America and Europe in 1985: A Renewed Partnership?

AMERICA AND EUROPE IN 1985 A RENEWED PARTNERSHIP? Simon Serfaty UNwiTTiNGLY, almost reluctantly, Foreign Affairs' yearly reviews of America's relations with the world have described a new trend in U.S.-European relations under the Reagan administration. In early 1981 Flora Lewis pointedly wrote of European leaders who "were pleased to start 1981 with a new American President and looked forward to steadier Atlantic relations rather than a bumpy, unpredictable course with Jimmy Carter." There remained, however, she quickly added, "alarm bells"—to which Josef Joffe returned one year later. Writing on the "politics of resentment," which in Joffe's view were once again characterizing the Atlantic Alliance, Joffe referred to the "trans-Atlantic disaffections, sturdy perennials since the turn of the decade [that] continued to spread throughout 1982." Most of all, Reagan's opposition to Europe's involvement in financing the Yamal pipeline was said to have been a "blunder of almost historic proportions." Yet Joffe found it "conceivable" that 1982 might later be seen as the year when the two sides of the Atlantic began to accommodate many of their differences. This prognosis was confirmed the following year by another German observer, Christoph Bertram. "The surface was all smiles and harmony," Bertram wrote of the year 1983. "After years of Atlantic distress, the major nations of the West assembled in . . . Williamsburg to manifest their unity and their confiSimon Serfaty is executive director of The Johns Hopkins Foreign Policy Institute and research professor of foreign policy at SAIS. He is the author of a number of books, including Fading Partnership: America and Europe After 30 Years (1979) and American Foreign Policy in a Hostile World: Dangerous Years (1984). 243 244 SAIS REVIEW dence." But instead of simply applauding the "more pragmatic note" that had emerged in the policies of the Reagan administration, Bertram returned to Lewis's alarm bells to emphasize that the new consensus was "deceptive" and "hid more than it revealed."1 The year 1984 has confirmed the best ofthis analysis—the European expectations of 1981, the possible turn for the better in 1982, and the unity and the pragmatism of 1983—and the harmony hoped for at the outset of the Reagan administration has continued to assert itself. Ironically, the catalyst for a revived Atlantic partnership proved to be the very issue that many thought would rupture the alliance. This was, of course, the question of intermediate-range nuclear forces (¡nf) deployment , which ultimately encouraged both sides to show a new sensitivity to the expectations and concerns of the other. In Europe it was understood that failure to abide by the decisions of December 1979, whatever their merits, could trigger a political debate in the United States—the scope and consequences of which would go far beyond Senator Mike Mansfield's relatively moderate proposals of the late 1960s (a fear reinforced by the initiatives of Senator Nunn and others in the spring of 1984). But in the United States, too, the Reagan administration soon perceived that some American moderation and tolerance were required to avoid making the task of the European governments committed to such deployment more difficult than it already was: hence, for example, the Reagan administration's proposals on arms control in November 1981, and its benign neglect of Europe's criticism of U.S. policies in the Third World in 1981-82. Accordingly, the unity of purpose displayed at the 1983 Williamsburg summit was also apparent the following year in London. Is this unity lasting, though, and what does it point to? To a large extent, the Atlantic crisis of the 1970s resulted from an American crisis: the drift of a nation traditionally dominant and selfassured into one "in the midst of a malaise" that constrained its present and restricted its future.2 The circumstances of that crisis are well known, and Europeans have found it hard to comprehend nearly two decades of American history that began with the assassination of a president and ended with its humiliation in Iran. In between, other assassinations or the sheer political termination of leaders who had best captured the respect and imagination of the European publics, bloody riots in the cities and debilitating quarrels in...