, into which they were drawn by the Marshall Plan following the Second World War, the immense development of transatlantic trade and financial integration and, since the 1990s, by globalization.

Their political subordination also had a wartime and postwar origin, reinforced by American patronage of the European Union, the insecurities of the Cold War, NATO, and by simple political inertia and fear of destabilizing change. Most important has undoubtedly been the profound loss of self-confidence and the crippled ambition inflicted upon European civilization ever since the uncontrollable bloodletting of the First World War. Americans, isolated from all that, perhaps knew better how to run the world.

The United States, as Richard Holbrook observed several years ago, became and has remained in certain respects “a European power” ever since the Second World War. Europeans have often grumbled, and Charles de Gaulle during his 1950s presidency successfully re-established French political and strategic autonomy. But France’s critical position versus the U.S. has had relatively little serious consequence except by de-legitimating, so to speak, the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, forcing Washington to give up the attempt to win U.N. Security Council approval for that war.

That was six years ago, and Nicolas Sarkozy, when elected France’s president in 2007, proclaimed his admiration for the U.S. and his intention to restore France to full NATO membership. But since then, much political and financial drama has occurred.

Europeans and European governments alienated from America’s Iraq and Palestine-Israel policies, offended by U.S. use of torture and illegal imprisonment, and now being drawn by NATO toward the intractable Afghanistan-Pakistan tragedy have become increasingly hostile to military involvements at America’s side. Whatever their doubts, though, America’s best friends in Europe this year mostly convinced themselves that Barack Obama was sure to be elected president, and that as Americans once sang of the Democratic presidential candidacy of the unlucky Alfred E. Smith in 1928, happy days will be here again. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081016_us_loses_its_grip_on_europe/