CIAO DATE: 09/07
The National Interest
Transatlantic Troubles
Andrew A. Michta
Abstract
Transatlanticism, conceived as a special security bond between the United States and Europe—framed by the NATO alliance, driven by shared threat perceptions and buttressed by common Western values—is in flux.
The United States is losing influence in Europe, and the growing resistance to its continued leadership on a range of security issues is not limited to politicians. According to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, while 78 percent of Germans in 2000 had positive views of America, after the attack on Iraq in 2003 the number fell to 45 percent, to stand in 2006 at only 37 percent. For the French, the numbers went down from 62 percent positive in 2000 to 39 percent in 2006; even in the UK, the attitude toward America fell from 83 percent positive in 2000 to 56 percent in 2006.1 The emerging anti-Americanism of the “European street” is a reality not only in Germany, France and Belgium, but also among the most pro-American new members of NATO like Poland. In a Center for Social Opinion Research (CBOS) poll released in Warsaw in November 2004, 58 percent of the respondents saw U.S. policy as contributing to instability and conflict in the world, while only 21 percent saw American policy as contributing to peace and stability.2
Europe’s policy elites do not reject the use of military power out of hand. Contrary to the argument advanced in the 1990s, the fracturing of the transatlantic relationship is caused not by the incompatible strategic cultures of the allegedly Hobbesian Americans and pacifist Europeans, but rather by divergent interests and differences on security policy. Those differences are not existential, but they are nonetheless important; we are driven apart not by what we are, but by what we do.