Thinking Global

Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel talks with France’s President Francois Hollande (R) at the European Union leaders summit in Brussels March 15, 2013. REUTERS/Laurent DubruleTaxicab2

Occasionally a public opinion survey surfaces that signals a seismic event. That is the case with a new report from the Pew Research Center that measures the widening tremors of a political earthquake now shaking Europe.

Although the report leads with evidence that  Europeans are increasingly losing faith in the European Union (which I wrote about here), the more troubling problem is the fast-growing divide between France and Germany. This schism is ripping apart the bonds that have held Europe together for 60 years – just when they are most urgently needed.

There is  a second, powerful underlying message: Germany has more economic weight and political will to determine Europe’s future than it has had since World War Two. Now, though, it lacks a partner that can replace France’s pivotal importance. Beyond that, Germans are increasingly out of step with most other Europeans in their economic optimism, their faith in their national political leadership and their continued support for European institutions.

Some 75 percent of Germans consider their economic situation good or very good, despite Germany’s recent economic slowdown. At the same time, more than two-thirds of those surveyed in seven other countries – Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Poland and the Czech Republic – are dissatisfied with their economies.

A wall of photos of European Union citizens outside the EU Commission building during the celebration for the Council of Europe in Brussels May 4, 2013. REUTERS/Yves Herman

Happy Europe Day!

If you don’t know May 9 is Europe Day, then you find yourself in good company with a majority of Europeans. Even in the most buoyant time, this holiday – marking the Schuman Schuman Declaration, presented by French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman in 1950, that launched the European Coal and Steel Community – doesn’t come with the transcontinental fireworks of America’s July 4.

It does, however, provide occasion to reflect on the growing perils to Europe, and the enormous risks they pose to both the United States and the global future. For all the talk of Europe’s fiscal deficits, or the “democracy deficit” that leaves European Union institutions lacking accountability and legitimacy, the most dangerous deficit is one of Europeans.

Amid the buzz in Washington about new North Korean nuclear threats, President Barack Obama late last week summoned 15 of America’s top financial leaders to the White House to discuss what his administration considers to be threats that are more pervasive, more persistent and less manageable ‑ cyber risks.

“The president scared the hell out of all of us, and we’re not easy to frighten,” said one member of the group, which included Goldman Sachs’s Lloyd C. Blankfein, JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon and Bank of America’s Brian T. Moynihan. “This isn’t like the nuclear threat, where it was really governments facing down governments. The American financial sector is a new battleground, and we’re going to have to invest millions of shareholders’ dollars to protect ourselves from what are essentially national actors.”

In this new world, cyber conflicts have already begun. But no one has written the rules of how they should be managed between government and private-sector responsibility.

I have covered far happier times for the Vatican. I reported on John Paul II’s pilgrimage through his native Poland some three decades ago, and I have been thinking about this while watching the Catholic Church’s 115 cardinal electors pray for divine inspiration on this historic day in Rome’s Sistine Chapel.

The cardinals will need every ounce of God’s help to determine who among them has the leadership and managerial wherewithal to both fix their scandal-ridden church and inspire a needy world. They can take some solace from the 1978 papal conclave held after John Paul I’s sudden death following just 33 days in office.

Electors then took eight ballots and two days to select Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, then the archbishop of Krakow, as the first non-Italian pope since 1523 and a man who over time would become one of the great leaders of the 20th century. John Paul II was beatified in 2011, in no small part for the role he played in liberating his homeland and ending Communist rule over most of Eastern Europe.

This week marks the 80th anniversary of the German Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933. That arson blaze ignited one of history’s ugliest stories of a fragile democracy gone tragically bad — and its generational consequences.

Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazis, elected Germany’s dominant party six months earlier, had exploited the fire – which he claimed was set by a half-blind, disabled, Dutch communist bricklayer – to transform Germany into a militarized dictatorship. This set in motion the Third Reich, World War II, the Holocaust, the destruction of Europe and the deaths of 60 million people, 2.5 percent of the global population.

History doesn’t repeat itself, as Mark Twain famously said, but it does rhyme.

President Barack Obama devoted just one sentence in last week’s State of the Union address to call for a new transatlantic trade and investment deal. However, if negotiated with sufficient ambition and presidential engagement, it is Obama’s best chance yet at leaving a positive foreign policy legacy.

The other global issues Obama catalogued in his speech were largely about avoiding the worst: North Korea, cyber threats, Iran, Syria and other Middle Eastern upheavals.  Achieving what Obama called “a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership,” however, has all the makings of grand strategy.

It is about nothing less than combining the world’s two largest economies and communities of common interest in a manner that could reshape all global trade and investment standards. It would also reinvigorate the Cold War’s victors, known then as “the Free World,” at a new inflection point of history. Only through common cause can the United States and Europe ensure they continue to write global governance rules even as they lose relative power and influence to countries that are less committed to democratic rights and free markets.

Munich – For America’s friends and allies, who will welcome Vice President Joe Biden to the annual Munich Security Conference this weekend, President Obama’s second inaugural address was notable for its single-minded focus on U.S. domestic issues even as global challenges proliferate. It was the clearest sign yet that Obama intends to build his historic legacy at home.

No one quibbles with Obama’s conviction that America’s global role can best be sustained through a period of “nation-building at home.” The problem is the world is unlikely to hit the pause button as America gets itself off the fiscal cliff, reforms its immigration system, modernizes its infrastructure, fixes its education system and focuses on other long-neglected home chores.

Rude reality inevitably intrudes.

Even if Washington weren’t facing a world of escalating trouble spots – Syria, Iran, North Korea, Yemen, North Africa, and the disputed waters around China (for starters) – U.S. allies would be looking to Afghanistan as the leading indicator of how Obama 2.0 will balance domestic priorities against his global commitments.

President Barack Obama has been commander-in-chief for four years, but the world only now will see the full flower of Obama foreign policy unfold. It likely will have less to do with any grand ambition to shape an increasingly dangerous world, and instead will be focused on avoiding new wars as he focuses on what he has called “nation building” at home.

In the past week, the president has provided important clues about how he views his historic legacy through nominating a national security team that more closely reflects his own personal preferences and through the underlying message he sent last Friday to visiting Afghan President Hamid Karzai. The two men agreed most U.S.-led combat operations in Afghanistan would end this spring, signaling an accelerated end to the second war Obama inherited from President George W. Bush.

First term nominations often involve a complex political calculus that doesn’t entirely reflect a president’s policy and personal priorities, and that was also the case with Obama. Though Hillary Clinton has won global praise for her performance as secretary of state, Obama’s motivation in picking her was driven more by politics than policy. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, though one of the finest leaders to ever serve in the Pentagon, was a Bush administration holdover and often disagreed with White House decisions.

Read between the lines of the U.S. intelligence community’s quadrennial global trends report, a document released this week that has significant influence on White House thinking, and the message to President Obama is clear.

First, the United States is at a far more crucial juncture of human history than most Americans realize – reminiscent of 1815, 1918, 1945 and 1989. Second, the United States has something that is unprecedented among the world’s great powers, a second chance to shape the international economic and political system.

Read more deeply, and you’ll find a stark warning for the president within the National Intelligence Council’s 140-page “Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds” report.  The world may suffer severe consequences – ranging from economic slowdown and environmental catastrophe to violent conflict and global anarchy – if the U.S. fails to act, escape the fiscal cliff, restore its political effectiveness, revive its economic competitiveness, and engage China and a host of other rising actors.

ISTANBUL — Fatih Birol, the International Energy Agency’s chief economist, is not prone to hype. So industry executives listen when he calls the surge of U.S. oil and gas production “the biggest change in the energy world since World War II.”

“This is bigger even than the development of nuclear energy,” said Birol in an interview just minutes after he had briefed dozens of the world’s leading energy players and policy makers over breakfast at the fourth annual Atlantic Council Energy and Economic Summit here on the IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2012. “This has implications for the whole world.”

Where Birol lingered longest in his briefing was on a slide, projected for dramatic effect on a giant overhead screen. It was history by PowerPoint, first showing U.S. energy production through 2030 from conventional sources. That scenario left America as a middling producer requiring imports as far as the eye could see. The next two overlays added shale gas and “tight oil” – products of hydraulic fracking, horizontal drilling and America’s God-given geology. According to IEA projections, the U.S. will overtake Russia as the world’s top gas producer by 2015 and will pass Saudi Arabia as the No. 1 global oil producer by 2017. By 2035 the U.S. is likely to be energy self-sufficient and an exporter of oil and liquefied natural gas. Experts are only now beginning to absorb a gusher of geopolitical consequences.