Bridging The Gap

Given the state of public opinion, America could hardly have asked for better advocates than Merkel and Sarkozy, especially since Bush's chief European ally, Tony Blair, was being nudged into retirement because of his closeness to the president and to U.S. Iraq policy. Merkel, an East German physicist who grew up under Soviet domination and became politically active after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, looks as much west as she does east. When she speaks of "the power of freedom," she can sound positively Kennedyesque. As for Sarkozy, a sometimes fawning French press compares him and his young, attractive family to the Kennedys. He has never disguised his admiration for America. As he said at the Daughters of the American Revolution Hall in Washington a year ago, "No one in France dares deny the truth. The United States is the premier economic, military and monetary power in the world. Your economy is flourishing, your intellectual life is rich, research in the United States is organized such that the best researchers in the world work in your universities and quickly become American patriots."

It's easy to imagine Gordon Brown saying those exact words. But Britain, having been shoulder to shoulder with America for so long, is now something of an exception. Brown is trying so hard not to be Blair that he's sending out mixed signals to Washington—the Menwith Hill decision on the one hand, the suggestion that he's slowly disengaging from Iraq on the other. Brown is without doubt instinctively American. Vacations are no litmus test, but it's worth noting that if Sarkozy suddenly popped up this summer in New Hampshire (a modest drive from the Bush family retreat in Maine), Brown used to vacation regularly on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Not this summer. To reinforce his Britishness, he went to the English seaside. No one would accuse Brown of anti-Americanism. But it says something when he is out-Americanized by his German and French counterparts: the Continental drift toward America is very real.

With Lorna Shaddick And Nick Hayes In London, Owen Matthews In Moscow, Christopher Dickey And Tracy McNicoll In Paris, Mike Elkin In Madrid And Katka Krosnar In Prague

© 2007