Amazing, isn’t it, how the conventional wisdom that holds sway among many sophisticated — i.e. liberal — Washingtonians and New Yorkers is often so completely divorced from reality.
These folks have come to take it as a given that America’s involvement in Iraq has inflicted severe damage to our nation’s image abroad, especially in Europe. But the most recent national election results from France and Germany demonstrate that this “truth” about George W. Bush’s America is about as credible as the recurring rumor that Elvis is actually alive and well flipping hamburgers in happy obscurity somewhere near Seattle.
Exhibit A here is France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, who is described by the editors of the old gray lady on West 43rd Street in Manhattan as “unabashedly pro-American.”
In an election with a record turnout, Sarkozy won more than 53 percent of the vote in his contest with Socialist Segolene Royal, who was anything but pro-American. Sarkozy admires American initiative and hard work, and has made it a first order of business to mend the relationship almost strained beyond repair by a decade of Jacque Chirac’s shallow echoes of Charles De Gaulle’s “Third Way” illusions of the Cold War.
Exhibit B is Germany’s 2005 election of Angela Merkel as Germany’s first female chancellor.
Her elevation to the chancellorship followed an era in which her predecessor, Gerhard Shroeder, had become an increasingly strident critic of the U.S. and sought to weld Germany and France together as Europe’s dominant power. But Merkel won while running on a platform that stressed the importance of maintaining close ties to the U.S. In a 2003 op-ed in The Washington Post, Merkel said: “Germany needs its friendship with France, but the benefits of that friendship can be realized only in close association with our old and new European partners, and within the transatlantic alliance with the United States.”
Neither of these leaders can or should be expected to toe an American line mindlessly, but for the first time in a decade there appears to be a genuine opportunity to pursue a mutually productive and cooperative relationship among the U.S., Britain, France and Germany. Add the markedly pro-American countries developing across Eastern Europe and the immensity of the opportunity can be even more fully appreciated.
Note, please, that this opportunity has come about at the very time when the conventional wisdom here said America was becoming a pariah on the world stage.
