Interesting article by Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian (via American Future).
Reasons to be cheerful:
Her conciliatory speech in Paris earlier this week coincided with the handshake of peace between Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas. That was a gift only in small measure of Washington’s own making. The president whom Dr Rice serves so faithfully, George Bush, has long been inspired by the example of Ronald Reagan. Like Reagan, he wants his first term, in which he was demonised as a warmonger by many Europeans, to be followed by a second term in which he writes himself into the history books as both peacemaker and freedom spreader. (Into some history books, depending whose you read.) But Reagan could do this because the US’s main geopolitical challenger produced a leader called Mikhail Gorbachev. Until recently, it was hard to see where Bush’s Gorbachev moment would come from. Now there is a chance that Bush’s Gorbachev will be called Mahmoud Abbas.
On the other hand:
Gorbachev was the undisputed leader of a post-totalitarian state. Mahmoud Abbas is the contested leader of a non-existent state. Representatives of two militant Palestinian groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, said yesterday that they are not bound by his ceasefire. Reagan was Gorbachev’s chief interlocutor; the deals were made directly between the two of them. For all the US influence in the region, Abbas’s chief interlocutor is Sharon, and the deal has to be done between them. Europeans and Americans are pulling in the same direction here, but if the Israeli-Palestinian negotiation stalls, transatlantic differences could again become acute.
Dr Rice has been reassuring Europeans that Iran is not another Iraq. While the US president will never take the threat of force off the table, the military option is low on his list. Yet the administration wants Iran to stop working towards a nuclear weapons capacity, stop supporting terrorists, reform itself, and respect human rights. This adds up to regime change. In dealing with the already nuclear-armed Soviet Union, you could combine military containment and detente-style political engagement for peaceful change. But no one has yet managed to explain how you do both prevention and detente at the same time. Meanwhile, there’s a big transatlantic row brewing over the EU proposing to lift its embargo on arms exports to China.
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