One enduring constant of the trans-Atlantic relationship is the condescending attitude among European elites toward every new U.S. administration. This is a very old syndrome. With the possible exception of Nixon, I cannot recall a presidential transition in the past half century when Europeans did not do so.

It is certainly no secret that Europeans pretty much across the board favored an Obama victory — largely because they saw him as the anti-Bush — but how little they really understand the President Elect now begins to emerge, not to mention how little respect he is accorded among the continent’s chattering classes.

First, the Italian prime minister comments on Senator Obama’s “tan,” as if such a blatant bit of racism would go down well in this country on either side of the political aisle.  Then the Polish President deliberately puts words into the President Elect’s mouth about potential U.S. missile deployments in his country, forcing the Obama transition office to issue a public corrective it obviously would have liked to avoid. Tuesday’s Financial Times informs us that the British Prime Minister’s “aides now talk excitedly about tutoring the new president in the intricacies of the global financial system,” as if Obama does not have the likes of Paul Volker at his elbow.

Sigh. The underlying European assumption is that the new American leader is charming but in need of their guidance, and he will be policy putty in their hands, in contrast to his predecessor. On this basis, a trans-Atlantic honeymoon will not last long, just until Europeans discover (doubtless to their shock) that Barack Obama is an American, not a European, and a Democrat rather than a Social Democrat.

It is a pity, because a change of U.S. administrations, particularly after one so ill thought of by Europeans as that of President Bush, might be a good time for a fundamental review of the trans-Atlantic relationship. Surely, twenty years after the end of the Cold War is time enough for the kind of basic reform I advocated in a recent article in The Journal of International Security Affairs and in previous pieces in The National Interest and elsewhere.

Sadly, two or three factors militate against such a long overdue reformulation of American-European relations. First is the financial and economic crisis, which doubtless will push other issues aside. Second is the enduring European desire to return this relationship to some supposed Eden (about the time of Eisenhower, Adenauer, De Gaulle and MacMillan). Third is the probable presence in a new U.S. administration of neo-liberal figures of the Clinton years whose attitudes toward Europe mirror those of European elites toward America.

One European commentator, Philip Stevens of the FT, gets it exactly right in his column of November 11th: “Behind the general air of adulation, though, is a profound misconception. This is the belief that the Bush years were an unfortunate interlude and the old Atlantic alliance can be reconstituted much as before. In truth, that possibility ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. One of the big problems of the past couple of decades has been a failure (on both sides) to recognize that a partnership of necessity has become one of choice. Europe is no longer at the heart of America’s foreign policy interests, and Europe no longer has such a pressing need for the US security umbrella. There are lots of other good reasons to promote a strong alliance. But, to borrow a thought from Mr. Obama, the relationship can work only if both sides understand the change.”

Will it require yet another crisis in the trans-Atlantic relationship, comparable to that surrounding the outbreak of the Iraq war, to shake things up enough so that the two sides will come to grips with new realities? Probably, but even that may not be enough.

Is there hope for missile defense after all? During his campaign, president-elect Barack Obama famously promised to “cut investments in unproven missile defense systems” - a message that many observers took to mean that missile defenses would become an endangered species in an Obama administration. Now, however, there is at least a glimmer of hope that missile defense could survive (if not thrive) under the new White House.

First, there is the growing worldwide ballistic missile threat. Countries such as Iran and North Korea are making major investments in their strategic arsenals in an effort to acquire asymmetric capabilities by which to threaten other nations and the United States. So are Russia and China, which have both demonstrated qualitative leaps in the number and sophistication of their ballistic missiles - leaps which analysts have cautioned have not been matched by similar investments on the part of the United States. These developments were surely covered by Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell during his first classified top-level briefing to the president-elect on November 6th.

Then there is Russia’s recent provocation. Less than a day after Obama’s electoral win, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced in his first-ever State of the State address that his government is planning to deploy short-range missiles in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, where they would target the emerging U.S. missile defense system in Eastern Europe. Needless to say, if carried out such a move would mark a major escalation of tensions between Russia and its former satellites - and, by extension, between Moscow and Washington.

All of which suggests that Obama’s strident pre-election stance on missile defense might end up being softened over time, as the new President begins to grapple with the need to maintain U.S. strategic superiority and defend against growing threats abroad. That, at least, is the hope.

“Terrorist aggression” is what Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Mu’allim termed Sunday’s raid by the U.S. into Syria that either captured or killed Abu Ghadiya. The daylight attack took place five miles inside Syria in the town of Sukkariya near Abu Kamal. Syrian television claimed nine people were killed and 14 were wounded in the operation. A native of Mosul, Iraq, the 32-year old Ghadiya has been in charge of al-Qaeda’s extensive Syria network since 2005, when the organization declared an Islamic Emirate in Al Qaim along the Iraqi border. In February, U.S. intelligence sources named Badran Turki Hishan al-Mazidih (a.k.a. Abu Ghadiya) as al-Qaeda in Iraq’s top operative in Syria, tasked with funneling foreign fighters, weapons, and cash into Iraq.

This latest event on Syrian soil presents the Asad regime with a difficult problem. Several recent brazen attacks against Syria are thought to have been carried out by the West. Back in February, Hezbollah’s senior official and longtime resident on America’s most wanted list, Imad Mughniyeh was assassinated in Damascus. In September 2007, Syria’s (alleged) nuclear facility was bombed in an Israeli air raid. The silence with which the Arab governments in the region greeted the news was deafening. Now the same appears to be the case, serving to demonstrate the new low Syria has reached in its regional political standing.

In response to questions about the operation, Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh explained: “The attacked area was the scene of activities of terrorist groups operating from Syria against Iraq. The latest of these groups… killed 13 police recruits in an [Iraqi] border village. Iraq had asked Syria to hand over this group which uses Syria as a base for its terrorist activities.”

Such an activist response from Iraqi officials - and such a muted response among Arab governments - would have been unthinkable before Rafiq Hariri’s assassination in Lebanon in February 2005. One might even have to reach back to the 1980s - when Syria supported Iran in its war against Iraq - to find a time when Syria was last seen as so opposed to regional Arab interests. Asad’s recent foreign policy maneuvers, in which the Syrian dictator has simultaneously supported various militant and sectarian groups with often-competing agendas, has left Damascus without regional support outside of Iran.

So far, the Syrian regime has tried not to tip its hand about potential responses. The real question, however, is whether this latest attack on Syria - the first publicly claimed by the United States - will alter the regime’s decision-making process or lead to a lasting change in Syrian behavior.

Two years after North Korea carried out its first successful nuclear detonation, the “Hermit Kingdom” has officially been removed from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. Officials in Washington are calling the decision a victory - proof that international pressure is working and Pyongyang is turning over a new leaf. But evidence on that score is sparse. After all, the U.S., and the other participants in the Six Party Talks have engaged in a political contest of wills with North Korea for more than a decade - with precious little to show for their efforts. Since the Clinton administration first signed the Agreed Framework in 1994, North Korea has evolved from a nation without the capacity to build a nuclear weapon to a country that has tested a nuclear device, and is now being rewarded handsomely for dismantling that same capability.

After the North Koreans barred inspectors from the Yongbyon facility, the U.S. responded by removing them from the State Department’s terrorism list as a way to reengage Pyongyang in the nuclear dismantlement process. But at what cost? The North Koreans now enjoy the ability to dictate which facilities international inspectors are permitted to visit, while the U.S. - along with almost all of the other Six Party states - must provide the DPRK with increased aid.

Will these reduced verification goals, and further appeasement of North Korean demands, truly lead to a denuclearized Korean Peninsula? This is a key question that the next president will need to answer. One can only hope that America’s performance thus far is not the template for future policy - or for dealing with other rogues, such as Iran.

The U.S. and Iraq are inching toward the completion of a comprehensive, long-awaited agreement on the legal status of U.S. forces after their UN mandate expires at year’s end. The drawn-out negotiations, which have long passed their “hard” deadline of July 31st, were recently concluded by the Bush administration and the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and will soon move to the final stage of review by the Iraqi parliament.

Washington and Baghdad have long been in agreement on the vast majority of issues contained in the agreement. What had until very recently stalled the deal was the question of the legal status of U.S. forces conducting operations in Iraq under their new mandate - most notably whether U.S. soldiers would retain the legal immunity the U.S. has historically demanded for them in wartime. Washington had already caved - after initial stiff resistance - to an earlier demand by the Iraqis that private military contractors be stripped of this immunity, but the immunity of U.S. soldiers was generally considered off the table. Things, however, appear to be changing.

The text of the final agreement has not yet been officially released, but officials from both sides have outlined the contours of the compromise. U.S. military personnel will retain their traditional immunity when they are in their bases, or on authorized combat missions within the country. However, crimes committed by U.S. personnel when they are off-base and off-duty would fall under Iraqi jurisdiction and be addressed via the Iraqi legal system. This raises the prospect of more than a few nightmare scenarios, but the agreement is said to stipulate that only particularly heinous crimes, and only those deemed so by a joint committee staffed by both countries, would fall under this category. As expected, then, the devil is in the details.  

Capitol Hill can be expected to raise Cain over the prospect of U.S. soldiers being tried by an “underdeveloped” Iraqi legal system, and it is unclear whether intense lobbying by Secretaries Rice and Gates will sufficiently assuage Congress’ concerns. But because constitutionally the Bush administration does not require Congressional approval for a Status of Forces agreement, it is the Iraqi parliament that is likely to prove the biggest hurdle to the compromise deal. That is, if it makes it to Iraq’s parliament: it first must pass the Iraqi cabinet and Iraq’s Political Council for National Security, where it has already hit a few snags.

Opposition to the agreement, which has been an easy target for America’s opponents in Iraq, runs high. Radical Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has whipped his followers into the expected frenzy against the deal, and Iranian agents are working overtime to lobby and intimidate lawmakers in Baghdad to vote “nay.” Even Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s own political bloc, the Unified Iraqi Alliance, has expressed its reservations, and Iraqi politicians of all stripes have voiced their desire to renegotiate aspects of the deal.

It is unclear what will happen if the Iraqi cabinet or Iraqi parliament rejects the deal or demands unacceptable revisions to the pact. The UN mandate for U.S. forces to operate in Iraq expires on December 31st, and the both sides are loathe, for their own respective reasons, to return to the Security Council for another one-year extension. Yet if an agreement is not reached, it is unclear what other recourse is available to Baghdad and Washington, for without a legal mandate U.S. forces would (technically) be forced into a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq - something both Prime Minister Maliki and President Bush agree would be disastrous.  

Other notable aspects of the deal: U.S. combat troops would withdraw from Iraqi cities by 2009 and from all of Iraq by 2011 unless requested otherwise by the Iraqi government. (The caveat sought by the Bush administration to have withdrawal dependent on local conditions appears to have been dropped). Likewise, U.S. combat operations will now require explicit approval from Baghdad, and American forces will be forbidden from detaining any Iraqi citizen outside of the conduct of operations sanctioned by Baghdad. As well, any Iraqi citizen detained in a permitted operation must be turned over to the Iraqi authorities within 24 hours. Finally, the U.S. would not be obligated to defend Iraq in the case of external aggression, but could assist the country if requested by Baghdad. 

Although the last Syrian troops left Lebanon on April 26, 2005, Syria still has countless horses in the Lebanese race. The Syrian regime - along with Iran - supports Hezbollah and Amal, and it backs various secular Sunni groups, in addition to the largely Christian Free Patriotic Movement headed by General Michel Aoun. Along with the Syrian Ba’ath Party, Syrian Social Nationalist Party, and the Nasserite Popular Movement, these groups form the nucleus of Lebanon’s March 8 coalition.

Together, they have posed a serious challenge to the pro-Western, anti-Syrian March 14 coalition. That group includes the Future Movement headed by Sa’ad Hariri, the son and political heir of the slain nationalist politician Rafiq Hariri; Druze leader Walid Jumblatt’s Progressive Socialist Party; the Democratic Gathering Bloc, and; Samir Ja’ja’s Lebanese Forces.

Adding to this unstable political mix are over 400,000 Palestinians confined to refugee camps throughout Lebanon, who remain largely outside of state authority. There are currently some 15 active Palestinian factions, which range politically from the Marxist far left to the Islamist and jihadist far right - many of whom operate with the support and encouragement of Damascus.

By supporting so many hostile players, the Syrian regime has itself become a target. Since 2006, there has been a rash of small scale attacks that the Syrian government has blamed on Islamist extremists, including attacks against Syrian state television in central Damascus, an uprising at the Sednaya prison outside the capital, and an unsuccessful raid on the U.S. embassy just blocks from Bashar al-Asad’s family home. The latest took place on September 27th, when a car packed with 440 pounds of explosives blew up in Damascus next to a Syrian intelligence building, killing 17 and fueling more speculation that the Syrian regime is losing control of its pawns on the Middle East chessboard.

An unstable Lebanon serves Syrian interests because it raises the possibility that the regime in Damascus will once again be called back into Lebanon as a power broker, as it was in 1976 and 1989. Back then, Syria’s method of “pacifying” Lebanon allowed it to dominate its neighbor. Nevertheless, the volatile political and ideological cocktail that Syria is stirring seems to be weakening its own domestic security situation.

If at first you don’t succeed, try try again. That’s the sentiment out of London these days, where one of the most prominent members of Saudi Arabia’s ruling family is attempting to rescuscitate the Kingdom’s moribund plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace. At a “track two” diplomatic conference just convened by the Oxford Group, Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Kingdom’s former intelligence czar and envoy to the U.S., outlined a peace plan under which Israel would “accept peace as a strategic choice … withdraw completely from all the lands they occupied in 1967, including Jerusalem … accept a just solution for the refugee problem … and recognize the independent state of Palestine.”

Those terms are not new. They are the cornerstones of the peace initiative put on the table by then-Crown Prince Abdullah at the 2002 Beirut Arab Summit. Back then, however, they were seen more or less as non-starters by the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Times have apparently changed, though. According to Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, officials in his government - once incredulous - are now seriously considering the proposal, and that an Israeli counteroffer could be in the works. “There is definitely room to introduce a comprehensive Israeli plan to counter the Saudi plan that would be the basis for a discussion on overall regional peace,” Barak has said in a radio interview.
 
UPDATE: Officials in Jerusalem now appear to be backing away from the Saudi plan. “Whenever the process stalls, there will be those who will pull out the Saudi plan,” one senior official has told the Jerusalem Post. “And the Saudis have an interest in pushing this out there now, to put on a ‘constructive face’ with which to greet the new US president.”

The recent death of Austrian politician Jorg Haider in an auto accident has produced routine press descriptions of him as an “extremist.” This is a bit unfair, as Haider’s views were often pretty much mainstream, keeping in mind that the Austrian mainstream elected Kurt Waldheim as president knowing his Nazi past and involvement in war crimes. Haider was not so much extreme by Austrian standards as uppity. He was a bright, ambitious young politician from the provinces who refused to play by the rules of the sclerotic, Vienna-centric political elite which condescended to him (and many others). By the rules, Haider might have aspired to become a junior minister in a couple of decades. He decided to rewrite the rules, make his political base in rural Carinthia a political asset rather than a liability, and gain votes by being in-your-face to the Vienna elites. His views and public statements were overtly hostile to migrants, protectionist about the European Union, and nostalgic for the Third Reich. In short, mainstream.

With little more than ambition and good looks, he built a personality-centered political party which eventually entered into a national coalition government (although without Haider himself, to assuage European sensitivities). Somewhat odd for an Austrian politician, he rather liked America, although his political associations here tended toward the David Duke variety. I met him a couple of times in the course of my professional duties and thought his obvious talents were wasted in National Socialist nostalgia. 

Haider’s political offense was to violate the post-war Austrian effort to (as often noted) persuade the world that Hitler had been German and Beethoven Austrian, rather than the other way around. Haider’s big mouth made it more difficult for Austria to conceal its record behind mounds of Mozart Kugeln. In the recent Austrian national elections, the two parties which Haider founded received a quarter of the popular vote. More to the point, many of Haider’s views about migrants and protecting national identity are now in the program of the established parties of his country (and of some neighbors). There will be few tears for his passing among Austria’s leading politicians (the inquest indicated he was speeding while under the influence), but the man’s sin in their eyes was not so much extremism as candor.

Increasingly, China is using its military strength to pressure its neighbors.There have been dozens of Chinese incursions into the Indian provinces of Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh. Typically, the Peoples Liberation Army goes a couple of kilometers into India and then retreats to its uncontested territory. Pressure on Vietnam has taken a different form. Not long ago, credible plans for invading and occupying Vietnam ended up on a Chinese website, fanning fears in Hanoi of potential Chinese expansionism. With Japan, it is the PRC navy that is applying pressure. The Japanese are finding it necessary to be increasingly vigilant in tracking the penetration of their waters by submarines thought to be Chinese. In all of these cases, the military is reinforcing the political. China is negotiating with all three countries over long-held disputes. Are the Chinese simply trying to increase their bargaining power en route to a peaceful solution? Or is this the first step toward a more widespread use of their growing military power?

Last week, the Bush administration gave final approval on a $6.5 billion arms sale to Taiwan. If there is one certainty in Chinese foreign policy, it is the staunch desire to reunify with Taiwan. So, as expected, the move has elicited a harsh response from the Chinese government, which immediately condemned the deal and cancelled a few previously scheduled high-level meetings with the U.S. Beijing also cautioned the two presidential candidates against future arms sales to Taiwan to ensure that Sino-U.S. relations continue to strengthen.
 
Chinese relations with the U.S. and Taiwan are not as bleak as they may appear - although the weapons package included impressive defensive weapons systems, it notably left out U.S.-made submarines which can be construed as offensive. And while China may outwardly express anger, it is internally tempered by the knowledge that Taiwan’s new president, Ma Ying-jeao, is much more open to the “one-China” policy than his predecessor, Chen Shui-bian.
 
During President Bush’s tenure in office, Washington appeared to drift closer to China as Chen, a fierce advocate of Taiwanese independence, ratcheted up the rhetoric. And Beijing displayed its approval last year, when the U.S. upheld an unspoken moratorium on arms sales to Taiwan. But Washington’s former quasi-official envoy to Taiwan, Douglas Paal, has argued that the decision had more to do with pacifying China in the run up to the Olympics than with quelling Taiwanese pro-independence desires. And now that the Olympics have passed, Washington is again drifting toward a stricter interpretation of the Taiwan Relations Act, under which it is committed to the island nation’s defense.