ECFR has just published a brief multi-authored paper looking at what President Obama’s re-election means for Europe (I was one of the contributors). The paper highlights that there are still many areas – from the Middle East to climate change – on which the US and Europeans differ. But is a new transatlantic bargain possible?
How should Europe respond to Obama’s re-election? Two basic strategic choices are on offer. The first – and the most tempting – is to imagine that Europe and the US can work together on a common project for the future of the international system at a period of deep change in global politics. According to this vision, Obama and the EU can unite to reinvent the post-1945 liberal order for a multipolar world, fulfilling an agenda that many in the US and EU foresaw in 2008. The president may have strayed from this agenda, the argument goes, but now he is no longer constrained by the need to win a second term and can make up for lost time.
The strategic alternative is to assume that Obama’s highly pragmatic approach to international affairs will not fundamentally change in his second term. On this reading of the president, his tepid commitment to global governance and willingness to use tactics like drone strikes have not been aberrations. Instead, they represent his considered view of the best strategy available to the US at this time. If European leaders want to fit in with this realistic American worldview, they should focus on developing their own power and their outreach, leverage and alliance-building capacities with emerging democratic powers, and in particular managing crises in their own backyard, rather than trying to woo Washington. In fact, the US would welcome a tougher Europe of this kind.
Read the full analysis here.
