North Atlantic Disinterest

[CHIMO]

On his recent travels through Europe, U.S. President George W. Bush tried to put his best face forward. He was as polite and well mannered as he could manage. In Paris, he listened attentively to President Jacques Chirac speaking in French. In Eastern Europe, he recalled the various velvet revolutions. He commented on human rights to human rights defenders but did not deign to mention them when he met with President Vladimir Putin.

The United States is trying to fix its official reputation, which was thoroughly ruined by the war in Iraq. However, to really fix something, it will definitely take more than a week of good behavior and more than a couple of pleasant speeches. When Bush reached Bratislava, once part of the communist bloc, he must have felt more at ease, but even in Slovakia, he was greeted by protests, albeit on a smaller scale. The anti-American sentiment in Eastern Europe is also growing, though not at the same rate as in the West.

NATO stands to suffer most of all from a further escalation of the conflict in the Middle East. The alliance is an anachronism for many Europeans. Founded during the Cold War to fend off the Reds, it turned into a tool for subordinating Europe's military organizations to American interests in the 1990s. However, now that the United States is seen as the problem and not the solution, NATO no longer has anything positive to offer the Europeans. Over the many years of its existence, a powerful bureaucracy that wants to perpetuate itself has emerged in Brussels. It is unlikely that one of the European leaders would be bold enough to openly disrupt the traditions of trans-Atlantic cooperation. The experienced politicians of the Old World are taking a different tack. They are ignoring NATO as much as possible and slowly founding their own military alliance. If the United States attacks Iran, this move away from NATO will get yet another push.

Washington's only consolation is that the less interest EU leaders show in NATO, the more politicians from former communist states push to get in. For instance, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko was recently spotted in Brussels.

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/03/03/008.html