Europe\'s Problems Likely to Loom Post-Election

LONDON - As Americans headed out on Tuesday to choose their next president, there was no disguising the fact that Europe was feeling singularly left out.

Europeans take an almost proprietorial interest in the U.S. political process. If the United States is leader of the free world, then Europe has liked to regard itself as at least an influential, if junior partner in that global enterprise.

In this year's election campaign, however, the Continent has barely figured, except as a negative example for the Republican campaign of all that is wrong with socialist state intervention and budgetary laxity.

“Thirty-five mentions for China, 27 for Israel and only one for the old Continent,” France's Le Figaro wrote this week, recalling the final Obama-Romney foreign policy debate on Oct. 22.

From left to right, European leaders were privately rooting for Barack Obama, according to the French daily. But, with no prospect of European issues influencing the outcome, one senior official reflected: “What's the point of speculating?”

New Europe Online commented in an election-eve analysis:

“As Europe keeps its eyes on the upcoming U.S. Presidential Election, it has come to the realization that the continent no longer carries the necessary geopolitical clout to influence the calculus of Washington's foreign policy in the region and beyond.”

Europe may have been largely ignored during the course of the campaign, but there seemed little doubt that its chronic problems would soon land on the desk of whoever occupies the White House for the next four years.

“The euro zone is a $17 trillion behemoth, the largest economic bloc in the world, whose members are struggling to solve a complex crisis across 27 countries and nearly as many different economic cultures,” according to an article in Foreign Policy magazine.

“And the debt crisis consuming the United States' larges t trading partner is arguably a much more immediate threat than Iran, Libyan terrorism, or any other foreign policy issue the candidates have discussed.”

According to a recent paper for the Center for European Reform:

“Regardless of the outcome of the presidential election, the euro zone crisis will be a source of major U.S. concern. Officials in the Obama administration identify the E.U.'s inability to solve its economic travails - which threaten to harm America's economic prospects - as their biggest frustration with Europe.”

Ronald H. Linden, a political scientist at Pittsburgh University's European Union Center of Excellence, noted that the European Union was by far the most important economic partner for the United States and vice versa.

“Since job creation and the economy are the major issues for the American public, restoring growth in the European economies plays an important part in the American recovery,” he wrote in an article published by the E.U's Institute for Security Studies.

If the fate of the U.S. economy is tied so closely to that of Europe, it raises the question why European issues figured so little in the campaign.

Nick Schifrin, London correspondent for ABC news, suggested in the Foreign Policy article that both candidates had an interest in not talking about the European debt crisis and that the U.S. was constrained by its own economic problems from doing much about it.

However, he concluded: “If the United States has any hope in finding a stable economic path within its own shores, the next administration will have to figure out a way out of the Euro zone debt crisis. Maybe it's time they started talking about it.”