Drifting Apart

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In historical perspective, that's almost inevitable. The overarching Soviet threat of the cold war was extraordinary; so was the cooperation, from the Marshall Plan to nato to Fulbright scholarships, it inspired. "The closeness we grew used to of shared perspectives between 1950 and 1990 was the exception rather than the rule," says Tony Judt, a British-born professor of European history at New York University. "Before World War II, no one spoke about 'the West' as a shared cultural area. Americans, mostly of recent European descent, saw themselves as getting away from Europe. Europeans saw America as worryingly rootless, an exclusively mercantile place without culture, heritage, tradition, which was therefore threatening to their future. I think we may be seeing an unarticulated return to an opening of that old tap."

The young are the ones most easily inebriated. Europeans entering university this autumn have no personal memory of the joyous destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989, let alone the preceding 40-year struggle against the Soviet system during which the survival of a free Europe depended upon an alliance with the U.S. — something their parents felt in their bones even if they disliked particular U.S. policies. The youngsters' professors might teach that the American nuclear umbrella provided the strategic framework enabling France and Germany to stop trying to annihilate each other and the European Union to take root and prosper; their grandparents might remember G.I.s bearing nylons and Hershey bars. I have seen the power of such sentiments myself. When I was a high school exchange student in 1972, I had a rollicking argument with a train compartment full of East German teenagers about "imperialist America." But when I gave one of the girls a John F. Kennedy half-dollar, she broke into tears and gave me a big kiss. How many European teenagers today would feel that way about any American President?

For Europeans to have less need of the U.S. is an inevitable fruit of cold war victory. But Judt argues that things are worse than that. Bush, he says, "has successfully attached what might have been a passing period of anger about a series of American policies to a larger sense of detachment from America." Robert von Rimscha, the German author of several books on transatlantic issues, argues that in his country, "many citizens across all generations, but especially many young, are no longer simply saying, 'We do not need the United States any longer'; they are saying, 'We do not want the United States any longer.'" David Graves, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, who has worked in France, recounts the end of a very friendly conversation with a thirtysomething Dutch couple at a restaurant in Amsterdam this summer. "I like you, and I like Americans," said the man. "But I have to tell you that my generation here in Holland is moving toward seeing the U.S. the way we saw Nazi Germany in 1944." Astrid Rosenwirth, 25, an Austrian political-science student, lived in the U.S. for four years and likes lots about the country, including a "tolerance and inclusiveness that Austria will not have achieved 20 years from now. I met the most enlightened and open-minded people there," she says. "But also the most ignorant, uneducated and prejudiced. I guess with a society built on contradictions, you can only have an ambivalent relationship." And she finds its government repulsive. "What puts us [in Europe] off most is its in-your-face hypocrisy. It's this idea of American exceptionalism, the moral talk and the overt and often naïve religiousness." Of course there is a wide spectrum of European opinion toward the U.S., and not all of it is well-informed. But Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, told me that his greatest worry about U.S. foreign policy is that "we're losing the next generation." Opinions don't have to be right to have political consequence.

Continuing to exacerbate those bad feelings is the Iraq war, which, more than anything else, has divided Europe from the U.S. It seems unlikely to come to a welcome end anytime soon. That the U.S. has botched the occupation of Iraq is widely agreed, including in Washington. For a hyperpower to be disliked may be inevitable. For it to be incompetent over a long period is deeply corrosive to its capacity to lead. "People hate the U.S. for not being able to handle the situation in Iraq," says Zbigniew Lewicki, professor of American Studies at Warsaw University. "It has failed in its duty to fix things." In the eyes of many Europeans, the same goes for Afghanistan, where the Taliban is resurgent, and for Islamic terrorists, too. Al-Qaeda and its allies have not mounted another attack on the scale of Sept. 11, but continue to take lives. Americans can find plenty to criticize in the way Europeans have awakened slowly to the threat posed by Islamic radicalism, and Bush is right to emphasize that the fight against it will be long. But by comparison with the cold war, this time a U.S. President hasn't managed to sell Europe on his basic strategy for winning a generational struggle. "Even though we agree that Islamic radicalism is a common threat," says a British official, "most of the world thinks the U.S. is making it worse."

Aspects of that sentiment are widely shared. Von Rimscha says "American unilateralism, militarism and disdain for international law do not even have to be argued anymore. They are firmly believed, they have become part of an entrenched canon of anti-Americanism." Other experts doubt things are that bad, but elements of this canon are migrating into the mainstream and constraining the running room of politicians all over Europe. In the Czech Republic, for example, 83% of those polled in July don't want to let the U.S. build a military base there. The Transatlantic Trends survey shows the sharpest drop in support for U.S. leadership in countries that have traditionally been most pro-American, such as the U.K. and Poland. The new leader of Britain's Conservative Party, David Cameron, has said that he wants to "rebalance" London's relationship with Washington. "We have never, until recently, been uncritical allies of America … We must strive above all for legitimacy in what we do." You can bet the ranch that Prime Minister Tony Blair's likely successor Gordon Brown will not let himself get tagged as "Bush's poodle" as he prepares to face Cameron at the polls.