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  Europe is ready to work with the Obama administration, French ambassador Pierre Vimont told a UB audience last week.

By ANN WHITCHER-GENTZKE

Published: April 15, 2009

The new Obama administration, along with increased European leadership on the world stage, offer “great opportunities” amid the challenges the world faces today, Pierre Vimont, French ambassador to the United States, said during a visit to UB last week. Europe is more ready than in the past, he added, to “become a more true and serious partner to the U.S. in the trans-Atlantic relationship.”

Speaking before a packed audience in the Center for the Arts Drama Theatre, Vimont said he was “humbled” to be at UB, where so many distinguished French intellectuals have held the Melodia E. Jones Chair since its endowment 80 years ago. It also was in some sense a speech among “family,” Vimont said, alluding to the estrangement in recent years between France and the United States. Not so long ago, giving a talk at a U.S. university on trans-Atlantic relationships could be compared to “asking Prince Dracula to chair a blood donors’ conference,” he joked. Vimont, who spoke for about 45 minutes in impeccable English before taking questions, also poked fun at the careful and nuanced speech that is a diplomat’s stock-in-trade.

Paradoxically, Vimont said, the doubt and lack of confidence in the trans-Atlantic partnership can be traced to the heady moment in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union began to break apart. “At the time when the Western world would have seemed to have won the war against the Communist regime, that’s precisely the moment when we started to doubt a little bit about what we had to do [in international policy],” he said.

Whether in Iraq or the Middle East, whether involving terrorist groups, issues of climate change, immigration or African poverty, “we found as each new crisis emerged that we don’t have much efficiency as we thought we had.” Furthermore, Vimont argued, if one examines present-day realities in Afghanistan, Darfur, Zimbabwe and elsewhere, “instead of the great hope that we had at the beginning of the 1990s that the trans-Atlantic partnership was definitely the winner…we find ourselves in a sort of a powerless situation that is a bit of a surprise.”

Indeed, said Vimont, these sobering realities can be partially explained by “the global world,” a term that while frequently bandied about, is often misunderstood as to its full implications for the balance of power among nations. In fact, the very expression “global world” no longer means one or two international leaders, but rather the full complement of leaders, including those of emerging nations. “They deserve to have their seat at some of the major international institutions and with whom we need to start a new dialogue,” he said.

Today, Vimont said, forward, efficient leadership is often called for in moments of international crisis, even if such leadership may need to veer from traditional, time-consuming diplomatic maneuvers. As an example of this time-efficient approach, he cited French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s advocacy in the Georgia crisis last year when France held the European Union presidency. Sarkozy decided to quickly intervene, making a few phone calls to other EU leaders, but largely bypassing the usual steps before talking directly with Russian and Georgian leaders.

Although a cease-fire resulted in Georgia, some European partners disagreed with Sarkozy’s approach, Vimont reported. “But as President Sarkozy has said time and again since then, what do we want? Do we want a quick result? Or do we want to abide by the normal rules that would have certainly prevented us from getting this result?”

In the short term, Vimont urged attention to three priorities in the trans-Atlantic partnership. He defined these as trying to solve the economic crisis with the G20 general conclusions translated to actual operational goals; achieving a common strategy for Afghanistan, “one that is not exclusively a military operation”; and attention to the Middle East. Without progress in that part of the world, he said, “our relationship with the whole Arab world will still be fraught with many dangers, many threats and many difficulties as we go ahead. To do that…we will have to work together—the American leadership on one side, the European leadership on the other—to improve our methods.”