When American President Barack Obama recently admitted in France - of all places - that America had in the past acted with arrogance and that America needed to listen more, American right-wing pundits were furious.

Sean Hannity was fuming on Fox at the gall of Obama to go to Europe to say exactly what Europeans have been shouting vociferously since the Iraq war. John Bolton, former American ambassador to the United Nations who epitomised that arrogance in the Bush administration, contemptuously dismissed Obama as someone not knowing much about Atlantic history.

Anti-Americanism

Never mind that Obama had in that same Strasbourg speech decried "an Anti-Americanism that is at once casual but can also be insidious". Indeed, Obama had gone on to say that, "I think it is important for Europe to understand that even though I am president and George Bush is not president, Al Qaeda is still a threat."

There have been tensions in the Atlantic relationship before George W. Bush, to be sure, and serious ones too. There was the dispute over German disarmament in the 1950-55 period; the Suez Crisis of 1956; the Gaullist challenge of the 1960s and the Alliance rifts over the war in Bosnia in the 1990s (Not to mention the wars America fought with Europe.) But the tensions over Iraq and the Bush Doctrine have represented a fundamental strain in Atlantic relations.

The election of Barack Obama to the presidency has by itself bridged the trust deficit between The United States and Europe and has paved the way for repairing a broken alliance.

It is important that we understand how Europeans and Americans see each other and, more importantly, what are the objective realities, interests and values which define their relationship.

One of the most important and provocative scholars writing on Euro-American relations today is Robert Kagan, in my view the most intellectually formidable of the neo-conservative voices in America. His 2003 book Of Paradise and Power: America vs. Europe in the New World Order is one of the most influential to have ever been written on Euro-American relations and foreign policy in the last decade.

But the scholarly article which set off a torrent of debate in the academic world was his June 2002 piece in Policy Review titled Power and Weakness. In this highly-influential work, he set out his main thesis which is a fascinating one. "It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world or even that they occupy the same world," he begins controversially, dispensing with the view that Europe and America share the same interest and values.

"On the all-important question of power - the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power - American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation."

Kagan's thesis is that Europe's moralising over and aversion to the use of raw power stems from its military weakness. Its values are informed by "objective conditions", as the Marxists would put it. Europe favours negotiation, consensus, cooperation, etc. because it cannot afford to impose its will on others as America can, the sole superpower since the end of the Cold War.

A doctrine of pre-emption

In this April 4, 2009 file photo (from left) British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, United States President Barack Obama, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, walk to a NATO summit group photo in Strasbourg, France. Obama's eight-day trip to Europe and the Middle East helped burnish his image abroad. - File

George Bush and the neo-conservatives were particularly offensive to the Europeans because they believed in the exercise of raw power; they had a doctrine of pre-emption and were noted for thumbing their noses on international agreements like the Kyoto Protocol, the International Court, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Americans could afford to spurn the United Nations and the Atlantic Alliance on the Iraq issue and any other matter it so chose because it had amassed the greatest economic, military, naval and nuclear strength in all of history.

"On major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus. They agree on little and understand one another less and less ... European intellectuals are nearly unanimous in the conviction that Americans and Europeans no longer share a common strategic culture. The United States, they argue, resorts to force more quickly and compared to Europe is less patient with diplomacy. Americans generally see the world divided between good and evil, between friends and enemies, while Europeans see a more complex picture," says Kagan in his essay.

He continues: "When confronting real or potential adversaries, Americans generally favour policies of coercion rather than persuasion, emphasising punitive actions over inducements, the stick over the carrot."

Europe needed America during the Cold War. America provided the nuclear and military blanket for Europe. America made it possible for Europe to concentrate on building its economy and civil society, while it provided the protective shield. This is why some Americans are angry at the "ungrateful" and suddenly "self-righteous" Europeans who wash their hands of any power stains; conveniently forgetting that were it not for the war-mongering Americans they would have been overrun by the Soviets and the Nazis before them.

Helped to keep Europe safe

It was America which helped to keep Europe safe from fellow Europeans themselves, more particularly from the Germans. The Americans helped to keep the French and the Germans from each other's throat and now they have the nerve to snub America and not offer support her at crucial times such as the war in Iraq, these WASPS complain.

Some say that it was really the Cold War which was the glue which melded Europe and America, and now with the Soviet threat a thing of the past, the natural rivalries continue. But even during the Cold War that fiercely independent French President Charles de Gaulle could make the stunning remark that "the United States was the greatest danger in the world today to peace".

French opposition to US involvement in Vietnam was overwhelming. In 1965, 32 per cent of French respondents to a poll said Mao Tse-tung was the greatest threat to world peace, while US President Lyndon Johnson came a close second with 30 per cent.

"A Europe at peace and a deeper and wider European Union (EU) have diminished European dependence on US power," says well-known foreign policy expert Charles Kupchan in his essay in the 2008 book The End of the West? Crisis and Change in the Atlantic Order, one of the best foreign policy compendium of the year.

"Europeans have accordingly grown more ready to assert their autonomy and chart their own course, upon occasion breaking with the United States on key policy issues." Having won their peace, Europeans feel they can dispense with America. Ungrateful brutes, the Sean Hannities and John Boltons would say.

More than just ingratitude

Kagan says it's more than just ingratitude or historical amnesia. It is weakness masked as moral gallantry. Says Kagan in that seminal 2002, Policy Review essay: "Today's transatlantic problem, in short, is not George Bush's problem. It is a power problem. American military strength has produced a propensity to use that strength. Europe's military weakness has produced a perfectly understandable aversion to the exercise of military power. Indeed, it has produced a powerful European interest in inhabiting a world where strength doesn't matter; where international law and institutions predominate; where unilateral action by powerful nations is forbidden; where all nations regardless of their strength have equal rights and are equally protected by commonly agreed-upon international rules of behaviour. This natural and historic disagreement between the stronger and the weaker manifests itself in today's transatlantic dispute over the question of unilateralism."

Barack Obama shares the vision of Europe, though the US is just as strong militarily. Make no mistake, Obama is no pacifist and is not about to cut the US military budget (he is just shifting military focus from Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan). But fundamentally Obama believes in multilateralism, in dialogue, in diplomacy, in liberal internationalism. He is Wilsonian in his foreign-policy perspectives. Indeed, Woodrow Wilson and other pre-World War 2 American statesmen were more like the Europeans today, stressing international alliances, international cooperation and multilateralism because then Britain was powerful and America was just rising.

This is why Obama is Europe's president. In Strasbourg, Obama said to wild cheers: "In America there's a failure to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world." To some Americans, to talk about a militarily weak Europe as having a leading role is simply illusory. But in Obama's foreign policy framework, unlike George Bush's, power grows from values, not military might. It's what Kagan calls the clash between the Hobbesian and the Kantian perspectives, philosophically.

In his tome, The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream, well-known intellectual Jeremy Rifkin says, "The American Dream is wedded to a love of country and patriotism. The European Dream is more cosmopolitan and less territorial. Americans are more willing to employ military force in the world to protect what we perceive to be our vital self-interests. Europeans are more reluctant to use military force. Instead they favour diplomacy, economic assistance and aid to avert conflict and prefer peace-keeping operations to maintain peace."

American Dream

Continues Rifkin: "The American Dream is deeply personal and little concerned with the rest of humanity. The European Dream is more expansive and systemic in nature and therefore more bound to the welfare of the planet."

American now has a more European, president, to the consternation of the political Right, but to the relief of the world, and to Europe.

Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist who may be reached at ianboyne1@yahoo.com or columns@gleanerjm.com.