The Foreign Service Journal, October 2004

I F E UROPEANS HAD A VOTE IN THE U.S. PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION , G EORGE W. B USH WOULD LOSE IN A LANDSLIDE AGAINST ANY CANDIDATE . B Y M ATTHIAS R UEB F O C U S O N T H E 2 0 0 4 E L E C T I O N S ooner or later they will all be disappoint- ed. The vast majority of Europeans, that is, will be disap- pointed by the results of the U.S. presidential election of Nov. 2, 2004 — no matter what the outcome. For them there is only the difference between an immediate, deeply shocking disappointment and a delayed sort of creeping disenchantment. It is difficult to judge which would be worse for them, which would do even more harm to rela- tions with their closest political and military ally of the last half-century. The shocking, even stunning disappointment for most Europeans would be the re-election of George W. Bush. When asked by friends and colleagues from Germany and other European countries who will win the presidential election later this year, I reply that it is impossible to pre- dict because the race between President Bush and Democratic candidate John Kerry is so close and the country so evenly divided between the opposing political camps. This answer leaves them incredulous, and my guess that the president, as the incumbent, might still be in a slightly better position to win the race adds a certain degree of despair to their confusion: How can this possi- bly be the case, they wonder? Their disbelief has a foun- dation. Were Europeans to participate in the decision- making process on who should be the “leader of the free world,” President Bush would lose in a landslide against any candidate. Even in 2000, the majority of Europeans were hardly able to grasp how the American people could elect a man president of the United States whom they regarded as a gun-slinging cowboy. No other U.S. president since Ronald Reagan has been so deeply disliked and mistrust- ed in Europe as George W. Bush has been since he assumed office in January 2001. Expecting an Apology The invasion of Iraq in March 2003 seemed to prove how irresponsible and dangerous the man is: How could he dare — after the Europeans willingly had backed the toppling of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan because of its cooperation with the al-Qaida terrorist network and Osama bin Laden — to squander the deep sympathies everybody felt with the victim of the terrorist attacks of 9/11? German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder won re- election in September 2002, after trailing his conservative opponent Edmund Stoiber badly in all polls for months, solely because of his opposition to the Iraq “adventure” that the American president was about to plunge the U.S. and its Western allies into. According to all polls, about S E UROPE W ILL B E D ISAPPOINTED — N O M ATTER THE O UTCOME O C T O B E R 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 17 Matthias Rueb is Washington bureau chief for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.