Der Spiegel, the influential German weekly news magazine, is giving Barack Obama the kind of treatment it once gave George W. Bush.
Obama’s West Point speech, sniffed Der Spiegel, sounded “false” and left “both realists and dreamers distraught.”
“One didn’t have to be a cadet on Tuesday to feel a little bit of nausea on hearing Obama’s speech,” mused the magazine. “An additional 30,000 US soldiers are to march into Afghanistan — and then they will march right back out again. America is going to war — and from there it will continue ahead to peace. It was the speech of a Nobel War Prize laureate.”
Fortunately much of Spiegel‘s coverage is of a much higher quality than this. There’s an interesting piece on a study showing that for every infidel Al-Qaeda kills, it murders eight fellow Muslims. A piece summarizing German reactions to Obama’s West Point speech is thoughtful and useful. For Americans who don’t read German but want to keep an eye on what people in the EU’s richest, largest and most important country are thinking, the Spiegel site is worth bookmarking.
That said, the cheap cynicism of this particular article makes for disturbing reading. Americans disheartened by the descent of our media here at home into vapidity can take comfort; in some ways Europe has surpassed us.
In the Bush years, Americans opposed to the administration’s policies saw European criticism of Bush as a vindication of their own views and a sign of Bush’s policy failures. To some degree this was true. But there was more. A shallow and mean-spirited anti-Americanism really does exist in Europe, and it has already begun to turn on Obama.
The problem is not that Herr Steingart disagrees with Obama’s policy in Afghanistan. This is a complicated subject and many thoughtful people in both parties have qualms about a long war in a remote country with a weak state and corrupt leaders. The problem is that in its snarky and supercilious way the article doesn’t so much refute Obama’s serious and closely argued speech as it dismisses it. It assumes there is no case to be made for the policy and goes on from there.
This is the way many people treated George W. Bush and it is, to say the least, unpleasant to see Europeans getting ready to serve President Obama from the same dish.