Analysis: What Obama should tell Europe

As President Barack Obama heads to his first international summits in Europe, his frustration with his counterparts only two months into his presidency is already quite vivid.

In a reference to the European rejection of a greater economic stimulus to match U.S. efforts, the president at his March 24 press conference declared, "We don't want a situation in which some countries are making extraordinary efforts and other countries aren't, with the hope that somehow the countries that are making those important steps lift everybody up."

The language echoed that used by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates in Munich in February, when he warned that the conflict in Afghanistan signaled NATO is becoming a "two-tiered alliance of those who are willing to fight and those who are not."

Tensions haven't magically disappeared
The messages from the new administration may strike a dissonant chord to some. Yet those who expected that the transatlantic sniping that occurred during the George W. Bush presidency would magically disappear with the election of Obama have not been paying attention to the underlying dynamics in U.S.-European relations over the past twenty years.

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has turned more of its attention to other parts of the world, particularly Asia and the broader Middle East; meanwhile Europe has been intensely focused inward on extraordinarily challenging projects such as creating a common currency and extending the European Union across Central and Eastern Europe.

Now, with an ongoing financial crisis tearing at the very fabric of what Europeans have created over the years and a difficult counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan leading to a more significant U.S. military involvement, the different attitudes, approaches, and interests across the Atlantic are again apparent. Despite the differences, the most important message President Obama can deliver is that the United States does welcome a stronger Europe.

Looking for NATO help in Afghanistan
When NATO leaders gather in Strasbourg, France and Kehl, Germany to mark NATO's 60th anniversary, they will, as they do at any summit, celebrate what they have achieved. The meeting venues – along the Franco-German border – will remind everyone that the alliance has helped Europe overcome its violent history. 

NATO members are expected to welcome Albania and Croatia into their ranks, the latest chapter in an enlargement process that while antagonizing the Russians has helped stabilize broad swaths of formerly-communist Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. France will formally rejoin NATO's integrated military command after a four-decade absence, helping to pave the way for stronger cooperation between NATO and the European Union.

While European allies will welcome a broad-based U.S. approach to Afghanistan that emphasizes not just military tools but economic and diplomatic efforts, the lack of burden sharing, evident in Secretary Gates' "two-tiered" remark, will hover in the background.

President Obama has begun to reframe U.S. objectives for Afghanistan, focusing attention not on the ability of outsiders to create democracy but on eliminating al-Qaeda as a threat to U.S. and allied interests. His emphasis has inevitably led to the understanding that the problems of Afghanistan and Pakistan are inextricably linked.

But European publics have been slow to accept the need to do more in the region, in large part because they have never overcome their sense that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were both part of a wrongheaded foreign policy by the George W. Bush administration. Coming on the heels of a G-20 meeting, whose mood will presumably be quite sober, the NATO summit must signal that allies can define a common purpose for the transatlantic partnership as they go forward to develop a new strategic concept.

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