• In “Obama and Europe: Missed Signals, Renewed Commitments,” (September/October issue, Foreign Affairs), Anne Applebaum writes that Germans and other Europeans were enraptured by presidential candidate Barack Obama who “said just what the Germans, and so many other Europeans, wanted to hear. He reaffirmed the United States’ commitment to Europe, [and] …praised the virtues of ‘allies who will listen to each other, learn from each other and, most of all, trust each other.’ ” She continues: “Soon after he was elected president, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize – simply, it seems, for the fact that he was not George W. Bush. With those kinds of absurd expectations surrounding his presidency, it was clearly impossible for Obama to avoid disappointing the Europeans. What is only surprising, in retrospect, is the speed with which he did so – and with which the Europeans disappointed him.”
The columnist and author goes on to list three incidents that “illustrate the nature of problem”: the March 2009 “reset” with Russia, whereby “U.S.-Russian relations, inexplicably damaged by the Bush administration, could now begin afresh”; the NATO summit of April 2009, at which “nothing important was said or decided at the event” and an “American request for more troops in Afghanistan met with almost no response”; and the Obama administration’s decision, in September 2009, “to cancel the eastern European missile defense program, which had been proposed by Bush and which would have required the placement of hardware in the Czech Republic and Poland.”
Ms. Applebaum also points out: “At least until nearly the second half of Obama’s second term, neither the president nor anyone on his foreign policy team took European security seriously. The continent was considered safe and dull, a place for photo opportunities rather than real debate. NATO, which even then was desperately in need of radical institutional change, was thought too uninteresting to bother reforming. …The security fears of central Europe and the Baltic states were an afterthought… Ukraine scarcely figured in U.S. thinking at that time.”
Ms. Applebaum writes that “Russia’s subsequent seizure of Crimea, followed by its invasion of eastern Ukraine, stunned leaders on both sides of the Atlantic, redrew a European border by force, and led the Obama administration to reassess its policy toward Russia. …For the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the trans-Atlantic alliance was forced to seriously consider the physical security of some of its members, including the possibility of a hybrid war – for example, a phony Russian-minority uprising in one of the Baltic states or a struggle over the rail corridor that runs through Lithuania between Kaliningrad and the rest of Russia.”
The Obama administration, she writes, “continued to support economic sanctions targeting Russian oligarchs and banks with ties to Putin. At the same time, Obama and his administration continue to refer to the Ukraine crisis as a regional problem, which seems
to stress the United States’ distance from Europe.”
To read the full text see: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/europe/obama-and-europe.