----- Original Message ----- From: Miroslav Antic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: BALKAN <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; SIEM NEWS <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: NATO <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, February 24, 2001 9:05 PM Subject: Europeans Urge U.S. Ally To Address Growing Rift [STOPNATO.ORG.UK] STOP NATO: NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------- ListBot Sponsor -------------------------- Build a marketing database and send targeted HTML and text e-mail newsletters to your customers with List Builder. http://www.listbuilder.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Europeans Urge U.S. Ally To Address Growing Rift http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43300-2001Feb22.html By William Drozdiak Washington Post Foreign Service Friday, February 23, 2001; Page A14 BRUSSELS, Feb. 22 -- Growing estrangement between the United States and Europe on a broad array of defense, trade and political issues threatens to divide the Atlantic alliance and give the new occupant of the White House a major foreign policy challenge. Though President Bush says he wants to give top priority to relations with immediate neighbors such as Mexico and Canada, European policymakers say he should turn urgent attention to fixing a commercial and security partnership that they believe Americans have taken for granted too long. Bush has already met the leaders of Mexico and Canada. This weekend, he is scheduled to sit down for the first time with a European counterpart, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, at Camp David to discuss topics that officials say will include sanctions against Iraq following the U.S.-British bombing raids last week near Baghdad. Next week, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell will meet with his peers at NATO headquarters in Brussels for a review of U.S. plans for a national missile defense system, Europe's creation of an autonomous military force and NATO's expansion toward Russia's frontier. But security disputes are only part of what troubles the alliance. In the absence of the common threat of the Soviet Union to bind them together, the United States and Europe are often taking diverging roads in trade, environmental and social policy. "There is a new generation coming up that has no memory of the Soviet threat as the basis of a special relationship with the United States," Rafael Estrella, a Spanish legislator and president of the NATO parliamentary assembly, said in an interview. "Young people think of America in terms of the culprit behind the death penalty, global warming, the bombs over Baghdad and the use of depleted-uranium weapons in Kosovo. For governing coalitions in Europe, it means when the next international crisis comes it will be much harder to rally people behind the United States." Tensions within the alliance are nothing new and have usually worked themselves out over time because of an abiding commitment to shared values. "There was always more to NATO than collective defense," NATO Secretary General George Robertson said. "It remains the expression of something wider and deeper -- a voluntary security community based on democracy, individual liberty, free economies and the rule of law." But two factors now seem to be magnifying the divide. First, the 15-nation European Union is pursuing a common foreign and security policy with a goal of making its strategic clout commensurate with its status as the world's largest trading power. Second, the United States is often seen by its allies as wanting to go its own way, even if that is perceived as arrogant. This tendency, reflected in the Bush administration's hostility toward the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the International Criminal Court and the global warming treaty, has deepened convictions in Europe that the United States places itself above international law. So far, the European allies have muted their concerns in the hope of getting relations with the Bush administration off to a good start. Only France expressed outrage over the Iraqi bombing -- Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine said it had "no basis in international law." On the issue of national missile defense, Britain and Germany have suppressed initial misgivings, in the apparent belief that it makes no sense to provoke a dispute if the United States is determined to proceed with the project. But concerning Europe's plan to create a 60,000-member "rapid reaction force" -- which the United States warns may undermine NATO's security role -- it is the Europeans who have been inflexible. The United States has insisted that NATO countries that are not members of the European Union, such as Turkey and Norway, should be fully involved in EU military planning. But the EU has said no, insisting that it needs to build an independent force. This has stirred resentment among some leading members of the Bush administration and prominent members of Congress. "It's quite clear our perspectives are diverging," Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said after hearing the latest plans for the European force at a Munich security conference this month. "Europe's project is creating unneeded acrimony, and I fear that our geographical divide is increasingly becoming a functional one." The Europeans counter that the Americans have failed to recognize that the balance of power within the 19-nation NATO alliance is changing with the times. "A lot of the people on Bush's national security team come out of the Cold War era and think the Europeans have to fall in line with everything they say," a senior German official said. "But the days when the Americans could manage the alliance as they see fit are over. They need to show a better grasp of how to compromise." Similarly, Europe seems less inclined than ever to bend to America's will on restarting global trade negotiations that stalled in late 1999 during a rancorous meeting of World Trade Organization (WTO) members in Seattle. As the world's two leading trading powers, the United States and the EU account for about half of the world's exports. Despite the importance of this partnership, the menace of a trade war hangs in the air. The United States has slapped more than $300 million worth of sanctions on European imports in disputes over trade in beef and bananas, while the European Union has warned that it may seek up to $4 billion of sanctions against the United States unless it abolishes a tax break for American exporters. "These issues must be resolved because they are absolutely critical to the health of the world trading system and the global economy," said Mike Moore, director general of the WTO. "It will take political engagement at the highest levels to get it done." 2001 The Washington Post Company Miroslav Antic, http://www.antic.org/SNN/ ______________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
