In Defense of America Read Online Free PDF

for President Sarkozy, said in October 2007, “Under his presidency it is no longer taboo to be pro-American and to be French.” 21 The newspaper
Le Figaro
elaborated on this shift. “What is new is that France no longer positions herself as a rival of the U.S.,” it wrote. “She doesn’t let herself be locked into a role that should not be hers, as a rallying point for all those who oppose America.” 22
    Angela Merkel, who grew up behind the Iron Curtain in what was then East Germany, has been determined to use her chancellorship to strengthen ties with the United States and to cool them with Russia (Gerhard Schröder, her predecessor, promptly took a job with the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom on leaving office). But these exuberant claims of a new fondness for the superpower should be taken skeptically. They hold true more of the leaders than the public at large (and despite President Sarkozy’s enthusiasm, his own foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, declared in March 2008 that no matter who succeeds President Bush, “the magic is over”). 23
    For all the efforts of pro-American advocates to distinguish between President Bush and the United States itself, there are signs that most Europeans are not so indulgent. Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French intellectual who enjoys his status as the national contrarian for being passionately pro-American, told the
New York Times,
“
Non, non, non,
this French pro-Americanism is nonsense.” 24 Lévy argues that whatever President Sarkozy might say, the American project of blending together so many different kinds of people from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds is essentially hostile to the French idea of what it is to be a nation (a point I shall come back to in the next chapter).
    Nor are Spain and Italy sounding pro-American these days, despite their intertwined history and large emigrant populations in the United States. When Condoleezza Rice traveled to Spain in June 2007, her counterpart, Miguel Angel Moratinos, lectured her that the United States would see the error of its ways in its hostility to Fidel Castro; in a widely reported response, Rice, rolling her eyes, silently mouthed to American reporters, “Don’t hold your breath.”
    Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, writing about the “recent improvement in transatlantic ties” in December 2007, argued that “This belief is comforting, but it is bound to end in disappointment.” Haass added, “U.S.-European relations are not about to become as good or as significant as they were in decades past. Some of the reasons for this are familiar: social differences, including an unequal emphasis on religion and differing views on abortion rights and the death penalty; lingering anti-Americanism resulting from the Iraq war, perceived American neglect of the Palestinian issue, and both Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.” But he pointed, too, to “generational and demographic changes on both sides of the ocean.” The generation in Europe that was most pro-American, that had lived through the war, was dying out. As Haass put it, “Fewer Europeans regard Americans as their liberators; fewer Americans view Europeans as their ancestors.” 25
    The Real Cost for the United States
    These attitudes carry a real cost for the United States. Since the Iraq invasion, the starkest rejection of the American alliance was the decision of new left-wing governments in Spain and Italy to pull their troops out of Iraq, as they had promised, to enthusiastic response, in their election campaigns. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain’s Socialist Party prime minister, took out Spain’s 1,300 troops in April 2004, and Romano Prodi, prime minister of a coalition with a strong left-wing faction, pulled out Italy’s 3,000 troops in December 2006. Anti-American attitudes have also, as I have said, taken some of the warmth off the United States’ relationship with Britain, where a politician has little