Charlemagne

The Atlantic gap

The honeymoon between Europe and Barack Obama's America is over

A “FLASHING yellow light”. That is how one American official describes warning signs of trouble between his administration and Europe. Less than a year after Barack Obama’s election, European euphoria over the end of the Bush era is fading. Relations are still far better than in the dark days before the Iraq war. But as the official puts it, there is “a lot of sniping” going back and forth across the Atlantic. And, he adds, there is a recognition at the “highest levels” that such snippiness is becoming unhelpful.

European Union politicians and officials are dismayed that, with a poisonous debate over health reform chewing up his political capital in Congress, Mr Obama may not secure legislation fixing binding emissions targets for America before the climate-change summit in Copenhagen in December. They also think the health-care impasse explains the lack of progress on the Doha world-trade talks. Nor did Europeans enjoy the G20 meeting that Mr Obama hosted in Pittsburgh. Despite hogging a ludicrous number of seats at the table, the EU came away with only one big Europe-specific agreement: alas, for them, it was a plan to cut their voting power at the IMF.

From the American side, there is frustration that the Obama administration’s multilateral humility has not been matched with more European help in Afghanistan, or a promise in every European capital to back tougher sanctions on Iran. (Yes, it looks as if they are building a bomb, goes the line in some places that do business in Iran, but if we stop selling things, the Chinese will just take our place.)

The sense of a honeymoon ended is widespread, at least at official level. In a revealing coincidence, 24 hours before the American official talked of a “flashing yellow light”, an EU official used the same metaphor to describe east European alarm at the clumsy way in which the Obama administration cancelled plans for a missile-defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Doubts about the Obama administration have been a dirty secret in European policy circles for months, even as polls like the latest German Marshall Fund’s “Transatlantic Trends” survey continued to find Obamamania in western Europe. But the grumbling is slowly becoming public. In Brussels on September 30th America’s assistant secretary of state for European affairs, Philip Gordon, warned the Europeans that the Obama administration needed something in return for its punt on multilateralism. If “in a year from now”, Europeans have not decided to offer more help in Afghanistan and tougher sanctions on Iran, he said, “plenty of Americans will say, you know what, let’s do it our way.”

Can a transatlantic bust-up be averted? It would help if some misunderstandings were cleared up. The EU is an elite, supranational project, and only indirectly democratic. This creates a structural problem whenever it talks to the Americans. Eurocrats often get on well with administration officials (another secret is that European bigwigs found the second-term Bush lot congenial to deal with). The bigger problem is usually Congress, which acts as a lightning rod for American popular opinion. In Europe no such partisan democratic body exists (the European Parliament is more remote from voters and less powerful than Congress, and MEPs live in a warm bath of mushy conventional wisdom). Euro-types boast that the EU stands for stirring values like leadership on climate change or opposition to the death penalty. It is less clear that you could win a mandate for such things from European voters, which may be why they are not directly asked.

If people in Brussels struggle to understand how troublesome Congress can be to an American administration, they should try this mental aid. Congress is a bit like France: prickly, status-obsessed, ruthless in defending national interests and addicted to subsidies for special interests such as farmers or industrial champions. Both are ambivalent about free trade: as the Copenhagen climate talks near, it is France and certain American senators who want to talk up “green tariffs” in case China and India duck binding limits on carbon.

Look east not west

Many Europeans may also be labouring under a second misapprehension. Because they believed that George Bush was wicked and Mr Obama seemed to agree, they assumed that they and America’s new president occupied the same moral high ground. You can overstress biography, but a Kenyan-American raised in Hawaii and Asia could be forgiven for remembering that Europe was a continent of colonial powers before it proclaimed itself a beacon of moral values, and for considering the Pacific to be just as strategic as the Atlantic.

There are misunderstandings on the American side, too. American diplomats insist that Europeans see a failed Afghan state as a direct threat to their security. That is not true. “A very small number” of European governments believe Afghanistan is on the front-line of the war on terror, says one senior Brussels man. Most sent troops just to maintain good relations with America. Europe’s governments fear there is no strategy for winning the war but “some are afraid to tell the Americans the truth.”

Finally, Americans may not realise how horrible their health-care debate looks to outsiders. It is not just that it is blocking other legislation. The partisan nature of today’s Congress looks mad to Europeans brought up to value consensus. Europeans also know that “European-style” health care does not include death panels prescribing euthanasia for grannies and are offended by the way such tosh is alleged in America.

The end of the transatlantic relationship has been predicted many times. In truth, lots binds the rich democracies on both sides. But disillusion is a dangerous emotion. Both sides must keep talking, before the warning lights turn red.