"The" Obama Effect

That, without the quotation marks, was the name of the conference I participated in this past week. It was held at the Roosevelt Study Center in Middelburg (Dutch province of Zeeland). The purpose of the conference was to look at the past, present, and future of the transatlantic relationship and see if the election of Barack Obama has had an impact on this old but evolving alliance. The organizers had brought in three excellent keynote speakers. On the opening night, NATO head of policy planning, Jamie Shea, gave us a detailed and sophisticated view of the current state of West-West relations. One the one hand, the Obama administration has not awarded a very high priority to the old continent in its foreign policy. See for example the cancellation of Obama's attendance at an EU-U.S. summit earlier this year, or his absence last year from the anniversary ceremonies of the start of World War II in Europe or the fall of the Berlin Wall. On the other hand, his administration has done much to send reassuring messages to Europe's fringes, as in the anxieties in Eastern and Central Europe about Russia, European concerns about the Balkans, and the place of Turkey in Europe. Both sides in the partnership, Shea suggested, need to worry about their own sins of (mostly) omission that threaten the long-term health of the alliance. The U.S. needs to get its financial and economic house in order to stem the spreading sense that it is a great power in decline, less and less able to act effectively around the world. It also would help if U.S. politics was less divisive ("poison politics"). The Europeans, in turn, should think hard about the way they're falling further and further below agreed-upon NATO defense spending targets. Soft power doesn't count for anything in Washington, only hard power gets you credibility. Europe, Shea warned, needs to recognize that the decline of U.S. interest in Europe is real. It would also be nice if "Europe" managed to act a little more in unison in foreign policy, also, or especially, outside the transatlantic relationship. If a multi-polar world is the future, and multilateralism its essential tool, the EU could do a lot more in developing its own ties to rising powers such as India and China.

The second keynote speaker, Scott Lucas, of the University of Birmingham, provided an alternative vision, one he also promotes through his website, EAWorldView. To take one major argument from his talk: Europe should worry much less about whether its policies please Washington. The U.S. would be much better served with an independently acting Europe telling Washington what its interests are. The U.S., meanwhile, should break with its tradition of military interventionism, especially in its struggle against Islamic terror groups, because it is counter-productive. Perhaps the main phrase from Lucas' talk came at the beginning: we (the U.S.-led West) needs to recognize the power of the regional and the local. That is where solutions to large problems can be found, not in Western interventionist capabilities.

The third keynote speaker was Marcel Wissenburg, a political theorist at Nijmegen University, who drew on recent work to discuss the differences between European ("Eastern") and U.S. approaches to environmental issues, especially the failed attempts to get the U.S. to sign on to international climate agreements. It is all about "culture," broadly defined. Americans just won't go for the thing that works so well in the "East," namely international agreements setting clear targets that countries should meet through targeted, government-mandated regulation. Pointing to the success of Governor Schwarzenegger in California and the 2007 Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA (authorizing the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions), Wissenburg argued that the way forward for the U.S. is to go back to basic principles, such as "health" and move toward policy from there. By implication this would probably mean that there's no future for global climate agreements, but given also the attitude of for example China and India (not to mention Europe's own inability to meet agreed-upon targets) we already knew that.

So what is the Obama effect on transatlantic relations? Ties will be more business-like, and Europe will have to pull its own weight a good deal more, both in maintaining the relationship and in developing its own independent role. It would help if ordinary Europeans became a little less obsessed with their own lives and societies and developed a broader view of global affairs and what is required, also in military terms, to keep things from getting out of control. The U.S., meanwhile, should get a hold of itself, its politics, so that it gets back in a position from where it can take some sensible steps to repair the basis for its global power (which we still very much need). However much one might want to criticize the president, the burden to make that happen mostly rests with others; ultimately, it rests with the American people. It would help if more of them actively showed how the current hysteria does not represent them.