An interesting article in New York times today, related to what we've been talking about.
Many in Europe See U.S. Vote as a Lose-Lose Affair
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
Published: October 29, 2004
ERLIN, Oct. 28 - No matter who wins the presidential election next week, the consequences for American-European relations will be bad, according to a deeply pessimistic view taking hold here.
If President Bush wins, the reasoning goes, pro-Kerry Europe will be astonished at what it will see as the bad judgment of the American electorate. Europeans will be confirmed in their sense that they are from Earth and Americans from some other planet.
But if Senator John Kerry wins, the result may well be an almost immediate trans-Atlantic crisis. Mr. Kerry, having presented himself in the campaign as the man who can restore a functioning alliance, will ask Germany and France to come to the aid of the United States in Iraq. Germany and France will refuse, and Americans will feel angry and betrayed.
"If they were to say no to Kerry, the risk of a backlash against Europe in America would be large," said William Drozdiak, the director of the German Marshall Fund's Transatlantic Center. "Americans would say, 'We can't depend on Europe, even though we protected Europe for 50 years.' It will cause lasting damage to the relationship, a great sense of disillusionment."
It is a strangely paradoxical reasoning, but the very fact that it may be accurate has led some foreign policy thinkers in Europe to a new sense of urgency about the world's most important alliance.
The animating idea here is that whoever is elected, the future of the world depends on a continuation of healthy relations between America and Europe and a common appreciation of the bedrock values of their alliance. To effect a reconciliation, the thinking goes, European leaders have to show a willingness to take some political risk, while the United States has to stop seeing the development of Europe as a threat to its interests.
"We should want every country in Europe to have a relationship with the United States as close as ours," the British historian and essayist Timothy Garton Ash writes in his sparkling new book, "Free World."
Britain and France in particular, he writes, need to overcome their narcissism of small differences, nurtured by centuries of rivalry and competition, and join hands in a "consistently Euro-Atlanticist" partnership with the United States that can keep the collective eye on the big picture. The big picture is knowing that only by working together can Europe and the United States achieve the common objective of enhancing democratic values in the parts of the world where they do not yet exist.
It is a good thought, and good advice, but how to overcome the immediate barrier, the difference over Iraq, which is by no stretch of the imagination a small one? There are some good ideas in that area too - some draft compromise formulas, one requirement of which is that neither the American nor the European side expect the other to make all of the important gestures.
In a formula devised by Michael Naumann, the former German culture minister who is now the editor of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit, Europe will come to the aid of the United States in Iraq if the United States can fulfill four conditions:
¶That in the aftermath of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, it reaffirms its commitment to the Geneva Convention's rules on the treatment of prisoners.
¶That it recommits itself to nuclear nonproliferation at home, reducing its own weapons stockpiles and not just preventing countries like North Korea and Iran from obtaining them.
¶That it enters into serious ecological discussions, including the Kyoto treaty on global warming, which was rejected by the Bush administration.
¶That there be what Mr. Naumann calls "a return to a less arrogant tone of conversation," meaning that leaders on both sides of the Atlantic need to desist from the demagogic posturing of past months.
This last point presumably means there should be no warnings about "countries like France" from the president of the United States, and no talk of a "multipolar world" - code meaning that American power is a danger and needs to be contained - from the president of France.
In return, France and Germany have to find a way to help the country that saved Europe in two hot wars and one cold one in the last century and that now finds itself militarily and diplomatically isolated in a violent conflict in Iraq.
One way, proposed by Mr. Naumann, would be to get serious about the long-proposed but still mostly unbuilt European military rapid reaction force and to deploy some of its detachments to places like Falluja and Sadr City.
Given the intransigent and politically popular refusals by Germany and France to commit troops to Iraq, it might seem highly unlikely that either country could fulfill that part of the prospective bargain. And yet, in Germany at least, there have been some small signs that exactly such a gesture is being contemplated.
The hint was dropped a few weeks ago by Defense Minister Peter Struck, when he said, essentially, that there is never a never in politics and that under the right circumstances Germany might, after all, send troops to Iraq.
Mr. Struck's comment was immediately disavowed by spokesmen for Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who affirmed that there was no change in Germany's policy.
Still, sending units of a European rapid reaction force to Iraq would have several benefits. It would give Germany a European cover to change its position, and if Germany changed its position, the pressure on France to do the same would be intense.
It would have the added benefit of getting European leaders to take seriously their own pledge to build an independent European force. And it would demonstrate to Americans that such a force would not be part of some effort to weaken NATO and counterbalance the United States.
Most important, it might help ensure a stable, nonterrorist, possibly even somewhat more democratic Middle East, a place where Europe and America have an urgent immediate interest: to avoid chaos and the sort of political extremism that arises from it.
Sorry Serge. 
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