Obama’s right. Europe’s ‘free riders’ need to take the initiative on Syria

So to the settling of scores. One year from leaving office Barack Obama has, in an epochal interview with the Atlantic, spelt out what he thinks of his European allies. The terms are not generous. Much has been made of Obama’s comments about David Cameron having been “distracted” away from the focus Libya deserved, post-intervention; and of his remark about Nicolas Sarkozy wanting to “trumpet” French military action over the skies of Benghazi in 2011. But these are small twists, minute irritants – expect PR officers to smooth them over. The key message was elsewhere, and it was much more powerful. It came when Obama spoke of Europeans as “free riders” of the global order and of American might.

The president describes his European allies as powers unable or unwilling to match fine words with resources; prone to asking the US to act but incapable of committing themselves to the efforts required for a sustainable outcome. The lesson is clear: an era has passed, and Europe must now become an effective autonomous actor on major security issues if it is to survive as a stable, liberal, democratic, rules-based entity.

That is not to say that the US role within Nato, as a security guarantor to Europe, will altogether disappear. Obama has never wanted that and neither, one suspects, would his successor. But a page has been turned and the US can no longer be relied upon to address the chaos that is spilling out of the Arab world, and weakening the central tenets of Europe’s liberal order.

Reaching that point where Europe can assume a wider regional security role, and create the foundations of a genuine European foreign and security policy, is a tall order – but it is a task it can shirk no longer. The first requirement will be diagnostic: evaluating how we ended up in this dismal situation in the first place. Europe’s big three powers are Britain, France and Germany. Each carries a large share of responsibility.

Of course Obama has an agenda here. This is a man who scripted his own narrative by writing his autobiography at the age of 43, so one should not be surprised that he is now burnishing his legacy. But whatever one may now think of his foreign policy record, Obama was clear from day one that the days of US “humanitarian” interventionism were over. Under his watch, the US has acted abroad only when its national security interests are deemed at stake – witness thedrone programme. Syria never qualified as a national security issue in Obama’s eyes. Libya just did, but mostly because he was pushed to act by members of his administration and by European and Middle Eastern allies. It’s not the decision to prevent a massacre in Benghazi that he regrets; it’s the lack of “follow-up” from Europeans, who are, after all, just across the Mediterranean from Libya.