Obama Hinted That He Faced A Much Different Europe than Roosevelt or Kennedy
Whatever the outcome, President Obama's reception by the people and government leaders was a study in contrasts between the extremely popular Obama and the despised Bush.
Some will compare Obama's trip to Europe with Kennedy's trip in the early 1960's. But that was very different Europe and thus the comparison tenuous.
I think H.D..S. Greenway's column in the Boston Globe has an interesting take.
"But what a different world it was in Kennedy's time. The Soviet menace drove Western Europe and America together, and their NATO alliance was the barricade which kept that menace at bay. Today there is no over-arching reason for Europe to accept American leadership, and NATO' s mission is no longer clear.
"In JFK's day, the trans-Atlantic alliance trumped all others. India was a socialist country more friendly to Russia than the United States, and China lay impoverished under one of the greatest failures of economic and social planning the world has ever devised. Africa was just emerging from colonialism, and countries like Brazil were not then considered players.
"Obama caught some of this shift when he remarked how much simpler it had been when Roosevelt and Churchill could sit down and decide the fate of the free world. In the years since the "big two" became the G7, only to be replaced today in importance by the G20.
"As Germany's Angela Merkel once pointed out, Europe represents a far smaller
percentage of the world's population than it used to. And economically the power centers are shifting ever eastward toward Asia. Who could have foreseen in the Kennedy years that America would end up a debtor nation to China?
"Today, in the post-Bush world, there is a growing hesitancy to accept American leadership - leadership that was unconditional in JFK's time, at least for the non-Communist world. Obama may be personally popular, but there is no hiding the fact that the United States has badly mismanaged its stewardship of the world economy....
"Obama is fighting to save capitalism, as Roosevelt did during the Great Depression, but in much of the world American-style capitalism is discredited, and many would rather see something else emerge. Continental Europeans, whom Americans once scorned for their nanny-state economies, now feel justified in resisting the American model.
"The world feels itself in transition. There is nothing to replace America yet, but the role it has played since World War II is weakening and alignments are shifting, toward what no one is sure.
"And there is another worry, too. As Kennedy edged the United States further into what would become the mother of all quagmires, Vietnam, there is great unease that Obama may be committing his country's resources into what could become something similar in Afghanistan, and Europe doesn't really want to be there."
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