Now that Saddam Hussein’s regime is no more, some of the focus of US foreign policy has moved to Europe.
Washington plans to haul the European Union before the World Trade Organization to contest its current ban on genetically modified foodstuffs. This is a hugely serious attack on matters that, with their more advanced culture of public debate, Europeans take seriously.
The timing of this move is clearly driven by Washington’s anger at “Old Europe’s” obstruction in the UN of its plans to invade Iraq. Perhaps anything that can make life difficult for the French and the Germans, who both led the opposition in the Security Council, may serve to even the score with an increasingly independent-minded NATO partner.
The irony is that the aggressive referral of the EU to the WTO over GM crops comes at a time when Brussels is giving genuine consideration to the vexed question of GM production. US consumers are apparently blithely unconcerned at eating these foodstuffs and US farmers unworried by any environmental dangers. It is therefore not difficult for the White House to sell the EU’s caution over GM foods as merely politically motivated to a public at home that, the indications are, does not see that there really are genuine concerns at play.
This however takes no account of the extent of public opposition in EU member countries to GM foods, an opposition so massive and spread across the political spectrum that it would be political suicide for any European leader to ignore it.
Washington’s assault is likely to relegate serious cnsideration of the issue to the Brussels’ back burner, while Europeans are left to bridle at the uncompromising American attitude. Far from considering a genuine problem seriously, the US move, by shifting the issue to a different political plane, may have made matters worse all round.
A major irony here is that some EU member states, in particular Spain and the UK, were strong supporters of the US invasion of Iraq. They now face the political embarrassment of being caught up in what many will see as a truculent act of blanket reprisal. By association, they will suffer for what France and Germany have done. But even if they will blame the two giants for getting them into it, they will also not be pleased to be so shoddily rewarded for their loyalty to the US. Their leaders, who persisted in their support for the war in the face of overwhelming opposition from their own people, could find themselves in trouble once again.
The evidence for example is mounting that Washington has misled Britain’s Tony Blair on a whole series of issues, not least the promise of a significant role for the UN in postwar Iraq. Other European supporters of Washington’s war on Iraq may feel similarly let down now it has turned round and abandoned them. They may feel they deserved better.
Diplomacy is about listening as well as talking, about the velvet glove as well as the firm hand. Some issues can be made into political capital because that is essentially what they are on all sides. Other issues, such as the GM problem, are too serious to be so lightly treated. They require serious consideration for the benefit of people on both sides of the Atlantic.
