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Interesting Article about the US and Europe
a friend sent me this, thought yall might find it interesting.
(Allan Little is a BBC presenter and reporter.)
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Lyndon Johnson is not normally a poster boy for the American right. But Washington has become fond of repeating one of his rare quips. In 1966, when De Gaulle kicked Nato out of France, he called Johnson on the telephone and told him that he wanted all US soldiers removed from French soil. Johnson replied: "Does that include those buried in it?"
America is feeling very superior about the 20th century and - to paraphrase Churchill - it has a lot to feel superior about. These days you can taste the disdain in the clean, cold DC air. The dominant national narrative is simple and appealing: "We bailed you out twice, selflessly, and now, in our hour of need, you don't have the guts to come to our aid. Fine. See if we care."
The long, dark months between September 1939 (Nazi invasion of Poland) and December 1941 (Pearl Harbour) have disappeared from this narrative. There is no mention of the plain fact that when Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, Holland, France and the Balkan peninsula fell like dominoes to the Nazi juggernaut, American public opinion was uniformly hostile to US involvement in a "European civil war".
No mention of the summer of 1940, when it seemed that even Britain would succumb. No mention that Churchill begged the US to come off the fence. No mention that he even stated it in terms of America's own security interests: if the Nazis invade Britain and get hold of the British naval fleet, he told Washington, then the US itself would be no match for the combined might of the Axis powers. No mention that the US ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, repeatedly warned the British that continued resistance was futile, repeatedly urged Churchill to reach a deal with Hitler, repeatedly told the White House that the British prime minister was a drunk and a dangerous fantasist.
No mention that when Franklin Roosevelt laid the foundations for what would in 1942 become a decisive US intervention in the fate of Europe - the rebuilding of the US armed forces, the lend-lease deal - he had to do so almost covertly, disguising what he was doing from a hostile public, swimming, just as Tony Blair is now, against the tide of opinion at home. No mention that in November 1940 Churchill sat alone in the cabinet war rooms waiting for the result of the US presidential election, and finally greeting the news of Roosevelt's re-election with what he called "indescribable relief".
Churchill placed his faith in the eventual engagement of the US in the security of Europe, and in the end it paid off. America, he famously said, can be relied upon to do the right thing - but only after exhausting all other available options.
The dominant US narrative simplifies and misconstrues the transatlantic relationship. There is wilful misrepresentation. It worries a lot of old cold warriors - men such Laurence Eagleburger, who was briefly secretary of state to George Bush Sr. He is no dove but he doesn't like this new mood. "I want the United States to be amenable to the wisdom of, say, the foreign minister of the Czech Republic," he told me a couple of weeks ago. "But it's just not going to happen any more."
The mood is a reflection of what is happening militarily. Donald Rumsfeld came to the department of defence promising not reform, not expansion, but something much more radical than all of these: "transformation". In defence circles the buzz word is "integration". The four traditional wings of the US armed forces - army, navy, air force and Marines - will stop the infighting to which they have been so attached. Their equipment will be integrated. Their command and control structures will be integrated. They will be hi-tech. Their planes will be unmanned - aircraft bombing targets in the Gulf will be piloted by a man sitting in the Pentagon, working shifts and going home to his wife and kids at the end of his day. Everyone talks about US "power projection" - and it will be awesome. "The only thing I regret about this coming war" one defence adviser to the Pentagon told me this month, "is that we're fighting it two or three years too early. By 2006/2007 we could really show them".
Be under no illusion. This brave new world is already in the making. And no matter how desirable allies may be politically, there is no role for them militarily. The rest of us cannot keep pace with this transformation. We will not commit the money. We lack the vision. Our armed forces, no matter how willing to engage, will simply not be up to it. We will not be "integrated". One former aide to Rumsfeld put it like this: "There will come a time soon when the allies presence on the battlefield will not just be useless, but positively dangerous. They'll be in the way." And then he added "There is of course one exception to this. Israel."
So get ready for what could be the last war of the post-1945 way of doing things. The last one we get to take part in. And be aware that as the post-1945 military alliance slips away, so too might a partnership that transformed our world half a century ago.
For we Europeans are misconstruing - wilfully misinterpreting - the Americans too. Bush is a gun-slinging Texan surrounded by "stupid white men". Not true. Emphatically, manifestly, demonstrably not true. "Don't misread the language our leaders use," Eagleburger implored me. "We are not good at nuance. Maybe we are not a nuanced people."
I don't hear much nuance in Europe either. For just as George Bush's wild-west allusions offend European ears, the tone of effortless superiority, dripping as it is with self-righteous disdain, that crosses the Atlantic in the opposite direction, bewilders and alienates America. Where, thoughtful, progressive, decent America would like to know, is Europe's memory? Not of how we bailed you out militarily, but of how we stuck with you through the dismal years of postwar austerity?
For what is happening now in Germany - a nation emerging from the decades of enforced division and enforced silence on international and military affairs - is the latest phase in the long, post-1945 normalisation of Germany, the Europeanisation of Germany. And it is substantially an American achievement. It was Washington that underwrote early progress toward European integration. When six European nations formed the European Coal and Steel Community - the forerunner of the EU - prime minister Clement Atlee described them as "six countries, four of whom we had to rescue from the other two."
The rebuilding of Europe - militarily, politically, economically, culturally - was underwritten by a US that was engaged in nothing less than our deliverance. Its creator, George C Marshall, whom Churchill described as the architect of the allied victory and the salvation of Europe, is largely forgotten. His life's achievement is enormous. It transformed our world. But in this country there is no biography of him in print. There ought to be a statue in Trafalgar Square. He ought to be in the national curriculum.
The transatlantic dialogue - a dialogue of mutual disdain and despair - is going to change our world. These are the dog days of the Atlantic partnership. Get ready, in the desserts of Iraq, for its last huzzah.
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