‘New Europe’ in a bind as transatlantic glue unsticks

"Win some, lose some," is the breezy, private response of a top Lithuanian politician to the looming disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. "We were there for America. America will be there for us." Such robust Atlanticism is almost extinct in western Europe. And for all the east Europeans’ bravado, there is a sinking feeling that they are going to suffer horrible collateral damage from American failure in the ill-named ‘war on terror’.

For a start, the crude division of Europe into ‘old’ (anti-American) and ‘new’ (Atlanticist) hardly helped the still shaky cause of reuniting the continent. The disproportionate presence of largely token ex-communist forces in the ‘coalition of the willing’ helped entrench the idea in the cynical chancelleries of old Europe that the new democracies were gullible American patsies.

Then the implication of Romania, Poland and perhaps some other countries in the rendition scandal blemished what should have been the new democracies’ strongest card: their commitment to human rights. How could people who themselves had suffered ill-treatment in communist prisons be collaborating in the torture of political prisoners? The allegation may be outrageously unfair. But in the minds of many, it has stuck.

The damage goes on. America’s vital role in guaranteeing Europe’s security has been weakened. In western Europe, revulsion at the bloody and incompetent occupation of Iraq, coupled with a mixture of astonishing amnesia and lazy prejudice has wiped away a shared history that stretches from the Normandy beaches to the end of the Berlin Wall.

Even in the new democracies, America’s standing has fallen. The cost and hassle of getting visas grates disproportionately. Why are Polish and Estonian boys risking their lives as they fight side-by-side with Americans in Iraq, only to be treated as potential terrorists and illegal immigrants if they want to visit? The administration has moved shamefully slowly on this and on military assistance to its eager allies. So Atlanticism is a hard sell in eastern Europe too.

Yet any weakening of the Atlantic bond should be seen as dreadful news for the ex-captive nations. It was America that got them into NATO and it is America’s commitment to the alliance that keeps it balanced against the interests of powerful and potentially less friendly countries such as Germany. If America and Europe diverge, it will not be western Europe that suffers, at least initially, but the weaker, poorer countries of the east. Any suggestion that they can rely on the European Union to stick up for them against Russian bullying is, on current form, laughable.

It is hard to see the new radar station and rocket interceptors planned for the Czech Republic and (probably) Poland doing much to change this. The lesson of the mid-1980s in Europe is that you do not strengthen an alliance by forcing your allies to accept weapons that their populations do not want. Helmut Schmidt, then the German chancellor, thought that having Cruise and Pershing missiles in western Europe would make America’s nuclear guarantee more credible. Instead, it cast America as the warmonger in the minds of the muddle-headed and stoked peacenikery throughout Europe.

Barring an unlikely success in Afghanistan or Iraq, the strains on the Atlantic alliance will grow not weaken in the years ahead. The rivets have long been popping; now great girders, such as Italy, are twisting and buckling: it was public anti-Americanism that almost brought down Romano Prodi’s government.

Old Kremlin hands who remember how hard they once tried to destroy NATO must find it hard to believe how comprehensively the job is now being done for them by the alliance’s own leaders.

• The writer is central and eastern Europe correspondent of The Economist.

"Win some, lose some," is the breezy, private response of a top Lithuanian politician to the looming disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. "We were there for America. America will be there for us." Such robust Atlanticism is almost extinct in western Europe. And for all the east Europeans’ bravado, there is a sinking feeling that they are going to suffer horrible collateral damage from American failure in the ill-named ‘war on terror’.