‘This is the hour of Europe, not the hour of the Americans,’ Jacques Poos, foreign minister of Luxembourg, declared in 1991. Yugoslavia, he said, was a problem in Europe’s neighbourhood and Europeans would solve it. In the end, a decade of genocidal ethnic conflict was only ended thanks to substantial US involvement.
The hour of Europe has arrived again with the conflict in Mali. This time, though, it is the Americans telling the Europeans that it is up to them to solve the problem.
The Obama administration has wasted no time in making clear that it thinks France’s aims in Mali are overly ambitious. It is also dragging its feet in terms of offering assistance, complaining about the cost and publicly wondering what the exit strategy is. This is all quite a turnaround from the debate over Iraq a decade ago. But, as with Iraq, it raises profound questions for British foreign policy.
In Brussels, the American position is causing almost as much anger as the European one did in Washington ten years ago. One senior figure complains that ‘it scrambles longstanding trans-Atlantic relationships.’ This is part of Obama’s Pacific pivot, which Freddy Gray chronicled in this magazine a fortnight ago. A British minister involved in the discussions over Mali says, with a mixture of concern and surprise in his voice, ‘Obama just has far less appetite for intervention than any of his predecessors.’
‘The speed of this shift will bite Obama on the ass,’ warns one European official. He points out that European countries are normally the first to sign on to Washington’s UN resolutions and that they are, after the Americans, by far the biggest contributors to the international force in Afghanistan.
David Cameron is determined that Britain will play its part in Europe’s African mission.
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