US and them
The machismo and moral certainty that have taken over Washington are seriously damaging for Europe, writes Nick Clegg MEP

America has changed. Last week, I went to see for myself. Three days of meetings, argument and idle chit chat with congressmen, policy wonks, journalists and diplomats within the Washington DC beltway is not an especially scientific way to gauge the American mood. But it was enough to tell me that something is afoot.

Some of the changes are predictable enough. America considers itself to be at war, so it was little surprise to witness the pervasive grip of the Pentagon on foreign policy making. US foreign policy is now refracted through a military lens. It was easy to anticipate, too, that a president who scraped home in the last elections after some shilly-shallying in Florida should now subjugate all to his need to secure a more resounding mandate from the American electorate. Everything from punitive tariffs on European steel imports to hardline rhetoric against the old foe Fidel Castro is being deployed to maximum electoral effect, whether among the workers of America's rust belt or the Cuban community in Miami.

Other changes, by contrast, are more subtle. The Bush administration's attitude towards Europe, for instance, among radical "neo-conservatives" and mainstream Republicans alike, has undergone a transformation. The full-blooded contempt for Jacques Chirac and "old Europe" has caught the headlines. It is impossible to exaggerate the unforgiving machismo of much of the administration's attitude to those parts of Europe deemed to have been disloyal during the Iraq conflict. But such juvenile vitriol obscures a more discreet, but important, change: not only is Europe condemned as weak and ineffective, there is now an emerging view that it might be in America's interests to keep Europe weak and effective.
[...]

A sidekick to a Republican senator told me that religious conviction and moral certitude were the guiding principles for everything his boss did and said. He went on to claim that he saw no reason why international law or international institutions should constrain what the US administration said or did as long as it was "right". I pointed out that such an attitude was common to all theocrats down the ages, claiming a divine or moral justification to run roughshod over human conventions. It is odd that such a severe, Old Testament view of moral retribution seems to be taking hold in the capital of the one great liberal democracy which was established precisely to overturn the arbitrary divine rights of Kings and Queens.
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