EU Crisis Solution Creates Rift between Europe and US

The future of the United States has rarely been so closely linked to the situation in Europe, and rarely have both sides found themselves in such divergent positions. The U.S. administration’s dissatisfaction with the European Union’s responses to the crisis adds to uneasiness in the world economic panorama and risks widening the rift between Washington and a multinational institution that it has never wholeheartedly supported.

Over recent months, Barack Obama has been steadily raising the tone of his complaints at what Washington sees as the weak and indecisive way in which the key European leaders were responding to the crisis, leveling his most direct criticism to coincide with last Friday’s European summit. Without encroaching on the long-term solutions the EU claims to have found to strengthen its currency, Obama recalled the fact that “there’s a short-term crisis that has to be resolved to make sure that markets have confidence that Europe stands behind the euro.”

The U.S. president believes the threat of a new economic depression is much more serious than that of a possible increase in inflation and, though he supports the need to address the sovereign debt problem in the long term, he would have liked to see bolder action in defense of the euro. Obama’s preference is for policies that reconcile budgetary rigor with the urgent need to go back to growing the economy; he sent his Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, to Europe to convey that message during the days immediately prior to the summit.

He was ignored, however, and the summit culminated in an overwhelming victory for the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. This was to some extent a defeat for Obama, not just in the sense of the triumph of one ideology over another, but more importantly because the result of the summit distances the United States from Europe and complicates Obama´s political position.

Obama is staking his re-election on the progress of the economy. Unemployment in the United States has begun to fall this month, but the road to recovery remains slow and uncertain. Obama will most likely face the ballot box with higher unemployment figures than any other re-elected president. He needs a big push and he needs it right now.

An economic growth surge in Europe would therefore be extremely useful. If, on the other hand, that doesn’t happen and instead some European countries relapse into recession, once again U.S. economic growth will slow and Obama’s chances of defeat will be considerably increased. Anybody in Europe who’s tempted to think that that’s Obama’s problem and not Europe’s would do well to remember that the candidate currently best placed to succeed him is Newt Gingrich.

This latest summit is the beginning of a conflict between German and American visions of Europe. It could even be seen as a wider conflict between the Franco-German vision and the Anglo-American one, which is an old dispute made manifest in various ways throughout history, most recently by the UK leaving the summit negotiations and opting out of the final treaty.

For the U.S., it creates a conflict of loyalty among its highest-level associates. Though all the key members of the EU are close allies of the U.S., none enjoys the“special” category granted to the old ruler by its former colony. On his last visit to Europe, Obama spent half his time in London and didn’t once refer to the EU by its name. It was never easy to give the EU its due over here [in the U.S.], but now, without the United Kingdom, it could get even trickier.