As Dr. Jackson Janes heads to Berlin for Senator Barack Obama's upcoming visit, here are some of his thoughts on what the message of either presidential candidate ought to contain and where transatlantic relations are heading under a new president:


By the time Senator Obama gets to Berlin on Thursday, the debate over where he is to give his speech will have been hopefully replaced by the focus on what he is going to say to the enthusiastic crowd. In the minds of many Germans, it may be that it does not really matter what the Senator says. The main thing is that he symbolizes all that George W. Bush does not. But symbols cannot replace substance.

The main question remains: What is going to be the substantive message of this would-be president to Europe?

Just as Obama has been facing increasing pressure at home to spell out what his change message means in specific domestic policy terms, he also needs to make clear what he intends to do with and expects from our closest allies in Europe.

The Berlin speech should lay out not only what we need to do in facing shared challenges. It needs to deliver a clear and persuasive message as to why and how that transatlantic collaboration is necessary. That may appear to some to be self-evident. But the fact is that we are in strong need of a reboot of the Euro-American dialogue.

There are two reasons for that. One is that the recent past has generated a widespread attitude in Europe that the United States has become less a source of stability in the world and more a cause of uncertainty or even a threat to world peace. The confrontational style of the Bush administration during the years following 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo turned a good deal of European public opinion against the United States. America was seen as not living up to its own standards and that was both a disappointment for some and fodder for those who were already resentful toward both the American president and American power well before Bush was elected president.

The second reason has to do with the domestic politics on both sides of the Atlantic. People are nervous about the future and have less confidence in their respective governments. Recent polls in Germany indicate a decreasing trust in both politicians and political institutions. In the U.S., the levels of disapproval of both President Bush and Congress are at all-time lows.

In such a climate, voters feel skeptical toward political leaders who seem to have no - or mixed - answers to their anxieties. The call for change, coupled with the need for adjustments, be it with regard to energy prices, jobs, pensions, or health care, let alone the need to send people to fight far away wars, rings hollow if there is not a clear linkage between what we need to do and why it is necessary. Senator Obama is making his case for the presidency by saying that he can restore that link at home and with our allies. His current road show is designed to demonstrate that. His speech in Berlin is a chance to send that message; but he needs to avoid speaking too much in generalities and offer some specifics.

Within the transatlantic framework, there is continuous repetition among the political elite of the statement: Euro-American cooperation helps solve many more problems than does Euro-American conflict. That is true but for the public at large, that is not as tangible as it was during the Cold War. The sense of shared threats and burdens in dealing with them has become more ambiguous, sometimes contradictory.

The war in Iraq symbolized that trend acutely, but there are other platforms on which the Euro-American dialogue is marked by dissonance and disagreements over diagnosing a problem and then coming up with an agreed prescription to solve it. Whether it be dealing with Russia or China, Iran or Afghanistan, climate change or trade policies, coming up with a Euro-American consensus may be desirable, but it is getting harder than it has been in the past.

Some of that has to do with the fact that a much larger framework of the European Union makes consensus-building among 27 EU member countries a difficult challenge. Look at the recent Irish referendum as the latest example. Some U.S. policies of late have also been marked by unilateral decisions, such as in climate and energy policies, making a consensus more difficult to reach.

But the fact is that the interdependency equation over the Atlantic has evolved in the last two decades significantly. The U.S. and Europe, with Germany the best illustrative example, find themselves needing or not needing each other in different ways than before the Berlin Wall came down. There are different sets of choices on both sides of the Atlantic when it comes to dealing with foreign and domestic policies today than in 1989.

And the frameworks for making those choices, both in domestic politics as well as within transatlantic institutions like NATO, have been evolving as well. The recent NATO summit in Bucharest was an illustration of the stresses and strains within a sixty year old alliance in search of redefining its mission.

Why do Europe and the United States need each other? How do they need each other? What do they need from each other? These are the questions that need to be answered by both presidential candidates and the political elites on both sides of the Atlantic. The rhetoric is ready but political realities often get in the way of achieving a common action plan. Afghanistan illustrates the contradictions between commitments and caveats in assembling forces to defeat the Taliban.

Obama will have to address these issues not only in Berlin but straight through to the November 4 elections. So will John McCain. Their main target audiences are of course American voters. But what their messages are will be watched carefully by non-voters all over the world. Europeans would appear to have made their decision about the messenger they want to see in the Oval Office, based primarily on the symbolism of Senator Obama's candidacy.

But do they really know what his message will be and will they find themselves in agreement when he eventually gets down to specifics?

European leaders may realize that an Obama or a McCain presidency will bring more pressure on them to respond to challenges with more help and resources for Afghanistan, dealing with Iran or even Iraq. While they found it easier to fend off such demands from a highly disliked Bush White House, it will be more difficult to say no to a president whom their publics would have voted for themselves. If McCain is elected in November - and that is certainly a prospect the Europeans should be prepared for - the demands will be similar even if he is not nearly as popular as Obama. In fact, the parameters for their decisions will also overlap.

What we will see in Berlin on Thursday evening and then again in Paris and London will be a mixture of curiosity and excitement among Europeans about a symbol which seems to connect with projections or images of the United States as they would want to see that country. But the realities of an Obama or a McCain presidency will bring with it both linkages and divisions between the symbol and the substance of the Euro-American dialogue.

The success in dealing with Euro-American relations will depend on finding shared answers to those central questions: how Europe and the U.S. need each other, what they need from each other, and for both sides to respond jointly to the question of why they need each other. Whoever is in the White House next year, we will need to discuss the substance of Euro-American interests and goals with the Europeans at multiple levels.

For most of the post-war period the answer was visible and ran straight through the middle of Berlin. Today the answer has to be found elsewhere where other walls - physical, political, economic, and religious - divide people. Just like the Berlin Wall was a common challenge in the last century, today's walls require the same common commitment to bring them down today.


I welcome any comments.
Sincerely,