Many Europeans are ambivalent about America: prone to sounding off about Yankee imperialism but nevertheless infatuated with American culture. Many of them were furious with the Bush administration precisely because of its refusal to live up to the American ideals that had served the country so well during the second world war. Given a little wooing, they might be willing to fall back in love with America.

Was Europe ever truly "in love with America"? Is "just a little wooing" enough? I doubt it.

Related: Le Figaro says that Europe has to get prepared for rising US isolationism and fill the void (See Top Press Commentary in the Atlantic Community.) Europe won't do that either, I believe.

You think that American soldiers defeated the evil Nazis and brought democracy to Europe? Think again, says British historian Norman Davies: Militarily, the Allies contributed less than the Soviets to the defeat of Germany. About 80 percent of German forces were lost on the Eastern Front.

The Soviets won the war in Europe in terms of replacing political systems with their own. More at Dialog International.

The Soviets also had huge casualties, which still has an influence on Russian policies: David A. Bell, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in the Los Angeles Times (and discussed on the Atlantic Review post Responding to "Al-Qaeda's Revival"):  

Imagine that on 9/11, six hours after the assault on the twin towers and the Pentagon, terrorists had carried out a second wave of attacks on the United States, taking an additional 3,000 lives. Imagine that six hours after that, there had been yet another wave. Now imagine that the attacks had continued, every six hours, for another four years, until nearly 20 million Americans were dead. This is roughly what the Soviet Union suffered during World War II, and contemplating these numbers may help put in perspective what the United States has so far experienced during the war against terrorism.

In just three years, the Brussels Forum has established itself as an elite annual conference for the key players in transatlantic relations. The Brussels Forum is what Davos is for the business elite and the Munich Security Conference for the defense politicians.

Steve Clemons was impressed by this year's Brussels Forum from March 14-16. Dan Drezner has posted some good gossip and written something more serious for Newsweek.

Constanze Stelzenmüller of the German Marshall Fund, the main organizer of the Brussels Forum, presented an interesting sounding paper: "America and Europe, seven years after 9/11: Hard power humbled, soft power exposed, and a looser, more pragmatic relationship," available for download as a PDF.

Many European leaders will be saddened to see President Bush leave the White House next year. No, they won't miss his soaring inspirational rhetoric, collegial foreign policy or sophisticated knowledge of the world. What worries many Europeans is that their free pass is about to expire. Not since Richard Nixon's final year in office have foreign leaders been so free to say no to Washington with few if any political repercussions. In fact, for the last few years, agreeing with the White House has held greater political risks than snubbing Bush and his aides.

Yes, most political observers (at least in Berlin) believe that it will be harder for European governments to say no to a new president. I, however, think that German and European public opinion on issues like Afghanistan or Iran is not going to change, when a new president is inaugurated in the United States. European politicians will find plenty of good (and not so good) reasons to say no. Besides, 2009 is an election year in Germany. Don't expect any changes in our Afghanistan policy until after the elections.

Dialog International scans the German press coverage regarding the Iraq war anniversary and translates a Sueddeutsche Zeitung interview with Gunter Pleuger, Germany's ambassador to the United Nations during the run-up to the war.  Pleuger speaks about his impressions of Colin Powell's presentation at the UN Security Council:

It was all very surreal. Most of us in the UN auditorium knew that what Powell was presenting had no basis in reality. But we couldn't imagine that Colin Powell would deliberately present falsehoods.

I beg to differ with Dialog International's the headline "Bush's War Enters its Sixth Year." It is America's war. A majority of Americans were in favor of the war in 2003. The United States is a democracy with various powerful branches of government and with a free press. Thus I would not blame the war on Bush only. Writing in Foreign Policy Magazine (subscribers only) Alasdair Roberts described Iraq as "The War We Deserve."

And Gerd at Anglofritz is fed up with the Iraq Blame Game, specifically US accusations of Germany regarding "Curveball." Related post in the Atlantic Review: Schadenfreude? How the Smearing of Iraq War Critics Has Changed

Endnote: Think Progress writes about a book by Chile's ambassador to the UN: U.S. ‘threatened’ countries that didn’t support Iraq war. (Link fixed)

At my day job at Atlantic Community, we have published quite a few interesting articles on US-Polish issues. Polish perspectives are under-reported in the German and American mass media, but they are important because Poland is one of Europe's bigger countries, is considered very Pro-American and was seen as the primary "New Europe" country, a term that is less frequently used these days, but is still controversial.

Marek Swierczynski, a journalist at the Polish TV channel TVP, reflects on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war:

Poland's decision to join the "coalition of the willing" has left the military stretched beyond capacity, the society in serious mistrust of their leaders and perception of a joint effort for a good cause seriously damaged. It took 25 lives 5 years and 3 governments to rethink and withdraw.

Ryan R. Miller of the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) in Washington, DC. writes about Poland's Iran Option:

Possible Polish-Iranian energy cooperation puts U.S. policy makers between a rock and a hard place, as America finds itself committed both to isolating the Islamic Republic and supporting Polish efforts to outflank Russia's Gazprom.

Wess Mitchell, who is the Director of Research at CEPA, outlines recent developments between the United States and Poland regarding the US missile defense program. He concludes that relations between Poland and Russia are likely to deteriorate and Tusk may have compromised himself by acting so decisively this early in his term: Missile Defense: Poland Has Less Room to Maneuver.

Anna Nadgrodkiewicz sums up contentious issues in Polish-American relations: Polish troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, the necessity of easing visa requirements, and the proposed missile defense shield. See her article Managing Image and Expectations.

Marek Swierczynski  sees NATO at a Crossroad in a second article:

Just before the NATO summit in Bucharest, the differences on what and how the Alliance should do in the future seem all but rising on both sides of the Atlantic. The Warsaw conference on NATO's Transformation made fundamental divides clearly visible. (...) The new NATO members seem to live in a Neverland. Professor Kuzniar assessed that the Alliance is the only force of global reach and capabilities. Wrong. There is no such thing as NATO global capability. There is the US global capability and to be more precise it is one of the US Navy.

French counterterrorism efforts have been praised by several analysts, but I am surprised to see that two scholars of the American Enterprise Institute argue that "France is the world's most sophisticated practitioner of counterterrorism. The U.S. can learn from her experience."

Reuel Marc Gerecht and Gary J. Schmitt write in The American:

Whereas September 11, 2001, was a shock to the American counterterrorist establishment, it wasn't a révolution des mentalités in Paris. Two waves of terrorist attacks, the first in the mid-1980s and the second in the mid-1990s, have made France acutely aware of both state-supported Middle Eastern terrorism and freelancing but organized Islamic extremists. In comparison, the security services in Great Britain and Germany were slow to awaken to the threat from homegrown radical Muslims. Britain's gamble was that its multicultural approach to immigrants was superior to France's forced-assimilation model. But with the discovery of one terrorist plot after another being planned by British Muslims, as well as the deadly transportation bombings that took place in London on July 7, 2005, the British have begun to question the wisdom of their "Londonistan" approach to Muslim immigration.