US President George W. Bush has a foreign-policy problem that oil and gas companies can help solve. It involves Europe. And it relates to the abilities of US companies to pursue international opportunities.
Bush's trip to Mexico last week, taken in the US as altogether fitting, raised eyebrows in European capitals. Did this first visit by the new president outside the US represent a snub to allies across the Atlantic? Did it mean a shift of foreign-policy attention to the Western Hemisphere? Was there a hint of retaliation in it for the European Union's step late last year toward formation of an all-Europe military force?
If, indeed, hidden signals infused Bush's meeting with Mexican President Vicente Fox, they escaped notice in the US. Why shouldn't the new president visit a neighbor, especially one acting serious about long-awaited democratic reform?
Hints of diplomatic worry found their ways into the European press, nevertheless. And well they should. Transatlantic relations are strained.
The squabbles
No crisis looms. But there are squabbles, and some of them involve oil and gas.
European officials, for example, fault the US for its reluctance to raise fuel taxes as a precaution against global warming. Americans wonder in return why Europeans want to economically punish themselves any more than they already do for burning hydrocarbons.
Potentially more serious is the EU's plans for a 60,000-person military force. A few US officials fear the move will diminish or confuse the role in European security of the North American Treaty Organization-and that of the US by association.
On a separate but related matter, officials of at least some European governments, especially those of France and Germany, fiercely oppose US plans for an antimissile defense network. They consider such a system destabilizing.
Chances are low that any of these disputes will develop into a diplomatic crisis. And their potential for damage probably has less to do with direct effects, issue by issue, than with their ability to distort the triangular shape of North Atlantic tranquility.
The UK, one of the triangle's corners, continues to keep its diplomatic distance from the most aggressive proposals for European centralization. It even emits hints about abandoning the EU in favor of the North American Free Trade Agreement. But the EU exerts a strong and natural pull. A pattern of US carelessness toward Europe might force a close ally into difficult choices.
Yet it is not just for the UK's sake that Bush needs to mend the transatlantic fence, of course. He just needs to do so without compromising US interests with peculiarly European follies such as global-warming wealth transfers. An area bristling with possibility is one in which the US has indulged its own flawed impulses and been mostly wrong: economic sanctions.
Here, European governments have shown saintly patience. In the 1990s, the US went on a sanctions spree, pretending to punish foreign antagonists by proscribing trade and investment in their countries. History has shown that such measures seldom accomplish their advertised goals and most often hurt the wrong people, including innocent populations of target countries and US companies held away from global opportunities.
Recently imposed sanctions have compounded those problems with excursions into what diplomats call extraterritoriality. They contain provisions threatening retaliation against nontarget governments not aligning themselves with US measures.
Governments in Europe and elsewhere properly dislike this challenge to their sovereignty. Wisely, the US has chosen not to act on the threat when it might have done so. But the diplomatic offense will last as long as unilateral US sanctions laced with third-party coercion remain in place.
Sanctions review
Bush, therefore, should make a review of sanctions policy a priority for his administration. The first task should be to remove or ask Congress to annul any provisions that pressure nontarget governments into compliance with unilateral US initiatives. Especially in Europe, such a move would represent an unmistakable signal of US intent to improve relations.
A second task-one that the oil and gas industry must encourage-should be to shorten the list of countries subject to US sanctions. More than 60 countries appear on the list now. That's too many. In Europe and elsewhere, a trimming of the sanctions roster would be taken as a welcome sign of US seriousness in world affairs.
