The Foreign Service Journal, October 2004

of March 11, 2004. Those ever-growing hostile feelings toward the U.S. are very much personalized; they are considered to be anti-Bush and not anti-American. One would hardly find any European who admits openly that he opposes the U.S. just because the only remaining superpower is too strong and should not be allowed to “rule the world” and instead ought to face an emerging counter-power — regardless of what is at stake in Iraq and elsewhere. But French President Jacques Chirac is doing just that in threatening a veto against any involvement of NATO in Iraq under a U.N. mandate, even though Paris backed the last U.N. Security Council resolution in June 2004 that established the U.S.-led Multinational Force for Iraq and reiterated the U.N.’s “leading role in assisting the Iraqi people and government in the formation of institutions for representative government.” The U.S. under President Bush is regarded as a democratic hegemon. But being first and foremost a hegemon, the U.S. is to be confront- ed — and cannot be trusted simply because it is also one of the oldest and most successful democracies in history. Crazy for Kerry The widespread misconception among Europeans that Pres. Bush is the main or even only culprit responsible for America’s alleged new unilateralism and hegemonic for- eign policy is paired with a romantic view of the candidate who is supposed to unseat the “wild man” in the White House. In Germany alone, there are at least four biogra- phies of John Kerry available — mostly originally and hastily written for the German-speaking public and not just translations of the many books on Kerry published in the U.S. Those books have titles like John Kerry – America’s Chance , and portray the Democratic candidate as the last, best hope for Europeans, the transatlantic rela- tionship and the world as a whole. Never before has there been such a flood of publications in Europe about a single American presidential candidate, and never before have most of the authors so wholeheartedly sung such praise of a politician instead of critically reviewing the man, his biography and his convictions. Critical judgment has given way to wishful thinking. The same is true for polls taken in Europe, where usu- ally more than two-thirds are convinced that Kerry will easily defeat Bush — for no other reason than that most people want to see this change in the White House. Unlike the broad presentation of peacenik-and-later-sen- ator-turned-Vietnam-veteran Kerry’s life, his and the Democratic Party’s recent positions on national security and the war on terror are merely reported in Europe. Even though Kerry and other major speakers at the Democratic National Convention in Boston reiterated that America is at war against terrorism and that this new kind of war might take decades to fight and win; even though the Democratic platform is at least as “strong” as the Republican on national security, and as uncompro- mising as Pres. Bush in never ceding the decision to go to war to defend the national interest to any foreign country or international organization like the U.N., most Europeans tend to believe that the transatlantic relation- ship will be miraculously repaired as soon as John Kerry is elected president. They are even told so by some of their political leaders, who promise them that everything will be fine once George W. Bush is ousted. This is not only unrealistic but irresponsible. In order to heal the wounds caused not only by the conflict over the war in Iraq, but by the post-Cold War divergence within the Western alliance, it is of paramount importance to come to grips with the conflicting interests Europeans and Americans have today and will develop in the future. For example, while it is part of the political consensus in the U.S. that America is at war against international ter- rorism and faces a challenge that is similar to that of fight- ing and finally defeating communism in the Cold War, Javier Solana, foreign policy chief for the European Union, told a German newspaper recently that “Europe is not at war.” Likewise, American opposition to international treaties like the Kyoto Protocol and international organizations like the International Criminal Court has little to do with party affiliation or who is residing in the White House, but is part of a broad political consensus in the U.S. that was and is reflected by the voting record of Congress. These conflicts between Europeans and Americans will, of course, persist even under a President Kerry, so should he really be elected, the disappointment of many Europeans might be even deeper than it would be in the case of a sec- ond term for George W. Bush. Being disappointed when your favorite candidate is not elected or when, in the case of his election victory, he later behaves as one would not have wished might be naïve, but it is not a political sin. But to close one’s eyes in the face of realities one doesn’t like is a political sin, and makes the path to resolving deeply-rooted conflicts all the more rocky and difficult. F O C U S 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 19