The Foreign Service Journal, April 2009

A P R I L 2 0 0 9 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 25 President Barack Obama’s decision to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay within a year. Speaking in February Amb. Ischinger said, “The decision over Guantanamo is exceptionally im- portant. It is about re-establishing the fundaments of the trans-Atlantic alliance. It is about restoring the moral values of the Enlightenment shared by the Europeans and the U.S. The U.S. has created a playing field which the Eu- ropeans should be determined to join in order to deal with foreign policy issues.” Although the ambassador did not specify which “En- lightenment values” he had in mind, he seemed to indi- cate that the differences between Europe and the United States at the most fundamental level can be lim- ited to the Bush administration and to one salient issue, detainees and alleged torture. But other policy issues, as well as evidence of basic attitude differences, suggest the danger of divergence is broader. In April 2008, the allies agreed that Ukraine and Georgia will at some point be members of NATO. But at the behest of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, with support from French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the Alliance did not offer a Membership Action Plan to either country. Because MAP has, for the most recent candidates, been the standard path to eventual membership, the effect of this decision was clear: to forestall any prospect of NATO membership for Ukraine or Georgia in the near future. NATO Enlargement Berlin and Paris based their objections on the fact that neither Kyiv nor Tbilisi was ready for NATO mem- F O C U S NATO’s greatest internal problem has been the refusal of some members to take on the same risks as others.