America makes enemies of seven its friends

Jonathan Power, Columnist, London

Europeans are beginning to experience the same sensations of impotence that Muslims long have. Whatever they think or say, it is tossed in the wastepaper basket by their American friends. In the last week or so it has become evident that the Bush Administration is hell bent on implementing a new law, part of the recent anti-terrorist legislation, that sets out in no uncertain terms to undermine the new International Criminal Court, the pride and joy of a lot of countries but of the Europeans in particular, who see it as an effective tool for deterring would-be war criminals.

The State Department has made it clear to all foreign countries that their military aid will be cut off unless -- like Rumania and Israel last week -- they sign a pledge to protect Americans serving in their country's from the Court's reach. Brave Norway has told the Americans "no", and doubtless other Europeans if asked will say the same thing. But "nos" won't be enough perhaps.

The law says, as the New York Times has just reminded us, that authority is given to the president to free Americans who are in the Court's custody by "any necessary and appropriate means". One presumes that means war.

Now the Europeans are beginning to understand what President George W. Bush meant when he said last autumn, "who is not with us is against us". Who knows at the rate things are going there may be some briefing from some Pentagon "think paper" that will warn that Europeans are no longer to be regarded as allies. Saudi Arabia is still recovering from last week's shock of being labeled by a Pentagon working party as "the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent" of the U.S. in the Middle East.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made it clear that he did not dissent from this piece of inside advice.

It would be useful to know where the Netherlands stands in the Pentagon's eyes. It is home of the International Court and much of its informed opinion is cool on current American realpolitik. It is presumably a wild exaggeration to say that America is going to use military force against its best friends, but nevertheless all this is leaving a strange taste in European mouths.

At best, many Europeans consider what has happened in America the last couple of years as bizarre. First, acting as if it were some insecure newborn democracy, it chooses as a president the son of the last president but one who has few qualifications other than his family name.

The election itself was run in such a roughshod way that the ballot was suspect. Then the new president appoints a lot of senior officials -- vice president, defense secretary, national security advisor and many other high level appointees, who have never known war, or shed blood, much less seen corpses rotting on the battlefield or villages destroyed with the remains of children's bodies splayed in a hundred directions. Many of them like the president himself consciously avoided the draft at the time of Vietnam.

Yet it is they who are telling the military against its better judgment that it has to gear up for a new major war, against Iraq and who knows what then? Saudi Arabia?

Then comes Sept. 11, followed by a commitment to "smoke out" Osama bin Laden. A war is begun against his refuge, Afghanistan, but bin Laden apparently escapes whilst at least as many innocent people are killed as lost their lives in the World Trade Center. America -- with its allies -- is left trying to establish a central government in Afghanistan by cutting short-term deals with autocratic warlords, a precarious effort that Washington makes clear is a distraction from the prime (but failed) objective.

Shortly after the U.S. unilaterally raises its steel tariffs, hurting not just its closest trading partners but many of the Third World countries that finally are becoming what America always said it wanted, well on the way to becoming developed. Europe, careful not to do anything to polarize the deteriorating transatlantic relationship, forgoes its legal right to retaliate.

Before and after and in between these major events the administration takes pot shots at other causes the Europeans hold dear -- the UN torture convention, the treaty on global warming, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the UN discrimination against women's convention.

At the same time it effectually licenses Israel to re-take the Palestinian West Bank, with Rumsfeld now making it clear that American promises made as recently as early summer to push for a Palestinian state are now seriously in question.

No wonder that sober people in Europe are beginning to ask where do they fit in to the new Machtpolitik? According to one observer, Robert Kagan, in widely circulated essay (in this month's issue of Prospect magazine), an American show of power is inevitable considering that America has the weight of the world on its shoulders and is the only country powerful enough to change things for the better.

But it is not simply a question of cracking the whip in the style of the old British Empire. The world doesn't work like that anymore, neither financially, nor socially and not even militarily. No country these days however strong can walk alone without courting defeat and disaster. If America's friends are pushed to be against it this can only benefit America's real enemies. Is this what America really wants?