Europe's Continent Envy

Olivier Doulier-Pool / Getty Images As Obama jets off to Asia, Europeans are still licking their wounds over his decision to blow off the Berlin Wall anniversary. Alex Massie on the Atlantic crowd’s case of continent envy. Plus, our Big Fat Story on the toughest issues Obama faces in Asia.

No sooner had Barack Obama been sworn in as the 44th president of the United States than foreign ministries and their embassies in Washington began an unseemly race to see which country could secure the honor of the first meeting with the young, dashing, glamorous American president.

This "competition" was, in many respects, absurd. But, trivial though it was, it did not pass unnoticed in Europe that the first foreign leader welcomed to the Obama White House was the new Japanese prime minister, Taro Aso. Was this, as some speculated at the time, a sign of things to come?

If, after all, Obama could find the time to travel to Copenhagen to lobby for Chicago’s doomed Olympics bid could he not also have gone to Berlin to mark the anniversary of the greatest allied success—albeit one shared with many other players—since the Second World War itself?

For years, there has been talk that the United States would shift its gaze from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Victory in the Cold War was supposed to be the signal that Europe was old news and the new action was to be found in Asia. Nonetheless, successive presidents still found themselves tugged back to Europe. George H.W. Bush had to contend with the disintegration of the Soviet Union; Bill Clinton found himself embroiled in the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. The long-awaited shift from east to west was delayed.

Until, perhaps, now. The symbolism of the American president’s travels this week is as suggestive as it is telling. Rather than attend the celebrations marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Obama is traveling to Asia.

Outlining the details of a trip that takes Obama to Tokyo, Singapore, Shanghai, Beijing, and Seoul, Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, said: “The overarching theme is that America is a Pacific nation, it understands the importance of Asia in the 21st century, and it's going to be engaged in a very comprehensive way." In other words, Asia may be China's backyard, but the United States will not give up its own strategic, economic, military and political interests in the region.

The president’s decision to skip Berlin was worth at least one raised eyebrow. If, after all, Obama could find the time to travel to Copenhagen to lobby for Chicago’s doomed Olympics bid could he not also have gone to Berlin to mark the anniversary of the greatest allied success—albeit one shared with many other players—since the Second World War itself?

• Big Fat Story: The Toughest Issues Facing Obama in Asia

• Lewis M. Simons: Obama's 'Smart Power' PlayOn the other hand, the festivities in Berlin had an elegiac quality. The year 1989 and the crumbling of the Warsaw Pact were, arguably, the last time history on a global scale and with worldwide ramifications was made in Europe. It marked, in Francis Fukuyama's famous phrase, “The End of History.” In Europe, at least.

Since then, the continent has largely turned inward, concentrating on the pressing, painstaking task of welcoming the countries of Central and Eastern Europe into the European Union. That has proved difficult, time-consuming, and expensive, leaving Paris and Berlin, in particular, with little time or inclination to look too far beyond the continent’s borders.