Next president must have world view with allies

BY STEVE KETTMANN | Steve Kettmann's latest book is the forthcoming "Letter to a New President," co-written with Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W. Va.). He lives in Berlin.

May 16, 2008

If there is one issue on which the three remaining presidential candidates seem to agree, it's the need to repair relations with our key allies, badly damaged by the Bush administration's toxic combination of arrogance and ineptitude.

As easy a task as this might seem from the perspective of the campaign trail, the tricky reality is that moving beyond the jagged wreckage of the Bush years could prove surprisingly challenging, regardless of which party wins in November.

Granted, there will surely be fine flourishes of photo-op diplomacy early in the next administration that will inspire all sorts of commentary heralding the dawn of a new era in U.S.-European relations. It would be surprising, for example, if the next president does not come to Berlin and give a stirring oration near the Brandenburg Gate, riffing on both Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner!" speech and Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" moment, all on the way to marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall in November 2009.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has made political hay of just such a rhetorical embrace, self-consciously contrasting her own Bush-friendly approach with predecessor Gerhard Schr"der's alleged anti-Americanism.

Even so, Merkel held firm in the face of taunts from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and others that Germany was not pulling its weight in Afghanistan. Despite strong U.S. pressure, Merkel refused to send more troops or redeploy German soldiers to more dangerous regions.

She and others in Europe are finding it easy to say no to the United States with the Bush administration drained of clout, and it's fair to ask if this practice at ignoring U.S. pressure might have consequences that outlast the Bush years.

Relying on such shortcut diplomatic approaches as a grinning photo-op with a foreign leader indicates an administration that has failed to grasp the core reason for wanting robust relations with our key allies: It's in our own self-interest to have allies who can work with us on world priorities, yes, but also that can serve as a check on our more unfortunate impulses by objecting to policies that seem unwise and possibly disastrous.

The test of the next president's relations with key allies will not be the photo-ops or the speeches, but success in articulating a world view - and policies - that are based on a commitment to genuine give-and-take, not merely a mix of grudging compromises and largely empty feel-good initiatives.

We may have to wait for the various Bush administration memoirs for any real clue as to what the president was thinking with his reverie over seeing into then-Russian President Vladimir Putin's soul. Regardless, George W. Bush may have done us all a favor by helping discredit the politics of male bonding. He gave up much by drastically personalizing U.S.-Russian relations and gained little, except a self-imposed paralysis in the face of Putin's cheerful contempt for democracy.

Ironically, the Bush administration took office talking up the dangers of just such a personalization of politics. In an interview in late 1999 for the Berliner Zeitung, Condoleezza Rice told me that her top critique of Bill Clinton's policy toward Russia was the extent to which it had personalized U.S.-Russian relations. Rather than acting on that critique, the administration took personalization to new extremes.

John McCain offered a good example of the limits of atmospherics when he showed up at Elysée Palace in Paris in March for a backslapping session with French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The only problem was, McCain fouled up the whole trip with his now famous insistence that Iran was arming and training al-Qaida in Iraq. The repeated misstatement reminded Europe that a McCain administration would represent four more years of U.S. policy in Iraq completely detached from reality.

Meanwhile, the Arizona senator recently had to back away from his call for a "League of Democracies," an obvious bid to undermine the United Nations, in part because of the cool reception the notion was getting in Europe.

If a Democrat wins, enormous obstacles to revived relations will remain, starting with the likely need - regardless of campaign rhetoric - to leave a significant, if reduced, U.S. force in Iraq for many years. Continuing frictions over Afghanistan and a variety of other issues also are likely with a Democratic president under strong pressure at home not to appear too accommodating to European wishes.

"No matter who is the next president, the Afghanistan issue is not going to go away," said Thomas Risse, director of the Center for Transnational Relations, Foreign and Security Policy at Berlin's Free University. "I think there are some illusions in Germany that the first thing a new Democratic president would do would be to, No. 1, sign the Kyoto Protocol and, No. 2, sign the World Court.

"There are a lot of hopes that are unlikely to be met."