Timothy Garton Ash, senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
Barack Obama is the most European president of the United States there has ever been. Barack Obama is the least European president of the United States there has ever been.
Let me explain. In his commitment to social justice and universal health care, and in the positive role he sees for government, Mr. Obama's views are closer to the political values of contemporary Europe than that of any of his predecessors. Strip away the obligatory rhetoric about American exceptionalism, and what he says on most domestic issues would fit comfortably into the program of any mainstream European party. In the substance of his domestic policies, he is almost a European.
In the way he thinks about the world, however, and even more in his view of Europe itself, he could not be more different. His mental map goes north-south, not east-west. His roots are in Kenya and the U.S. Midwest; his childhood experience was in Indonesia and Hawaii. Biographically, he is the personification of a trend that analysts have identified in the abstract: a demographic shift, since the mid-1960s, toward Americans of non-European origin, weakening cultural and historical transatlantic ties.
Mr. Obama is also the first president young enough not to have been decisively shaped by the Cold War, which made Americans willy-nilly interested in the old continent, since it was the central theatre of superpower competition.
Today's front-line theatres are Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran. America's key strategic partner and competitor is China. And Mr. Obama's deep personal issue in world affairs is development, that is, the richer north helping the poorer south to help itself.
But hang on, you may exclaim: less European than George W. Bush? Surely not! Well, oddly enough, yes. Culturally a child of the East Coast as much as of Texas, and old enough to be shaped by the Cold War, Mr. Bush still had a strong residual image of the transatlantic West. Even the anti-Europeanism of the neo-conservatives was a kind of backhanded tribute to the old continent. While they chuntered on about Europe becoming Islamized, irrelevant, senile and impotent, the very fact that they obsessed about it showed that they still thought it mattered.
This time, it is different. To be sure, the major European powers remain, after China, the most operationally significant to American foreign policy. And, unlike China, they remain the most likely to be more or less on the same side as the United States, sharing interests as well as values and confronting common challenges in other parts of the world. As one senior official put it to me: We spend quite a lot of time talking to people in Europe about what we should do in Asia; we don't spend much time talking to people in Asia about what we should do in Europe.
Yet the Obama administration's approach to "the Europeans" is quite pragmatic, unsentimental and realistic. It might be summarized as: What can you do for us today? On Afghanistan. On Pakistan. On Iran.
Yes, this President can do the soaring European speeches - in Prague, on a nuclear-free world, and in Normandy, on the 65th anniversary of D-Day. But, talking to senior officials, I have little sense of any vision of a strategic partnership between the world's two greatest unions of the rich and free: the United States and the European Union.
Pragmatically, officials in the Obama administration take Europe as they find it. Where it acts as a single unit - on trade and competition policy - they deal with it as a single unit. Where it doesn't - on the deployment of soldiers to Afghanistan, for example, or even on tighter sanctions against Iran - they deal with 27 individual governments. That's tiresome, but it's just the way it is.
This attitude to Europe combines, in equal parts, respect and contempt. Respect inasmuch as the United States treats Europe as a bunch of grown-up, sovereign countries, no longer needing or wanting American tutelage. Contempt insofar as it recognizes how far reality lags behind the rhetoric of European unity.
Officials in Washington know better than anyone how European leaders compete for an audience with the president or secretary of state, how they go behind each other's backs to win that contract, offer this special service and generally preen themselves to be favourite poodle. As for Europe's promises of finally getting its act together on foreign policy if the Polish and Czech presidents sign the Lisbon Treaty? Even the continent's oldest friends in Washington sigh: We'll believe it when we see it.
Europe will not begin to have an effective foreign policy unless the major European states want it to. At the moment, Germany is less committed to sublimating itself in a European identity than it used to be in the days of Helmut Kohl. And the likely next prime minister of Britain, Conservative Leader David Cameron, is dead against a common European foreign policy.
On balance, the Obama administration would prefer to work with a more united Europe - especially now that the leaders of Britain, Germany and, most surprisingly, France are solidly Atlanticist. Apart from anything else, life would just be that much simpler.
But, unlike during the Cold War, the United States is not focused on Europe, and helping to build a strong, united Europe is not among its vital interests. Europeans may continue to feel that Mr. Obama is "one of us," and in one way he is, but in another way he isn't - and he certainly won't do their work for them. If Europeans want to get their act together, they must do it themselves. If they don't, the United States will continue to deal with them as they are, not as they pretend to be.
Timothy Garton Ash is senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.