Is U.S. Pushing Europe Off World Stage?

The vice president of the German Parliament felt slighted. In a meeting with U.S. Ambassador John Kornblum, she claimed, he seemed so bored that she began counting his yawns.

“It was very close to impolite,” said Antje Vollmer, a veteran lawmaker from the environmentalist Greens party.

While Kornblum strenuously rejects this interpretation of his demeanor, Vollmer saw it as part of a larger U.S. indifference--an indifference seasoned with arrogance--that she and others believe has settled over America’s ties with its European allies in the post-Cold War years.

Increasingly, they feel, Europe’s advice--and its interests--are simply ignored in Washington.

The transatlantic troubles percolate even as President Clinton’s recent dramatic visit to China has thrown a new spotlight on American foreign policy. Although the initial success of Clinton’s trip seemed to increase the potential of political and trade links to Asia, there is little argument that Europe remains vital to U.S. interests.

It is the home of America’s oldest, closest allies, its most enduring military alliance and its largest single economic link--a relationship that last year measured more than $600 billion in trade and investment, and supported more than 4 million American jobs.

Across a broad range of issues that runs through defense, trade, culture and a variety of global challenges, Europeans today view the U.S. as an increasingly unpredictable, detached and self-absorbed superpower. And they charge that Washington is wielding its political and military might in ways that sometimes seem directed more at self-gratification than toward any well-defined political ends.

And Europe is not alone in feeling snubbed: Even small--but strategic--allies such as the Caribbean neighbors of Communist Cuba are smarting from what they see as a heavy-handed post-Soviet approach to the region.

Europeans identify what they see as a feckless U.S. Congress and an apathetic American public as the main culprits for the tensions, although the Clinton administration comes in for its share of criticism too.

“The United States is a superpower with no domestic support for a world role,” said William Wallace, the Liberal Democratic Party’s defense spokesman in Britain’s House of Lords and a respected expert on Anglo-American relations.

On the American side, Kornblum admits that transatlantic relations have become more complicated, requiring far more diplomatic engagement. Any yawning during his meeting with Vollmer was from fatigue, not boredom, he insisted.

“Challenging and frustrating, yes, but never boring,” he said. “The comfy old days are gone.”

As the prime example of American actions that leave them dismayed and dumbfounded, Europeans point out that the more than $1 billion in back dues that the U.S. owes the United Nations has become hostage to a partisan congressional dispute over abortion.

But there are many others: congressional reluctance to replenish the line of credit for the International Monetary Fund even as the IMF was containing the Asian financial crisis; and some senators’ swift declaration that the so-called Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions would be “dead on arrival” even though the U.S. was among the more than 150 countries adopting the accord.

“The reaction is despair,” said Karl Kaiser, head of the German Foreign Policy Assn., a foreign affairs think tank in Bonn. “How can a country that played such a constructive role in building multilateralism become captive to such thinking?”

Added Francois Heisbourg, a French defense and foreign affairs specialist:

“American actions in the world today are a pure reflection of pulsations within American society, not the result of real situations in the outside world. So you have obsessions: Saddam Hussein; you have caprice: staying out of Bosnia for three years, then suddenly taking over the whole show. There’s an air of fantasy to American foreign policy now.”

Heisbourg argued that the U.S. is not becoming isolationist, simply indifferent.

“Isolation would imply a policy,” he said, “and I don’t think there is one in Washington right now.”

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One of France’s most popular television shows, a kind of Muppets-like political satire called “Les Guignols de l’Info” (The Clowns of the News), personifies the United States as a dumb, muscle-bound figure who bears a striking likeness to Sylvester Stallone and speaks for an entity known as “World Company.”

“The real message is that one country, so powerful and so big, can upset the global balance,” said Yves Boyer of the Paris-based Center for the Research and Study of Strategies and Technologies.

The new strains have already complicated efforts to unite against common foes--a phenomenon apparent in the lonely U.S. hard line against Iraq. Unless reversed, the strains could sharpen differences between the U.S. and Europe as they square off to capture international commercial markets, a struggle that is expected to dominate foreign affairs in the decades ahead.

“In an alliance, you have to consider the positions of your partner, or you won’t have them with you when you need them,” warned Serge Halimi, a senior editor at the French foreign affairs journal Le Monde Diplomatique.

Europeans have begun wondering whether the U.S. and Europe have become competitors rather than partners in a world where the important struggles are no longer over ideology but over markets.

“With the end of the Cold War, we’re not sure our interests fit together with the United States,” Wallace said.

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For Western Europeans, the reaction to all this is predictable: discomfort and resentment at the sheer size of American power, and a deepening frustration over their impotence to challenge it.

A senior European diplomat in Washington seemed more baffled than angry as he described the reaction of Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.) to his suggestion that elements of the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act that D’Amato helped write might contravene international law.

“To hell with international law,” the diplomat recalled D’Amato exploding. “You’ve got a choice to make: You’re either with us or against us, and I only hope for your sake you make the right decision.”

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Conventional wisdom among those who surveyed the debris of the Berlin Wall in 1989 believed that a Europe free of communism would emerge as a stronger, more confident, independent force in world affairs. Instead, the power disparity across the Atlantic has widened in America’s favor even as U.S. public interest has waned.

Today, when the chips are down, the United States is able to rely on these closest of friends not so much because they agree with America’s views or feel they share a common destiny but because they have little alternative. As Wallace put it: “There’s a feeling we’re bouncing along behind.”

The surging U.S. economy, with an unemployment rate less than half the European average and a consumer confidence level several times higher, has strengthened Europe’s sense of America’s dominance.

“I wouldn’t want the Soviet Union back, but there’s a counterweight missing,” said Karl Lamers, a prominent voice on foreign affairs in the German Parliament.

While strains in America’s ties with Western Europe are nothing new, the environment in which they now fester is.

Today’s lack of a communist threat means that when differences occur, they tend to be aired more openly and allowed to drag on longer. The rift over how to deal with the implosion of the Yugoslav federation in the early 1990s, for example, came dangerously close to tearing the Atlantic alliance apart before the United States agreed to become involved militarily.

And during the height of its standoff with Iraq earlier this year, the U.S. found itself at odds with virtually every ally except Britain.

“We have maneuvered ourselves into a position where . . . America, not Saddam Hussein, appears to be the problem,” former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger concluded at the time. “In another crisis, support for us will be even weaker than last time.”

On his most recent trip to Europe, in May, Clinton acted to remove two serious irritants in the transatlantic trade relationship, first by deciding to forgo U.S. sanctions against French oil company Total for investing in Iran, then by announcing his intent to ease parts of the Helms-Burton Act, which requires U.S. sanctions against certain companies trading with Cuba.

But Clinton needs congressional approval to amend Helms-Burton. And it took one of the law’s co-authors, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), only a few hours to register his opposition.

“To our European friends, I say this: no deal,” he huffed.

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The strength of America’s power and the level of its perceived arrogance are magnified by Europe’s own impotence. Europe’s diverse nations have long been unable to work together when the U.S. is not involved, and the end of the Cold War only accentuated this weakness--as crises, first in Bosnia-Herzegovina and then in Albania, have shown. There is little sign of any immediate change, since Europeans have cut deeper in their defense budgets than the United States during the post-Cold War years.

As one example, Europeans themselves cite their futile efforts to produce a spy satellite of their own. After rejecting strong U.S. pressure to purchase a version of an existing American satellite, Germany and France decided to team up to develop one, but they still have not come up with the money to do the job.

Some Europeans see Europe’s plan to create a single currency, the euro, as a potential equalizer, a chance to escape the American orbit--although it also might add tensions to the transatlantic relationship.

Stephan Goetz-Richter, publisher of a weekly Washington-based strategy letter called Transatlantic Futures, noted that a combined European currency area would have nearly twice the voting power of the U.S. within the IMF. In dealing with issues such as the $43-billion rescue package for Indonesia, a collective European voice would be the most influential at the table.

Goetz-Richter even suggested that under existing IMF rules, Europeans could lodge a claim to move the Washington-based institution to its own shores.

“Who knows, perhaps the United States needs to lose one of its premier global institutions to start appreciating the power and prestige it has been given by the world community,” he said.