| As Daffy Duck would say, "Ah-ha! Pronoun trouble!": the U.S. will work on solving its problems, but we're not as keenly interested in helping Europe to solve its problems... |
| In Europe they speak British English, where group nouns refer to a group of individuals, and therefore take the plural. Since Europe is exactly a group of individual countries, rather than a singular country made up of subsidiary parts, the writer should have said Europe is Convinced U.S. Won't Solve Their Problems. |
Europe is facing a convergence of the worst crises since World War II, and the overwhelming consensus among officials and experts here is that the U.S. no longer has the will or the ability to play an influential role in solving them.
At the Munich Security Conference, the prime topics are the refugee crisis, the Syrian conflict, Russian aggression and the potential dissolution of the European Union's very structure. Top European leaders repeatedly lamented that 2015 saw all of Europe’s problems deepen, and unanimously predicted that in 2016 they would get even worse.
“The question of war and peace has returned to the continent,” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told the audience, indirectly referring to Russian military interventions. “We had thought that peace had returned to Europe for good."
What was missing from the conference speeches and even the many private discussions in the hallways, compared to previous years, was the discussion of what Europe wanted or even expected the U.S. to do.
Several European officials told me that there was little expectation that President Barack Obama, in his last year in office, would make any significant policy changes to address what European governments see an existential set of crises that can’t wait for a new administration in Washington.
“There’s a shared assessment that the European security architecture is falling apart in many ways,” said Camille Grand, director of the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris. “There is a growing sense that this U.S. administration is focused on establishing a legacy on what has already been achieved rather than trying to achieve anything more. Yet the problems can get much worse.”
During the first day of the conference, the U.S. role in Europe was hardly mentioned in the public sessions. In the private sessions, many participants told me that European governments are not only resigned to a lack of American assertiveness, they also are now reluctantly accepting a Russia that is more present than ever in European affairs, and not for the better.
“There’s not a lot of talk about how the United States can be part of the solution. We seem to be disappearing from their calculations,” said Walter Russell Mead, a historian with the Hudson Institute. “From the European standpoint, Putin has become somebody that like it or not that they have to deal with.”
| Much, much more hand-wringing about the failure of the U.S. to step in and solve Europe's problems at the link. |
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