Plus Ça Change…

I arrived in Europe this week to a torrent of continental outrage that has an odd "back to the future" feel about it. Led by the leaders of France and Germany, European heads of state and their incensed publics are denouncing the U.S. president for what they see as overly aggressive national security practices that violate international law and smack of American unilateralism and arrogance. Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and (of course) the Guardian pile on with new revelations and editorial denunciations of perfidious American policies. In short, European abhorrence over the Obama administration’s policies in 2013 looks and feels much like European abhorrence over the Bush administration’s policies in 2003.

This is all somehow simultaneously disquieting and reassuring. Disquieting because as a committed Atlanticist I worry about yet another point of tension in the fraying of transatlantic relations. Already an inward-looking United States has sent multiple signals of passivity and disengagement to its European allies on issues including Libya, Mali, Afghanistan, Syria, and the ongoing eurozone economic fragilities. The American stock of diplomatic capital with Europeans is diminished, and in this context l’affaire Snowden and its fallout about surveillance policies only make things worse, especially since the United States still needs robust cooperation from its EU allies on many issues, counterterrorism among them — the political will for which is now further diminished.

At the same time, the European outrage is oddly reassuring insofar as in its wake might come notes of realism and perspective to both sides of the Atlantic. For President Barack Obama and his senior team, I hope that this will encourage them not to confuse the (much diminished) overseas appeal of Obama’s personality with support for his national security policies, and instead marshal a new measure of substantive transatlantic outreach. Likewise, perhaps now the White House will adopt a more humble awareness of its own fallibility and maybe even at last express public gratitude for the counterterrorism policies that George W. Bush developed and Obama has embraced — rather than the tiresome cheap shots that the president indulged in during his National Defense University speech in May. Meanwhile, for European heads of state this likely marks the final denouement, after a steady five year decline, of their enraptured delusions about Obama. Gideon Rachman puts it well in July 1’s Financial Times: "It has taken a long time, but the world’s fantasies about Barack Obama are finally crumbling. In Europe, once the headquarters of the global cult of Obama, the disillusionment is particularly bitter." Once this latest spate of European umbrage passes, as it will, American and European leaders would do well to engage in a private, candid dialogue about the threats of terrorism and Middle Eastern instability and the shared transatlantic responsibilities to respond.

It is no small irony that Tuesday Obama and Bush appeared together in Tanzania and jointly commemorated the 1998 al Qaeda attacks on U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi. The two U.S. presidents displayed solidarity in Africa in the fight against terrorism at the very same time that Obama is being reviled in Europe for aggressive counterterrorism measures in much the same manner that Bush was. Sometimes bipartisan continuity in American national security policy appears in unusual ways, and unlikely places.