H.D.S. GREENWAY
Bush's U-turn on alliesWHEN IS the last time you heard Donald Rumsfeld insult an ally? The defense secretary used to insult an ally a week. The men from Mars in Rumsfeld's inner circle had nothing but contempt for the un-warlike Europeans from Venus, as Robert Kagan famously put it. But in recent months Rumsfeld has become strangely quiet. The Bush administration never admits it has made a mistake, but you can detect shifts in policy by signals sent out, and one of them may be a muzzled Rumsfeld.
The fact is that the administration needs allies now. Iraq has gone so badly that the old go-it-alone neoconservatives have had to take a back seat, and the Bush forces are out courting countries it formerly disdained. So intensive was this effort to internationalize Iraq in the month of June that John Kerry began to see one of his key issues being coopted. The Bush administration came into office with a big chip on its shoulder, and long before 9/11, America's allies watched in dismay at what wags called the bonfire of the treaties -- Kyoto, the International Criminal Court, et al. But it was Iraq that caused the great divide between the United States and its European allies, and not all the fault lay with the Americans. The French saying they would veto any UN resolution to go to war against Iraq no matter what the circumstances ended any chance for a united international effort to prod Iraq into compliance with UN Resolution 1441. We now know that Saddam Hussein doubted Western resolve to disarm him, and even though the overall French position on Iraq certainly looks better in hindsight, it began to seem at the time that the real fight was about curtailing American power, not Iraq's. Rumsfeld's crack "old Europe" being less important to the United States as the new Europeans who had just emerged from Soviet power further inflamed trans-Atlantic sensibilities. Last month, however, President Bush traveled from Washington no less than four times to meet with and to soothe ruffled allies. He went from the beaches of Normandy, where the 60th anniversary of D-Day was being celebrated, to the G-8 summit in Georgia, to Ireland for a European Union meeting, and lastly to Istanbul for a NATO summit. Bush can claim a United Nations endorsement for the US presence in Iraq and a NATO commitment to train some Iraqis, but it was clear that the rift between allies has not completely healed. NATO's role in Iraq will be mostly symbolic. While it used to be that ordinary Europeans distinguished between America as a country and its current government, this may be changing. Polls show that while 63 percent of the French population held a favorable view of the United States two years ago, only 37 percent are favorable today. In Germany the 61 percent who held a positive view of the United States has diminished to 38 percent. It is inevitable in the discourse of nations that when one country emerges as the strongest power among powers and is perceived as bullying and dismissive of others, those others will band together to build coalitions of the less strong. This was bound to happen to some extent anyway, given America's unprecedented strength in comparison to other nations, but the perceived arrogance of the Bush administration has prompted a worldwide anti-American reaction. This has caused President Bush, some say, to listen less to Rumsfeld and the civilian neoconservatives in the Pentagon who have so influenced America's unilateralist policies. "There has been a U-turn," Chile's UN ambassador, Heraldo Munoz, told The New York Times. "The US has realized that the UN has a legitimacy and a weight that the coalitions of the willing don't have." "The problems in Iraq have lessened the influence of the neoconservatives," says The Economist. "Their reduced influence would open up a chance for better relations." And better relations there had better be. The United States cannot, and never could, go it alone and have any chance of prevailing against terrorism. It is a pity the Bush administration could not have come to that conclusion earlier before so much damage was done.
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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