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Transatlantic Partnerships: EU-USA
Nick Witney
for various reasons. The most important reason is that the West – indeed to the extent that this is a meaningful political construct any more – doesn't run the world any longer. A further key reason is that we no longer need American protection. Actually, we at this end of the Eurasian land mass are safer than we have ever been at any time in recorded history. This gives us the chance to stand up a little if that is we want to do, but we are a bit reluctant to take this action. Indeed the Americans, by which I mean President Obama, expressed it beautifully when he first came to Europe for his first NATO summit two years ago. He said that Americans don’t want to be the patrons of Europe, they want to be the partners of Europe. ‘Grow up please Europeans – make yourselves useful to us and get over these habits of constant deference to us that you have demonstrated.’ From the Obama point of view, the European response to that appeal, particularly on Guantanamo and Afghanistan, was certainly seen through American eyes to be pretty disappointing. So you are left, I suggest, with the situation in which Europe, seen from Washington is not a liability – there is no particular security problem here, nothing to worry about very much – but it is also not much of an asset. The Americans are disappointed on that score. If you are neither a liability nor an asset, you frankly do not figure very much in the accounts. I think this is roughly where we are. This view of a certain indifference to us is, of course, the thing that we find most difficult to take. Rather naughtily, someone in the State Department observed a few weeks ago: ‘the real problem of managing Europe is managing egos’. If, as Europeans, we present ourselves to the Americans as being divided, the Americans will happily divide us. But the irony is that, over the last four or five years, initially in the later days of President George W. Bush and subsequently increasingly clearly with Obama, the Americans would have a preference for Europeans pulling together in the hope that this would be most effective. Now, we do not necessarily want that message. The British, of course, are particularly bad at rejecting it. We like our self-appointed role as the American brakeman on the bobsleigh of European integration. We enjoy being more ‘Catholic than the Pope’ in this regard. But the Brits are not alone; Europeans as a whole feel that any sort of consolidated European position vis-á-vis America is somehow indecent, a bit like ganging up – not the way we should behave. We much prefer to conduct transatlantic relations through NATO under American