Larsson läser
Janerik Larsson
Janerik Larsson
Clemens Wergin är utrikesredaktör på tyska Die Welt och i en krönika som både finns på hans blogg och i New York Times gör han en träffsäker och inte särskilt orättvis betraktelse om både tysk, europeisk och numera även amerikansk utrikespolitik:
I have long been a critic of the German foreign policy debate — of its freeloading on the American security umbrella, coupled with moral grandstanding whenever the Americans did things their way; of too much analysis of past events and not enough thinking about how to get things right in the future; of its tendency to take words as a substitute for deeds. That’s why I have usually given the Americans the benefit of the doubt: At least they took on problems nobody else was willing to tackle.
But then, at the height of the Syria conflict and just after yet another of Barack Obama’s speeches, I suddenly understood the problem with this American president and his foreign policy. He sounded just like a German politician: all moral outrage, but little else to help end one of the most devastating civil wars of our age. President Obama, I thought with a sigh, has become European.
Indeed, the less this president wants to get involved in something abroad, the more he dials up his rhetoric. That the American president finds things “unacceptable,” one of his administration’s favorite words, doesn’t carry any real meaning anymore; it certainly doesn’t mean that America will try to change what it deems “unacceptable.”
Han slutar med dessa barska ord till våra amerikanska vänner:
When he was first elected in 2008, Barack Obama was hailed on the old Continent as a president with almost European sensitivities and worldviews. But the compliment was unintentionally double-edged. For more than two decades now, Europeans have assumed that the world would remain comparatively stable and wouldn’t need much hard power to be maintained (at least European hard power, that is). So too, it seems, does Mr. Obama.
Barack Obama wanted America to learn from Europe’s soft-power approach. But while Europeans are loath to admit it, they know that European soft power often doesn’t work either — and that it is a luxury that they could afford only because America’s hard power always loomed in the background. And when they dropped the ball, America would pick it up. And therein lies the lesson to our American friends who seemingly want to become less involved and more European: There is no second America to back you up when you drop the ball.