America the Invulnerable? The World Looks Again
On fundamental issues like the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto environmental treaty and the crisis in the Middle East, even strongly pro-American leaders like the British prime minister, Tony Blair, and the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, are openly differing with America with a public bluntness that would have been unthinkable five years ago — or in the weeks after Sept. 11.

There is shock over the way Washington handled the court issue at the United Nations, puzzlement over the concentration on Iraq as the Israeli-Palestinian relationship deteriorates and confusion over how to move forward in the Middle East with Yasir Arafat ruled out but no mechanism to establish another Palestinian leadership.

And there is dismay that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, a European favorite, is losing key battles to the conservatives who seem to have won Mr. Bush's ear and who regard European criticism as the whining of weaklings. The moral leadership that President Bush was granted and exercised after Sept. 11 has been "frittered away," a senior European official said. Renewed American unilateralism is giving weight to the old French idea of the European Union as a counterbalance to Washington.

Even more striking, some Europeans are talking about finally putting their money where their mouths have been for so long on defense spending, understanding that the superpower in Washington will only take them seriously when they can project hard power to back up their foreign policies.

A more competitive relationship with Washington, some argue, would be healthier, because it would be more realistic, and it would also help respond to increasingly anti-American views among their publics.

"Solidarity has to be a two-way highway," said another senior German official. "Unless, of course, you want to strengthen those who say we must develop our own mechanisms and we can't rely on the United States in all cases."

ONE of the texts helping to define the European discussion is a long article in Policy Review, an American quarterly published by the conservative Hoover Institution (www.policyreview.org). The article, "Power and Weakness," by Robert Kagan, is circulating by e-mail and causing European elites to see themselves more as Washington sees them — as powers who use multilateralism as a kind of weapon to restrain the superpower.

The Atlantic is fundamentally divided over attitudes to power, Mr. Kagan asserts. The Europeans, to escape their bloody history, are sharing sovereignty in the European Union, "moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation."

The United States, as a traditional nation-state bestriding the world and seeing threats all around, is "exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/21/weekinreview/21ERLA.html