Building a New Atlantic Alliance

Restoring America's Partnership With Europe

James P. Rubin

From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2008

Article preview: first 500 of 4,155 words total.

Summary:  How the United States can restore its relationship with Europe.

James P. Rubin is an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. He served as Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs from 1997 to 2000.

This spring's NATO summit in Bucharest marked the end of President George W. Bush's stewardship of the transatlantic alliance. This year, Germany, not the United States, played the role of NATO power broker. All the key NATO foreign ministers were huddled with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to determine the future of NATO enlargement. When their decision was announced, Georgia and Ukraine were stunned that the clout of the United States was not enough to put them on the path to NATO membership. The situation in Bucharest laid bare the underlying damage done to the United States' stature during the Bush era.

On the surface, transatlantic relations are in far better shape today than they were during the run-up to the Iraq war. But it would be a mistake to underestimate the depth of the wounds Washington's reputation has suffered. Today, the United States lacks concrete European support on vital issues, and European confidence in U.S. leadership has collapsed. Fortunately, both the Democratic and the Republican presidential candidates recognize how much harm has been done and have vowed to restore the United States' standing in the world. The 2008 presidential election provides an opportunity for a fresh start in U.S.-European relations. The new administration should capitalize on this moment by declaring that the era of U.S. unilateralism is over and that partnership with Europe is a central tenet of U.S. foreign policy. Then, it should launch a diplomatic initiative to win closer cooperation from European allies in exchange for substantial changes in U.S. policies toward Afghanistan and Iran and on issues such as climate change and the war on terrorism.

President Bush's second term was unquestionably better than his first on a number of pressing issues -- especially Iran, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and North Korea. Washington's emphasis on diplomacy over military force and its shift from belligerency to persuasion have had a salutary effect on U.S.-European relations. Key European countries have worked in harmony with the State Department to demand a halt to Iran's uranium-enrichment program and to secure UN Security Council sanctions against Tehran. Since the Annapolis peace conference in November 2007, European frustrations with Washington's hands-off stance in regard to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process have largely disappeared. And thanks to the Bush administration's about-face on negotiations with North Korea -- as well as the recent glimmerings of diplomatic progress with Pyongyang -- European leaders no longer feel compelled to send their own envoys to Kim Jong Il as peacemakers.

Likewise, decisions by the Supreme Court and Congress to rein in the Bush administration's extremist policy on the treatment of terrorist suspects and enemy combatants has helped quiet the outrage throughout Europe over the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. And although Europeans continue to be frustrated by what they see as Washington's selfishness on the subject of global warming, they are now at least hopeful about the future. The combination of former Vice President Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize and ...

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