Paul Taylor, Reuters

BRUSSELS, 21 January 2004 — The United States is seeking to engage European allies in President George W. Bush’s drive for democracy in the greater Middle East, partly to heal the rifts of the Iraq war. Initial reaction has been interested but somewhat skeptical. US officials say involving Europeans through both NATO and the European Union in the initiative launched by Bush late last year is one of the administration’s top priorities for 2004. Bush is expected to give more pointers to his approach in his State of the Union message to Congress on Tuesday.

“We are looking at ways to work better together with the EU on the greater Middle East, in security, economically and in promoting democracy and human rights, as we did in the Cold War toward Eastern Europe,” a US official in Brussels said. He said Washington wanted to build on the EU’s existing Euro-Mediterranean dialogue — known as the Barcelona process — which offers North African and East Mediterranean partner states trade and aid benefits in return for economic and political cooperation and reform.

Senior US officials began consultations at EU and NATO headquarters and in European capitals this month in preparation for joint initiatives at a series of NATO, Group of Eight and EU-US summits in June.

The aim is to convince European allies not only to take a greater share of the military burden in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also to work on a long-term effort to reshape the Arab and Muslim world promoting democracy and market economics.

EU officials welcome the consultation but some say their US partners appear to have little clear plan so far, differ among themselves, and are still at the stage of brainstorming. “We have had the Barcelona process for a long time. We have to find ways of broadening the Barcelona process and finding mechanisms for including other countries,” a spokeswoman for EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana told Reuters.

One US official compared the objective with the East-West Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), launched in Helsinki in 1975, which historians say contributed to the fall of communism in Eastern Europe by emboldening dissidents. The CSCE provided a founding charter and a forum for cooperation on security, economics and human rights. But European officials question whether such a structure is feasible for the greater Middle East, since there is no such common thread uniting a vast region stretching from the sands of Mauritania to the mountains of Afghanistan. In European eyes, the Bush administration’s willingness to work in partnership on the greater Middle East is welcome after what many see as a troubling period of US “unilateralism”.

But EU officials are critical of the low priority the US initiative gives to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which European governments see as the core dispute and key source of radicalism in the region. “The Israel-Palestine conflict is the heart of the Middle East problem. It is the main driver and the main ideological reason for terrorism,” one EU official said. The Europeans are concerned that hard-liners in Washington increasingly posit democratizing the Middle East as a pre-condition for solving the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

EU officials say the failure of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has been a key brake on the Barcelona process, with countries such as Syria and Lebanon boycotting meetings and putting a brake on cooperation in protest at Israeli actions.

The US initiative also aims to advance Bush’s security agenda of fighting the spread of weapons of mass destruction and preventing militant groups from gaining access to them. The United States and the Europeans can both claim some success in persuading Libya to forego its weapons of mass destruction programs and pressuring Iran to halt enriching uranium and accept intrusive snap inspections of its suspect nuclear program. But they still differ on the policy mix between engagement and isolation of what the United States brands “rogue states” such as Iran and Syria.

Washington is not comfortable with the differing approach to Iran and does not want the Europeans to reward Tehran prematurely with a trade agreement before it addresses other Western grievances, the US official said.