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America In, France and Germany
Down President Chirac
thinks Central and Eastern European countries missed “an opportunity to
shut up” when they announced their support for the American and British
line on disarming Iraq. “New Europe” isn’t very happy
about that. But it turns out that Eastern Europeans don’t require
French counsel to recognize a good opportunity to keep quiet. As the Jerusalem Post
observes today, “While millions of Western Europeans demonstrated
against uprooting the genocidal regime of Saddam Hussein, the streets
of Eastern Europe's capitals were resoundingly silent” last weekend.
It’s true that anti-American sentiment in Western Europe has been overstated, and exaggerated by obdurate political leadership,
but there’s no mistaking the support the United States enjoys in the
east. The Eastern European nations have a recent experience of struggle
-- they were our front-line allies in the fight against Soviet
totalitarianism -- and they’re more likely to appreciate the role of
American power in winning and preserving their freedom. For “New
Europe,” the world is a dangerous place of power politics, not the
cooperative neighborhood of agreements and contracts that Western
Europe has built in the EU. Interestingly, this means that Israel -- a
child of Western European thought -- finds more sympathy from these
other small countries “suffering from a difficult geography,” as the Post notes, than it does from its parent nations.
It
also means that the Eastern Europeans are the advocates of American
involvement in Europe. All of which commends the American policy of
expanding NATO to include the Baltic States. The NATO alliance was
originally formed, as the saying went, to keep “America in, Germany
down, and Russia out.” Russia is no longer our enemy, of course. Yet as
the transatlantic rift with “Old Europe” widens, NATO still has much
the same mission: to keep America in Europe, and to keep France and
Germany down.
Former French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine
has said that French diplomacy aims to create a multipolar world by
constraining the U.S. through multilateral institutions such as the
United Nations and the IMF. NATO serves a parallel function for the
United States: ensuring an American role in Europe, constraining
European anti-Americanism. Chirac’s chastisement of Eastern Europe --
that Europe must have a united foreign policy and speak with one voice
-- applies equally to France. With so many European countries
supportive of the U.S., France cannot define the European position in
opposition to the U.S. Europe’s united voice does not speak French or
German, but a wide range of European languages. Yet for these countries
to constrain the excesses of French and German hubris, they must be
part of Europe's institutional voice in the European Union and NATO.
They must “join Europe,” as Chirac put it.
Those who think NATO has outlived its usefulness are flat wrong, and the divergence of Old Europe and New Europe is Exhibit A.
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