in a desperate land..

of our elaborate plans, the end
of everything that stands, the end
no safety or surprise, the end.
I'll never look into youre eyes again.
Jim Morrison.



WHEN Barack Obama launched his presidential bid 18 months ago, many in Europe were attracted and amused by its exotic audacity.

Here was a 40-something African-American with less than six years of experience in politics, only two of them at national level, who hoped to win the world's toughest job.

Even more interesting was that Obama wanted to win as a European-style candidate, offering policies popular there a generation ago. Ideas such as redistributing wealth, increasing the government's regulatory role, backtracking on free trade and emphasizing "soft power" as the key foreign-policy tool had been popular in Western Europe until the late '70s, when the Thatcher revolution started to change the politics of the old continent.

European advocates of old-style "social market" tax-and-spend economics saw Obama as one of their own. "Greens" liked his opposition to drilling for oil, while the European Left as a whole marveled at his gamble to win the presidency in a conservative nation on a radical platform.

The European Left liked Obama's promise to abandon Iraq in expiation of "the original sin" of liberating it, and to acknowledge the Islamic Republic of Iran's moral equivalence with the Western democracies by promising to talks without preconditions. Obama's anti-war rhetoric, his promise of courting Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez (while attacking Alvaro Uribe the only openly pro-US leader in Latin America) and his close ties to pro-Palestinian figures also endeared him to the European left.

Nevertheless, few in Europe expected and even fewer wanted him to win.

The thrill was to see a US politician seeking to Europeanize US policies. The fear was that he might actually succeed.

Most Europeans want the US to remain American - that is, to be prepared to do the heavy lifting on their behalf, whenever needed. They like the fact that the US taxpayer spends four times more on the collective defense of the West than does his European counterpart. They like America's open markets, even as Europe clings to as many trade barriers as possible.

For more than six decades, Europe has enjoyed the privilege of being protected by the United States while indulging in anti-Americanism. If there was to be fighting, one always called in the Americans - and then, once victory was assured, damned them for being warmongers and "imperialists."

Thus, the prospect of the United States adopting the European model frightens many in Europe's elites. Today, the US is guarantor of peace, stability or at least stalemate in no fewer than 66 conflict situations across the globe. In many of those cases, Europe is a bigger beneficiary of US efforts than America itself. Remove the US from the equation, and Europe will be forced to do the job itself or retreat in the face of deadly enemies.

The last time a European power won a war on its own was in 1982, when Britain kicked Argentina out of the Falkland Islands. (Even then, it had substantial US support).

Ironically, the Americans may take the "European option" at a time when pro-US parties are in power in almost every part of the old continent. (The only major exception is Spain's mildly anti-American government.)

France and Germany have kicked anti-American leaders out of power and voted in Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, the most pro-US major political figures Europe has produced since the '50s. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi presides over the most pro-US government in his nation's history.

Earlier this month, as Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and the Rev. Jesse Jackson unleashed their anti-US rhetoric at the World Policy Conference in Evian, France, a number of European leaders from formerly communist states rose in defense of the nation that had helped them gain their freedom.

As the US election approaches, few European leaders want Obama to win. Sarkozy has expressed concern that an Obama presidency would enable Iran to speed up its nuclear program and build the bomb before a new strategy is developed in Washington.

Berlusconi has told his entourage of "uncertainties" that an Obama presidency might provoke on the international scene at a time of financial crisis and mounting Middle East tension.

Merkel has offered few clues about her preferences. But there are signs that she, too, regards Obama's positions on a number of key issues as "problematic."

The central and eastern European leaders are worried about an American "retrenchment" under Obama, allowing Russia to project power into the region as it did in Georgia.

Only the Left (in its diverse manifestations) and the anti-American Right root for Obama in the hope that he would (in the words of France's Socialist former Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine) put end America's role as " hyper-power," and, in the words of Spain's Socialist Foreign Minister Miguel-Angel Moratinos, inaugurate the "post-American era."

These are curious times. The old pastime of America-bashing notwithstanding, the American way of doing things has never been as popular in Europe as it is today. Yet many in Europe fear that Americans themselves might vote for policies that were tested and found to be failures in the old continent a generation ago.