WEISBRODE: Mugged by reality?

OP-ED:

There was something incongruous about having a discussion of Sarah Palin and Barack Obama sitting next to some of the most luxurious gardens in Florence, at the Villa La Pietra, a stunning house made famous as the home base of the Anglo-American aesthete, Harold Acton, and now owned by New York University.

But there we were, a small group of European and American students invited by New York University (NYU) to speak about the U.S. presidential election. The discussion was revealing, and the Americans gave as good as they got.

Nearly everyone present wanted Barack Obama to win, of course; even the few Europeans who described themselves as “proud adherents to the center-right” went for the Democrat. After all, they said, what counts as “left” in America doesn’t fall too far from the “right” in Europe.

The American students in the audience seemed perplexed. Ideology aside, the Europeans’ interest in the election had everything to do with American foreign policy. All were terrified that John McCain would start a big war with Iran and never leave Iraq or Afghanistan, and that many more Europeans would be dragged into the mess. “We thought the worst would be over with Bush,” said one, “and now we are desperate to see the clear end of a bad cycle.” The passion for Mr. Obama, they contended, had little to do with the man himself and everything to do with his being a Democrat.

The Americans countered that nobody in Europe seemed enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton, while Mr. Obama’s press over here has been, if anything, even more gushing than at home. It was simple, the Europeans responded: Mrs. Clinton did not represent change at all, and for most of them, a female head of state is nothing revolutionary. At the same time, all of the European speakers said it would be decades before any of their countries elected a “minority” to its top office; none could ever climb the ranks of the party machinery that is so much more powerful in Europe: “We don’t elect people out of the blue over here.”

Finally, a German sitting in the back of the room lent a note of cynicism to the discussion. “I think we Europeans are going to be very disappointed by Obama,” he said. “American foreign policy will continue to alienate Europeans, no matter who is president.” Most of the Americans in the room concurred; Mr. Obama has sounded quite hawkish on using force in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The perception of change, at least in foreign policy, is probably superficial.

The other Europeans in the room then nodded in agreement, more sympathetic perhaps with the cynical, sophisticated tone than with the substance of the German’s point, which essentially contradicted everything they had been saying. But no matter. If Mr. Obama were now the lesser of two evils, so be it. But then, in further contradiction, one of the Europeans mused, “if only we could return to the days of Clinton, when Europe mattered.” Yes, Europe did matter back then. NATO dropped bombs on European soil; the two most vocal members of Mr. Clinton’s foreign policy team-Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke-considered themselves great Europhiles: the former of long standing and the latter of more recent vintage.

The NYU discussants seemed oblivious to the absence of anyone like this in either camp this time around. Mr. Obama’s exhibitionism in Berlin notwithstanding, the idea that Europe will figure prominently on the priority list of either potential president is difficult to imagine. The formative experiences of both men happened in Asia. Their mental maps of the world do not place Europe at the center, or even in the first tier of important regions to the United States. Europe may come to seem, as Henry Kissinger once famously said of South America, like a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica.

That this notion, albeit somewhat exaggerated, did not occur to anyone in the gardens of La Pietra, is not really that surprising. The gravitational pull of the Old World can be strong, especially when one is surrounded by towering cypresses, olive and lemon trees and ilex, classical statuary and the domes of Florence visible in the distance. Whether that pull will extend as far as Washington, let alone to the battleground states in the South and Midwest, is another question.

Kenneth Weisbrode is a diplomatic historian. He is currently Vincent Wright Fellow in History at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at European University Institute in Florence, Italy.