Europe's Road Ahead - by Michael Elliott
If Obama is as wise as he seems, non-Americans will appreciate soon enough that he has just been elected President of the United States, not Secretary-General of the United Nations. For Europe's great and good, this will not be easy. Europeans love thinking about America, part in longing, part in envy, part in disdain. You could spend a nice year trotting from Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire to Salzburg, from the Italian lakes to German castles, doing nothing but ponder in earnest detail the state of the Atlantic alliance. It's a monumental waste of time. Nearly six years after those passionate disagreements on the invasion of Iraq, U.S.-Europe relations are just fine, with a clutch of Atlanticists heading the governments of Britain, France and Germany — and leading the European Commission in Brussels, too. The thing now is to figure out what the world's collection of rich democracies can do with their substantial power. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the New York Times recently that she once said to European leaders, "Can we take the trans-Atlantic relationship off the sofa? And stop analyzing it and analyzing whether it's healthy, and actually put it to work in common causes?" She has a point.
Many in Europe know just what to do with this peace and prosperity: lie back and enjoy it. As Gideon Rachman argued in a provocative column in the Financial Times in May, Europe has become a "giant Switzerland." Its people do not consider themselves threatened by the turmoil in the world around it, and see little point in going out looking for dragons to slay. Barack Obama may be Europe's darling, but he will find that his suitor's ardor cools pretty quickly the moment he asks European parents to volunteer their sons and daughters to beef up NATO forces in Afghanistan.
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