By William Inboden
Soft-power skeptics and B-movie fans
probably both found much to applaud in Peter Feaver's post
below on the International Olympic Committee's "talk to the hand" rejection
of Chicago and its implications for President Obama's global soft-power appeal.
In a similar vein, Karen
Donfried and Mitchell
Reiss have an excellent
op-ed in Monday's New York Times (global
edition) pointing out the hard power realities -- and the hard choices -- that
loom between Europe and the U.S. on the issues of Afghanistan and Iran. Donfried
and Reiss (both of whom I had the privilege of working with at the State
Department; the latter is also a Shadow
Government contributor) in turn draw on some of the fascinating findings
from the German Marshall Fund's recent Transatlantic Trends
Survey of European and American attitudes.
In brief, the Transatlantic Trends
survey found an "Obama bounce" of staggeringly high proportions in Europe. As the German Marshall Fund's Ron Asmus observed,
"If Mr. Bush experienced an unprecedented drop in public support, Mr.
Obama has produced a bounce not seen in trans-Atlantic polling on U.S.
presidents since the 1950s." Support for President
Obama jumped 80 percentage points in Germany, 77 points in France, 70 in
Portugal, and 64 in Italy, in comparison with President Bush's (very low)
European approval ratings in 2008. In short, Europeans (especially Western
Europeans) really, really love our current president. But why hasn't that
affection yet been translated into any significant policy changes by these same
besotted Europeans -- whether on Guantánamo detainees, NATO troops in
Afghanistan, tightened sanctions on Iran, or even giving the Olympics to
Obama's "Sweet
Home Chicago"? Here is where the
Transatlantic Trends survey offers some other revealing results.
Their personal adoration
for President Obama notwithstanding, most Europeans are still far apart from most
Americans on major security issues. Seventy-seven percent of EU citizens oppose
sending any further troops to Afghanistan, and majorities of Europeans (West
and East) want to reduce or remove their troops currently deployed in
Afghanistan. On Iran, a strong plurality of Europeans (48%) are willing to
increase diplomatic pressure but categorically rule out any possibility of
using military force, while an equally strong plurality of Americans (47%) are
willing to consider using force. This gap becomes a virtual chasm when it comes
to the general question of whether the use of force can ever "be
necessary to achieve justice": 71% of Americans agree, whereas a mirror-image
71% of Europeans disagree. It seems that Bob Kagan's famous
observation that "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus"
didn't just apply to the Bush years, but describes a persistent transatlantic
divide.
So although President Obama's
personal appeal to Europeans is genuine, also genuine is the European
disagreement with the United States on both specific policies and the general
nature of the international system. And when soft-power affections collide with
hard-power interests, the latter carries the day.
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