MARRAKESH, Morocco — The election of Barack Obama as president
seemed to most Europeans to be unadulterated good news, marking an end
to the perceived unilateralism and indifference to allied views of
former President George W. Bush.
President Nicolas Sarkozy, center, before chiding President
Obama on Iran in a speech at the United Nations in September. France
wants no deal that would let Iran keep enriching uranium.
But nine months into Mr. Obama’s presidency, trans-Atlantic
relations are again clouded by doubts. Europe and the United States
remain at least partly out of sync on Afghanistan, the Middle East,
Iran and climate change.
Many Europeans argue that Mr. Obama has not broken clearly
enough with Bush administration policies that they dislike, while some
Americans argue that the Europeans are too passive, watching Mr. Obama
struggle with difficult issues, like Afghanistan and the detention
center at Guantánamo Bay, without providing much substantive help.
Many of these concerns will be central to the United
States-European Union meeting in Washington beginning Tuesday that Mr.
Obama will lead, and they were the subject of debate at a World Policy
Conference run by the French Institute of International Relations in
Marrakesh over the weekend.
Mr. Obama remains popular with the European public, but a senior
European official said that he was worried about an underlying
disaffection. “It’s dangerous, because we must not get into a spiral of
dissatisfaction on both sides,” he said. These generalizations lack
real substance, he said, but the criticism runs that “the U.S. thinks
that Europeans don’t want to do anything to help and the Europeans feel
that the U.S. is naïve and not delivering enough.”
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