Friendly Fire

What happens to allies when they win?

World War II saw the United States in alliance with the Soviet Union against Germany and Japan. The Cold War was the opposite: The United States sided with Germany and Japan against the Soviet Union.

So now that the Cold War is over, what happens? Will the United States keep its old allies or find new ones? Or, in the absence of any kind of overwhelming danger, will our Cold War alliances make like old soldiers and just fade away?

Even as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization steels itself for another clash with the Serbs, there are ominous signs that something is going badly wrong between the United States and its former Cold War allies in Western Europe. These days, the United States and the European Union can’t meet without a slap fight. Whether it’s trade, global economic management or politics, the United States and the European Union just can’t see eye to eye.

Each side accuses the other of bad faith in the banana wars, the long, pointless and dangerous spat over the EU’s preferential policies for bananas grown in Caribbean countries that used to be colonies of the European countries.

At the World Economic Forum last month in Davos, Switzerland, U.S. and EU leaders spelled out totally different plans for managing the turmoil in the world economy. The European governments want a more tightly regulated world economy. The United States wants the opposite.

The United States wants the EU to cut interest rates and, if necessary, run big budget deficits to suck up more imports from the developing world. The European Central Bank thinks that’s a terrible idea, and it doesn’t hesitate to say so.

The United States wants to embrace the bioengineering revolution: feeding hormones to cattle and using genetically altered crops to enhance productivity. The EU wants no part of this and plans to ban hormone-treated beef and genetically altered crops. The United States warns this will lead to a trade war; the EU says, “Do your worst.”

The U.S. wants a seat at the table where EU bureaucrats and diplomats craft new regulations that will affect important U.S. exports. The EU says, “Keep out.”

In the Middle East, the United States backs the Turks and Israelis. The EU likes the Arabs and Greeks. Greece, an EU member, was sheltering Kurdish resistance leader Abdullah Ocalan, whom the Americans helped the Turks capture last month. Western Europe did not thank the U.S. as enraged Kurds staged deadly protests from London to Athens.

The Europeans are even challenging U.S. policy in Latin America. Beyond the banana wars, Western Europe doesn’t just ignore the U.S. embargo against Cuba; it votes with Cuba in the United Nations and attacks the U.S. on the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, which threatened to take foreign companies to court for doing business in Cuba. King Juan Carlos I of Spain is scheduled to visit Fidel Castro later this year.

Farther south, the United States wants to complete the Free Trade Area of the Americas before Mercosur, the South American trade group led by Brazil and Argentina, consolidates any further. The EU is cooperating with Mercosur, partly to limit U.S. influence in South America.

There are basic differences over NATO. The United States wants NATO to morph into a global alliance that could intervene anywhere from South Africa to Indonesia, if the U.S. judged it necessary. Europeans don’t want to make those kind of commitments to the United States and are busily trying to develop a European capability that will be independent of U.S. control and resist U.S. pressure for a broad global mandate.

Commercial rivalry also plays a part. Airbus Industrie, the heavily subsidized European aerospace consortium, is Boeing’s biggest rival in the commercial aircraft industry. Amazingly, new EU noise-reduction regulations will be difficult for Boeing-made jets to meet; Airbus planes will fit right in. If the EU bans Boeing, the United States will have to retaliate. The EU will then retaliate for the retaliation. And so it goes.

Name an important issue in world politics today, and chances are that the U.S. and the EU will differ about what ought to be done. Even when they agree in general--they both want stability in Kosovo, for example--they often disagree on methods. Given a crisis, the Americans are more likely to want to bomb the bad guys, while Europeans favor introducing ground troops as peacekeepers--but not as effective combat troops.

So far, the U.S.-EU spats have stayed mostly at the level of elites and haven’t spilled over into public opinion. But recently that seems to be changing, with public opinion in Europe turning noticeably more anti-American. Italians were outraged when Marine Capt. Richard J. Ashby was acquitted on March 4 by a U.S. court-martial in the deaths of 20 skiers, killed last year when the U.S. military plane he was piloting cut a gondola cable in the Italian Alps. Italians want to know why Ashby couldn’t have been tried in an Italian court, and many feel justice has not yet been done.

The U.S. has also taken a beating in Germany following the execution three weeks ago of two German brothers in Arizona for the brutal murder of a bank manager in 1982. Germany, like every other EU country, has abolished capital punishment. Most U.S. citizens don’t realize this, but the U.S. system of capital punishment is widely viewed as primitive and unfair in Europe and is regularly criticized by international human-rights organizations. One of the brothers chose to die in Arizona’s gas chamber, rather than by lethal injection. Germans, who identify gas chambers with Nazi death camps, were profoundly shocked; Bundestag members (the equivalent of U.S. congressmen) called for Germany to levy economic sanctions on the United States in retaliation.

This won’t happen. But now that the EU is up and running, Europeans want a bigger voice in how the world is run. Fear of the Soviet Union kept the Europeans from pushing their interests against the U.S. during the Cold War, but those days are over. The EU countries just don’t need Uncle Sam the way they used to.

At the same time, the EU enables member countries to stand up to U.S. pressure. It is far easier for a united EU to defy America on trade than for, say, the Netherlands to take on Uncle Sam.

So far, the U.S. establishment still underestimates the importance of Europe’s new assertiveness and growing doubts about American leadership. Blinded by the habits of a lifetime, many U.S. policy analysts and officials take U.S.-EU friendship for granted. They also assume, too easily, that a united Europe will be forever contented to play Boy Wonder to America’s Bruce Wayne.

Not that Europe can rival U.S. military or even political power. Increasingly, however, it can block American initiatives and undermine U.S. policy. Until the United States and the EU build a new relationship based on new realities, each will frustrate the other’s plans, and neither side will be able to exercise effective leadership in a dangerous world.

And one more thing. So far, American public opinion hasn’t taken note of EU opposition to U.S. leadership. When, and if, it does, watch out. If U.S. public opinion turns against the EU, the two sides won’t just drift apart--they’ll fly.*