Centerfield

Europe and the US Election

New York Times: An article published in Friday's paper speaks of a "deeply pessimistic view" taking hold in Europe. Interestingly (and perhaps prophetically), the article suggests that a Kerry -- not a Bush -- victory might result in an immediate transatlantic crisis:

If President Bush wins, the reasoning goes, pro-Kerry Europe will be astonished at what it will see as the bad judgment of the American electorate. Europeans will be confirmed in their sense that they are from Earth and Americans from some other planet.

But if Senator John Kerry wins, the result may well be an almost immediate trans-Atlantic crisis. Mr. Kerry, having presented himself in the campaign as the man who can restore a functioning alliance, will ask Germany and France to come to the aid of the United States in Iraq. Germany and France will refuse, and Americans will feel angry and betrayed.

According to William Drozdiak, the director of the German Marshall Fund's Transatlantic Center,

If they were to say no to Kerry, the risk of a backlash against Europe in America would be large. Americans would say, 'We can't depend on Europe, even though we protected Europe for 50 years.' It will cause lasting damage to the relationship, a great sense of disillusionment.

Read the whole thing.

Guardian: After attending a meeting at which Grover Norquist, the very conservative president of Americans for Tax Reform spoke, Will Hutton penned a column that contains several anti-American cultural cliches:

Norquist is on the side of working Americans living in the outer suburbs springing up like topsy around every US city; the network of soulless shopping malls, never-ending cloned streets and newly built churches created by the appetite of US property developers. This instant developments are communities only in name; their rootless inhabitants, questing for meaning in their lives, are the prey upon which the New Republicanism feeds.

I'm not sure I understand this next quote, which is Hutton's explanation for "the genius of the conservative position:"

It is a crusade fuelled by a never-ending tide of complaint that is compelled to set itself unachievable objectives in its battle to reduce women's rights and against the commercial ethic that so beleaguers religion but their non-achievement only proves the malevolent hegemony of the liberal elite and thus the correctness of the right's analysis.

The conservatives are against the commercial ethic? The commerical ethic beleaguers religion? Has Hutton read de Tocqueville? Doesn't he know that Americans are far more religious than any other industrialized country, despite our "crass" materialism?

Not satisfied with being wrong, Hutton then proceeds to contradict himself:

This hostility to modernity and sense of beleaguerment spills over to fuel an ugly American nationalism. Foreigners, and especially Muslim foreigner, are part of the threat to the values and lifestyles of ordinary God-fearing Americans.

Notwithstanding our soulless shopping centers and cloned steets, Americans are hostile to modernity? Despite immigration laws that many feel are to lax, we're afraid of foreigners?

Hutton's views may be laughable (at least to me), but the Guardian is read by millions of people across the globe. We need better soft diplomacy not just in the Islamic world, but also in the Mother Country.

Read the whole thing.

Posted by at October 31, 2004 08:58 PM