After fighting half a century during the Cold War to prevent an alliance between the Soviet Union and Western Europe, the United States now confronts a coalition of Europe’s historical powers of Russia, Germany and France uniting against US intervention in Iraq.
Some foreign policy experts say the fracas over Iraq has brought to the surface the fundamental shift of interests between Europe and the United States over the last decade since the Cold War standoff ended. But others say it’s just a temporary diplomatic contretemps caused by heated disagreements over President Bush’s aggressive policy toward Iraq.
James Goldgeiger, a professor of international relations at George Washington University, said the European coalition is just an alliance in opposition to American policy in Iraq and has not been accompanied by shifts in military alliances, which would be worrisome.
Goldgeiger said he has heard voices from Moscow warning the Kremlin not to damage US-Russian relations over Iraq. “Their relations with us are still extraordinarily important to them,” he said.
European opposition to Bush’s policies against Iraq have become increasingly shrill, with newspapers accusing the United States of using “cowboy diplomacy” and arrogantly dismissing allies who have concerns about destabilizing a Muslim world that is the source of Europe’s oil and natural gas. There is also lingering anger over the Bush administration imposing tariffs on European steel, the scrapping of the Kyoto treaty aimed at controlling carbon dioxide emissions and the $157 billion in US exports sent to Western Europe each year.
“There’s no question that for a lot of countries, the specter of an unchecked power makes folks nervous,” Goldgeiger said.
John Hulsman, a research fellow in international affairs at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, said he spots “a kernel here of a policy shift” in a coalition of France, Germany and Russia that could be dangerous if France can grow the coalition into some new international institution.
The three countries are used to playing power politics from centuries of intricate diplomatic dances that usually involved France and Germany employing Russia’s clout as a counterbalancing force.
“This is a Wizard of Oz coalition in which, like Dorothy’s friends, everyone is missing something,” Hulsman said. He said Germany has been left in economic turmoil from the costs of reunification; France a mid-level nuclear power with pretensions of being a global spokesman and Russia a country of vast resources but lacking foreign investment to exploit them.
On their own, the three countries have little chance of confronting the United States, but together they make a formidable force. Hulsman said the United States should move quickly to work with Germany and Russia to prevent that from happening and shore up traditional relationships. He doubted the US-France relationship will be quickly patched up and has already hit the lows scored during the administration of Charles de Gaulle, who ordered US troops to leave French soil.
Richard Betts, a professor of political science at Columbia University in New York, said seeing Russia, France and Germany working together is unusual, but he doubts the coalition of the three countries will last long after a final vote on the Iraq issue in the UN Security Council.
Betts said the fight over Iraq has changed other alliances and shown that the European Union isn’t as unified as France would like it to be. Spain has broken from its European Union allies to back the United States, and support for the American position remains strong in Central and Eastern Europe, much to the disgust of French diplomats.
“There’s not a uniform block in Europe,” Betts said.
