James Joyner of Outside the Beltway has a post this morning on Thomas Friedman’s column today that I wanted to make a longer comment on than I typically do in my Catching my eye morning run-down. Dr. Joyner writes:
Having read The Lexus and The Olive Tree and dozens of his columns over the years, I have one small suggestion for Thomas L. Friedman. I suggest that he come up with some new material every once in a while. Instead of constantly complaining that President Bush isn’t working hard enough to win European support, he might ask why it is that the Europeans have done to shoulder their fair share of the burden for defending themselves during the past six decades, first against Communism and now against Jihadist terrorists.
Let me put this is bluntly as I can: George W. Bush was just re-elected by a majority of the American electorate, which is a much more important referendum on U.S. foreign policy than a handful of people a columnist meets on a ten day tour in Europe. Sure, some people may think Mr. Friedman more qualified to advise the president than Condoleeza Rice, but I haven’t met them yet.
Since its beginnings as a country the United States’s foreign policy has been Eurocentric. While the U. S. military presence in Iraq may be getting the most press right now, probably the most significant change in American foreign policy during the Bush Administration is that it’s not Eurocentric anymore. We’re actually paying some attention to other parts of the world and I suspect that as our policy evolves we’ll be devoting more time and attention to the various regions of the world in proportion to their actual significance in world affairs and that means that Europe will receive less attention as their relatively dwindling role and significance warrants.
Said another way, the good old days aren’t coming back anymore.
And, as I wrote in my recent post, Plan B, if Bush’s grand Wilsonian plan to democratize the Middle East fails, the foreign policy that emerges from the wreckage won’t be a return to the Hamiltonian Realpolitik that Henry Kissinger and George Shultz recently urged on us nor will we cleave unto our old buddies in the EU again. No, we’ll either return to another grand old American tradition—Jeffersonian isolationism—or a full Jacksonian response. And the EU won’t have much role in either one of them.
UPDATE: Porphyrogenitus has posted something that’s quite relevant to my central point: the coalition that the U. S. assembled for tsunami relief consisted of Australia, India, and Japan, the other big Pacific democracies. Will this be the direction of future U. S. policy? Stay tuned.
The interesting thing about the “Core Group” the US assembled is that their governments are not dominated by transnational progressives.
It’s certainly beginning to seem that — in terms of how we see the world — the US has more in common with the Indians and Japanese than we do with the French and Germans (and, maybe, the Brits).
A radically different world is taking shape.
I agree that in a power sense, Europe is on the decline and India and China are becoming more important.
But where radical Islam and proliferation is concerned, it is vital that the U.S. and Europe stand together and not been driven apart, e.g., as Iran has been able to do.
There is certainly a need for the US to work with Europe. I don’t know how that is going to happen on anything other than a law-enforcement level so long as France sees Europe as its boost back to great power status, and its mission as being in opposition to the US.