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Europe will miss George Bush when he's not around
The US President is a useful bogeyman - but his successor's policies may not be much differentby Gerard Baker If there is one small, niggling, horribly ungrateful-sounding complaint about travelling on Air Force One, it is the complete lack of decent swag to carry home. From the moment that I had received word that we were to interview President Bush on the big blue plane this week, my family made it clear that I was to return home laden with Air Force One keepsakes. The last time that I interviewed George W. Bush, in the Oval Office, he reached into a drawer filled with presidential-seal-embossed gewgaws and presented them as offerings for my five daughters. So I figured that Air Force One would be no different. Even if there were no proffered take-homes, there would surely be some surreptitious carry-offs. Stories abound of first-time travellers on the presidential aircraft kitted out in extra large pairs of boots so that they could waddle off with every bit of plane that wasn't nailed to the floor or the walls. But I have to report that my house will never become a shrine of presidential hot towels, cutlery with the Great Seal of the United States engraved on it or specially embossed disposable lavatory seats. But other than that, the interview was, as you can imagine, a uniquely fulfilling journalistic experience. As he approaches the end of his term of office, Mr Bush was in expansive mood, reflective even. He betrayed just a hint of regret about some of the rougher moments in European relations during his presidency, and a surprisingly strong interest in leaving a legacy as a multilateralist and an accomplished diplomat. But there was a distinctly anticlimactic air to his last trip to Europe. The protesters have moved on these days; there is more boring agreement; the contentious issues have shrunk in scale. Mr Bush, of course, is more lame duck than poisoned chicken. The eyes of the world are on his successor. But I still harbour a conviction that for all their expectation of a brave new dawn, the Europeans are going to miss Mr Bush in ways that they are only beginning to understand. They'll miss, first, having a villain in the White House. It's a really convenient excuse to avoid doing anything yourself on pressing global concerns. And if Senator Obama wins, while the tone and nuances will sound more mellifluous to Europeans ears, most of those issues won't change, and some might actually become a lot worse. Despite the heat of Iraq in the presidential campaign now, I doubt that a President Obama will act much differently from President Bush, or for that matter from a President McCain. Conditions will either allow a quick US drawdown or they won't. Mr Obama will say more congenial things about global warming, Guantanamo Bay and the treatment of detainees (as will Mr McCain). But not being able to blame climate change on US greed and intransigence any more might pose problems for Europeans, and on the War on Terror, President Obama would have some demands of his own for them. He is certainly going to want more European effort in Afghanistan. European governments can conveniently hide behind anti-Bush sentiment now to resist those calls, but that won't work when St Barry is in the White House. What's more, the supposedly more multilateralist Mr Obama might have some unpleasant surprises. He is promising to start a new US-led diplomatic track with the Iranian leadership that could upset the delicate balancing act painstakingly constructed between the US, the EU, Russia and China. And when it comes to free trade he, like the Democratic Party, is decidedly not keen on being nice to foreigners. In truth, after the rough days of President Bush's first term, so much has changed in the past four years. The Bush team has curbed the rhetoric and realised that it needs friends, while new governments in Germany and France have tried to rebut the corrosive anti-Americanism in their countries rather than to exploit it. As an adviser to Mr Obama noted recently at a transatlantic conference in Washington, the differences for Europe between a first Obama administration and the second Bush Administration will probably be smaller than the differences between the first and the second Bush terms. My biggest worry, in fact, is that Mr Obama wins and the Democrats get a huge majority in Congress. The new president will be focused hard on two big policy challenges in Washington - dealing with Iraq and reforming US healthcare. He won't have a lot of political capital to spare to stand up to a resurgent Democratic Party in Congress over trade policy, and the US could slide further towards protectionism. Meanwhile, a big Republican defeat in November is quite likely to result in a very nasty isolationist turn inside the opposition party. The neoconservatives - those bad guys who believe that the US should spend blood and treasure trying to bring democracy to the great unwashed - will be discredited. President Obama could find himself under pressure from both parties in Congress to put US interests first. All of this means that the new president will have to spend a fair amount of time on trips to Europe explaining to his admirers why he really isn't able to deliver that much. At least he'll be allowed to walk off Air Force One with the fluffy, monogrammed pillows, though.
Posted by: Steve White 2008-06-15 |
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