What do the victories of two relatively inexperienced outsiders, Senator Barak Obama and Mike Huckabee, in the Iowa Caucuses mean for US foreign policy in general and the Atlantic Alliance in particular? It is too soon to predict, on the basis of a plurality of votes cast by a sliver of eligible voters in a small state, who will eventually prevail in the nomination process.
But it is not too soon to ask if the Bush administration's unfathomably cavalier and gratuitously alienating attitude toward the US' European allies will change substantially on Jan. 20 next year.
Commentators seem to agree that the voters who chose Obama and Huckabee felt that they were rejecting the status quo. To put the mistakes of the past behind them, they apparently voted for the candidates about whom they knew the least.
But exactly what status quo did they imagine they were rejecting? Upon inspection, the "politics as usual" that they apparently sought to rebuff looks nebulous.
Obama has repeatedly linked Senator Hillary Clinton, whose political team is personally and ideologically committed to wresting power from the current incumbents, to the thinking dominant in Washington from 2001 to last year.
Even more oddly, the genial and erratic Huckabee says that the Mormon former governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, represents the powers that be.
To focus the discussion, we can ask the following question: Did the status quo rejected by Obama and Huckabee voters include the deterioration of US-European relations during the term of US President George W. Bush?
After all, the administration's denigration of "old Europe" was not just a rhetorical aside, but a centerpiece of its reckless approach to foreign affairs.
That is why any serious break with the disastrous Bush legacy should start with rethinking and rebuilding the Atlantic Alliance. That a renewed Atlanticism would be a priority for either Obama or Huckabee is extremely doubtful, however.
WHAT EUROPE?
Relations between the US and Europe have gone virtually unmentioned in the dozens of presidential debates held over the past six months. This is not surprising. Candidates have no incentive to focus attention on a subject, such as the strained Atlantic Alliance, that seldom if ever enters the consciousness of the average voter.
Obama's failure to convene a single policy meeting of the Senate European sub-committee which he chairs -- a committee that oversees, among other things, US relations with NATO and the EU -- has had absolutely zero resonance among the electorate at large.
When the topic arises, the Republican candidates, for their part, seem less blandly indifferent than overtly hostile to Europe. Their anti-European animus, while crudely uninformed, reflects, among other factors, the scorn for secularism typical of southern white evangelicals and the perverse notion promulgated by some distinguished Republican defense intellectuals that Europe today can contribute little or nothing to US security.
Why does Europe matter to the US? Five reasons stand out.
First, Europe is as much a frontline region in the war on terror as it was during the Cold War.
As last year's aborted attack on 10 airliners heading to the US from London revealed, the likelihood of a terrorist attack on US citizens emanating from a European country remains high.
The US may not need the French military, but it certainly needs French intelligence services.
Second, the linguistic skills and cultural knowledge of Europeans ensure they can make indispensable contributions to US security.
The spread of English as the world's language has had a paradoxical effect on US national security, making the US transparent to people around the world, while making the rest of the world increasingly opaque to Americans. Europeans can supply this defect.
Third, the narcissism of small differences and Bush's war aside, Americans and Europeans share a common way of life and cultural commitment to tolerant individualism that is not found with the same intensity, concentration and unchallenged dominance in most of the rest of the world.
Europeans and Americans also face many of the same foreign policy challenges.
CULTURAL SUICIDE
These include not just terrorism, but also politically destabilizing immigration pressures caused by the wealth gap between North and South, the job-destroying expansion of low-wage labor in China, Russian President Vladimir Putin's unpredictable petro-politics, nuclear proliferation involving politically unstable countries, the threat of contagious disease, global warming and so forth.
It would be culturally suicidal for "the West" not to work together to devise ways to manage these immensely difficult problems.
Fourth, NATO can not only bring important military capabilities to the table, reducing the drain on US forces in a turbulent world, it also offers a much more plausible vehicle for serious foreign-policy multilateralism than either the EU or the UN.
Fifth, and perhaps most important, elementary human psychology teaches that individuals who shun contact with others have a weak grasp of reality. Individuals who are never criticized by companions whom they trust, and with whom they share a basic value orientation, have a hard time remaining mentally balanced. The same is true of nations.
What makes allies indispensable to an effective national security policy is the ability of like-minded nations to provide reality checks, without which a fallible superpower is -- as we have regretfully seen -- unable to keep its balance on swiftly evolving and treacherous international terrain.
Because 60 percent of Huckabee's Iowa vote came from evangelicals, it still seems probable that the Republican nominee will end up being Mitt Romney, Senator John McCain or Rudi Giuliani. All of them are strong supporters of Bush's bellicose foreign policy, and all would campaign on the premise that "fear" has a greater emotional hold on the US electorate than "hope." They may well be right.
Obama is an obviously gifted politician who, if elected president, would probably break, or attempt to break, from some frustratingly inflexible US policies, especially concerning Israel.
But other candidates, notably Clinton, would be more likely to conduct an intensely Atlanticist foreign policy, placing emphasis on rebuilding the US' alliance with those extraordinarily prosperous countries best positioned to help it face the daunting challenges to global stability that lie ahead.
Stephen Holmes is a professor at New York University School of Law and is the author, most recently, of The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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