Beacon Street Journal

As I noted in a previous column, before Obama set foot on the Continent, it was clear that Europe wasn’t buying his agenda, most prominently, his call for a European commitment for combat troops in Afghanistan. Yet fully cognizant of this rebuff, why then did he continued to apologize and sermonize about American “arrogance.” as a major factor contributing to strained trans-Atlantic relations? As Toby Harnden of the London Telegraph observed: “His speech in Strasbourg went further than any United States president in history in criticizing his own country’s action while standing on foreign soil.”

In many respects, Obama’s European visit was strangely reminiscent of the presidential campaign, replete with many of his  trademark ploys and grand themes, most notably, his ahistorical, vacuous rhetoric, as well as his penchant for assessing blame or ignoring painful facts by invoking the doctrine of moral equivalence. Yet Obama’s application of the doctrine of moral equivalence to the status of trans-Atlantic relations is wholly at odds with the historical record.

Twice during the last century, the United States plucked Europe from the abyss in two World Wars. Subsequent to WWII, the Marshall Plan helped to renew a ravaged Continent and thereafter, Europe availed itself of the American strategic and tactical nuclear umbrella to insure its security in the face of the rapacious foreign policy of the Soviet Union. Recently, Europe couldn’t even tend to ethnic cleansing in its own backyard in Bosnia without the predominant lead of the United States. And, American troops remain stationed in Germany to this day.

Against this backdrop, why then does Obama find it so hard to acknowledge, accept and incorporate into his grandiloquent sermonizing the disproportionate contribution of the United States to European security? For Obama, it’s as if the history of our relations with the Continent began with the election of the “cowboy unilateralist” George Bush and now have ended with his ascension to the presidency. Nothing that has transpired before or since has any significance.

Why raise the moral equivalency argument when assessing blame on the singular issue of burden-sharing relative to the costs of providing for European security? It is because the facts don’t comport with Obama’s world-view, and more particularly, with his self-anointed role as a transcendent figure on the world stage.

When the Jeremiah Wright controversy threatened to derail his candidacy by demonstrating the remarkable inconsistency between the myth of Obama as a post-racial, post partisan political figure and the sordid reality of his twenty-five year voluntary participation in a church that preached a rabid anti-Americanism and virulent racism, Obama simply ignored the facts by assessing equal blame to his actions and the perfunctory comments of his white grandmother. This tactic served him well during the campaign, as the post-Reverend Wright view of Obama as a Unifier, in the eyes of the press, remain unchanged.

As a “citizen of the world”, the maintenance of Obama’s iconic image as an historical figure is thoroughly contingent upon the adulation of Europeans which he eagerly solicits and craves. For their part, Europeans are happy to lavish praise on the new American President while reveling in their childish anti-Americanism, as long as he continues his serial apologizing and doesn’t rebuke them for their policies of disarmament.

The entire premise of Obama’s campaign was that he was going to be a radically different leader than his presidential predecessors. Adjudged by this standard, how successful were Obama’s European overtures? Despite the praise by Obama’s sycophants in the media, in terms of getting Europe to make more of a military contribution to Western security, Obama was no more successful than George Bush.

The only difference between the two is that Obama had no compunction about berating his own country overseas. For Obama, it is more important to be liked rather than to be respected.

Yet Europe continues with its desire to maintain a parasitic relationship with the United States when it come to providing for its own security needs. Obama’s unduly blaming the U.S. for contributing to the strain in the current trans-Atlantic relationship over this important issue doesn’t change this ineluctable fact.