Transatlantic Wounds Won’t Heal Overnight

WASHINGTON —  President Bush sought last week to call a cease-fire in the sniping between the United States and some of its longtime allies over the U.S.-led war in Iraq, but diplomats on both sides believe that the breach will take more work -- and time -- to heal.

“There have been disagreements in this matter among old and valued friends,” Bush told an audience of foreign diplomats Friday at a ceremony to mark the first anniversary of the invasion. “Those differences belong to the past.”

But judging from the swelling unrest in allied countries over the dangers and costs of troop commitments in Iraq, the debate remains very much in the present. Ironically, the most immediate problems the U.S. is facing are not with France and Germany, the two major allies that opted out of the Iraq war entirely. Instead, they are with countries whose governments joined Bush’s coalition -- and now face voters who are unhappy with the results.

Early last week, the newly elected leader of Spain denounced the invasion as “an error” based on “lies” and said he planned to withdraw his country’s troops unless several new conditions were met. Then Poland’s president complained that he felt “misled” about weapons of mass destruction, and mused that he might end his troop commitment early too (but backed down after a phone call from Bush). Then South Korea, normally the most reliable of allies, said it didn’t want to put its soldiers in Iraq’s unstable north.

It was little more than a footnote when France’s foreign minister -- not the most reliable of allies -- marked the anniversary with a blunt declaration that the war “did not make the world more stable.”

“Let’s face facts,” Dominique de Villepin told Paris’ leading newspaper, Le Monde. “Terrorism didn’t exist in Iraq before the war. Today, the country is one of the world’s principal sources of world terrorism.”

The problem of America’s strained relationships with its traditional allies goes well beyond disagreements on Iraq, and will not be easy to repair, warned former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger.

“We are now at a point that is different from any previous one,” Kissinger said last week. “Tensions have existed throughout the history of the Atlantic relationship. But what is unique about the present situation is that there is not -- as there was in the Cold War -- an overriding threat to provide a common reference point.”

During the Cold War, he said, the threat posed by the Soviet Union pushed the United States and Western European nations to believe that they shared similar defense interests, even when they disagreed over other issues. But now, with no Soviet Union, the “glue” in the relationship has melted away. In the case of Iraq, for example, the leaders of Britain and Italy agreed with Bush that Saddam Hussein posed an immediate threat; France and Germany, however, did not.

Over time, Kissinger warned, the consequences could be grave.

“What if the United States believes that Europe has become irrelevant and is just another player with which we have relations of convenience?” he asked. “Then we will be living in a world very similar to the pre-World War I world” -- an era when major powers competed with one another for influence, forged no strong alliances and plunged into “an armaments race and ... a huge conflict.”

But Bush administration officials say they are committed to improving U.S. relations with the allies -- and bristle at the suggestion that they have alienated other countries by reaching most of their major decisions without consulting others.

“I will not deny that there is a lot of noise and chatter among the world’s great powers,” Bush’s national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, said last month. “But this noise is obscuring one of the most striking facts of our time: The world’s great powers have never had better relations with one another.”

European diplomats in Washington acknowledge that the administration has mounted a campaign to work more closely with them -- with some largely unheralded successes.

“We have encouraged the administration to do more consultation for a long time,” a European diplomat said. “Miraculously, the Bush administration is doing exactly that.”

In nuclear talks with Iran, the administration has largely fallen in line behind a European-led effort to persuade Tehran to submit its nuclear program to tighter international control.

In Haiti, the United States is sharing leadership of a U.N.-sponsored peacekeeping mission with -- of all nations -- France.

In nuclear-disarmament negotiations with North Korea, the United States has insisted on including Russia, China, Japan and South Korea in the talks -- in large part to increase U.S. leverage against the secretive dictatorship.

And in Iraq, where U.S. officials once dismissed the notion that the United Nations could play a helpful role, the administration now appears willing to give the U.N. Security Council a greater part in overseeing the transfer of power from U.S. forces to an Iraqi interim government.

In all those cases, the administration’s newfound reverence for multilateral diplomacy is practical, not ideological. In Iraq, for example, the most powerful leader of the Shiite Muslim majority, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, had demanded a greater U.N. role as a condition for his cooperation with the formation of an interim government. Spain’s new Socialist leader, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, has said his nation’s troops can remain only if an acceptable new Security Council resolution is passed.

The U.N. debate over the terms of a mandate for the interim government in Iraq will be a test of each side’s willingness to compromise. U.S. and British diplomats are taking soundings now to try to determine what kind of resolution could win support from France, Germany, Spain -- and Sistani. The Europeans have said they want a greater U.N. role overseeing the transition in Iraq; U.S. officials say they would welcome more U.N. help, but not at the price of giving the U.N. hands-on control of the American effort to stabilize Iraq.

Yet even as they work to find areas where they can cooperate on practical measures, neither the U.S. nor the Europeans have shown much willingness to concede ground on issues they consider to be matters of principle.

In his speech Friday, for example, Bush again challenged the critics of his decision to invade Iraq. “Who would prefer that Saddam’s torture chambers still be open?” he asked -- a way of framing the issue that did not grant much legitimacy to his opponents’ views.

Instead, as he has before, Bush linked the struggle in Iraq to the global war on terrorism. “There is no neutral ground -- no neutral ground -- in the fight between civilization and terror,” he said.

A White House official said the speech was written in large part as a message to the people of Spain and other countries that have sent troops to Iraq, to try to stop their drift toward withdrawal -- or, as congressional Republican leaders put it, “appeasement.”

But the tough tone of Bush’s remarks alarmed another group of conservatives -- those who, while supporting the war in Iraq, believe that the president has failed to reach out vigorously enough to governments in Europe.

“The Bush administration shows little sense of urgency in making our case in Europe,” complained William Kristol, writing in the Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine. “We can decry the decision of the Spanish people all we want, but lamenting a defeat is one thing. Acting to minimize its damage is another. It’s time for the American government to get serious about dealing with the political crisis in Europe.”

Conservatives, moderates and liberals in the foreign policy establishment also urged Bush to do more.

The private Council on Foreign Relations issued a report faulting both sides. “If the transatlantic relationship is to continue to mean what it has meant in the past, both sides must learn from their failure over Iraq,” warned the report from a task force chaired by Kissinger and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers.

“The Americans will need to reaffirm the insight that shaped their approach to allies throughout the Cold War: that the power to act is not the power to persuade ... [and that] the costs of unilateralism can exceed those involved in seeking consent,” it said.

“The Europeans, in turn, will need to acknowledge that the post-9/11 world is by no means safe for transatlantic societies, that the dangers that make it unsafe do not come from Washington, and that neither nostalgia for the past nor insularity in the present will suffice in coping with those threats.”

The problem, Kissinger and others said, is that the tension between the United States and Europe stems from several sources -- some easier to cure than others.

Part of the problem, diplomats say, has been the assertive style of Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who have sometimes declared -- too bluntly for European ears -- that the United States is ready to pursue its national interest without waiting for others to agree.

Part of the problem has been a series of straightforward disagreements over major issues, most notably Iraq, which the Council on Foreign Relations said had brought the tensions “to the point of crisis.”

But underlying those immediate problems, scholars warned, is a worrisome long-term factor: With the Cold War over, the United States and a newly unified Europe are increasingly seeing their interests diverge, and Europeans are defining their identity as distinctly “non-American.”

A study commissioned by the CIA last year suggested that by the year 2020, “there will be tensions [between the United States and Europe], and these will be greater than now.... Europe will increasingly seek to strike a different tone to the U.S. and to be a distinctive voice on the international stage. It will be more assertive, and will see the U.S. increasingly as an economic and political competitor as well as a friend.”

CIA officials said the study was not an official government forecast, but acknowledged that their official analyses largely agree.

“This is a long-term problem, not a short-term one,” said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former State Department aide to Kissinger who is now a scholar at Washington’s Brookings Institution. “The accumulation of American power causes resentment among some people overseas. That’s been the case for a long time. We went through a phase like this under [President Ronald] Reagan, when we were putting nuclear missiles in Europe and part of the European public was unhappy.

“These relationships always require work,” he said. “At the moment, it may look as if transatlantic relations are a total shambles. But it’s actually a lot of complicated adjustments to several different situations.”