In just three years, the Brussels Forum has established itself as an elite annual conference for the key players in transatlantic relations. The Brussels Forum is what Davos is for the business elite and the Munich Security Conference for the defense politicians.

Steve Clemons was impressed by this year's Brussels Forum from March 14-16. Dan Drezner has posted some good gossip and written something more serious for Newsweek.

Constanze Stelzenmüller of the German Marshall Fund, the main organizer of the Brussels Forum, presented an interesting sounding paper: "America and Europe, seven years after 9/11: Hard power humbled, soft power exposed, and a looser, more pragmatic relationship," available for download as a PDF.

James Traub had a very interesting article about Barack Obama's foreign policy creditentials in the New York Times. While the media and many Americans -- according to polls -- question his experience, the experts apparently prefer Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton:

In mainstream foreign-policy circles, Barack Obama is seen as the true bearer of this vision. "There are maybe 200 people on the Democratic side who think about foreign policy for a living," as one such figure, himself unaffiliated with a campaign, estimates. "The vast majority have thrown in their lot with Obama."
Hillary Clinton's inner circle consists of the senior-most figures from her husband's second term in office - the former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, the former national security adviser Sandy Berger and the former United Nations ambassador Richard Holbrooke.
But drill down into one of Washington's foreign-policy hives, whether the Carnegie Endowment or the Brookings Institution or Georgetown University, and you're bound to hit Obama supporters. Most of them served in the Clinton administration, too, and thus might be expected to support Hillary Clinton. But many of these younger and generally more liberal figures have decamped to Obama. And they are ardent. As Ivo Daalder, a former National Security Council official under President Clinton who now heads up a team advising Obama on nonproliferation issues, puts it, "There's a feeling that this is a guy who's going to help us transform the way America deals with the world."

Obama got a bit frustrated at the end of an interview with James Traub, because of the constant criticism of his lack of foreign experience:

He wanted to know what kind of experience Clinton supposedly had that he didn't, and what kind of crisis she was supposedly better suited to than he, and why "toughness" had become a stand-in for experience, and how Clinton could get credit for it when she failed to stand up to Bush on the Iraq vote. We batted all this around. Finally he said, "Ask Nye why Hillary's paint-by-the-numbers foreign policy makes her more qualified to handle a crisis when for most of our history our crises have come from using force when we shouldn't, not by failing to use force."

I find it difficult to form an opinion on the foreign policy positions of many presidential candidates based on their statements so far. While I consider Barack Obama very impressive (incl. the quotes in this article), I found his Foreign Affairs essay rather superficial.

I asked a sampling of European analysts what Europe could do to help stabilize Iraq. Most of the 14 respondents from ten European countries note the high stakes for the continent and its limited capabilities to contribute to stabilization efforts.

Still, the answers do show a new willingness to contribute, but only on European terms. Many respondents suggest that Europe should pursue different policies than the US or make support dependent on more involvement in the decision-making process.

First and foremost, European analysts do not support deploying troops under US command. However, some suggest a quid pro quo where Europe provides military resources and training if given a real stake in an international effort.

Second, several respondents recommend that France mediate discussions among internal factions in Iraq. Efforts could focus on dialogue with groups that the US refuses to talk to and shall be aimed at reinvigorating Iraqi nationalism.

Third, a diplomatic offensive involving and pressuring Iran and Syria is seen as essential, but experts also point to Turkey. Maintaining peace in Kurdistan could be encouraged through EU membership negotiations.

I have written the survey conclusion for my day job at Atlantic Community: Europe Should Help Iraq, But Not Follow US Lead. It is the second part of our survey.

Many Germans wanted Merkel to do the same on CIA overflights and missile defense. Her decision to downplay these disagreements and focus on common interests has given U.S.-EU ties their biggest boost in a decade.

In recent months George W. Bush has rediscovered the virtues of having allies and working within alliances. In every big challenge confronting the US – from Iraq to Afghanistan, from Iran to North Korea – he has sought to enlist the help of America’s traditional allies. But in many cases the very allies who bitterly complained about the US president’s unilateralism only a short time ago have been reluctant to do their part in helping multilateralism succeed.
Nowhere is this more true than in Europe. Last month's Nato summit should have been the time for a rousing call for the alliance to act effectively and transform itself into an organisation that would establish partnerships around the world to address common threats. But progress was minimal, because the Europeans were unable to seize the opportunity presented by an America that has realised it cannot solve these problems alone.

When European commentators say they are still yearning for an end to American unilateralism, moral crusades, and the influence of "fundamentalist evangelicals," what they really mean is that they are longing for a United States just like secular, post-national, consensus-seeking, Social Democratic Europe. But, of course, even with Democrats controlling the House and the Senate, it ain't gonna happen.

Europe yearns for a pragmatic, problem-fixing America, engaged in the world's real problems and building international collaborations to meet these challenges. America has departed this space on ideological quests and left a giant void in global affairs that the Europeans have had to partially fill.

Many critics of the media believe that negative coverage could cost the United States the war. By their reasoning, the United States could fail in Iraq only if our national resolve falters, which could only happen if the American public gets an unfairly pessimistic view of the situation as a result of the media's fixation on violence and other bad news. If the United States and its coalition partners do not prevail, however, the failure will most likely result from events on the ground there, not from an untimely wavering of domestic political support. In fact, more than three years into the campaign, the U.S. body politic remains surprisingly tolerant of the mission in Iraq and, in general, resists calls for immediate withdrawal, despite far more bad news than anyone in the administration forecast or even thought possible when the war was first sold to the nation and launched. (...)
Indeed, even as President George W. Bush's personal popularity among the U.S. population has declined to well below 40 percent, a Pew poll conducted in the spring of 2006 found that 54 percent of U.S. citizens still expected some level of success in establishing a democracy in Iraq. If the media are so consistently reporting only bad news and creating an image of a failure in the works, it is not clear on what information this 54 percent is basing its guarded optimism.

The U.S. military's estimates, buried in a little-noticed recent report to Congress, are drawn from a daily tabulation of "significant activity reports," about "incidents observed by or reported to U.S. forces," known as the SIGACT database. do not distinguish deaths from injuries, nor between Iraqi civilians and members of the army, police or other government security forces. The estimates "are derived from unverified initial reports submitted by Coalition elements responding to an incident; the inconclusivity of these numbers constrains them to be used for comparative purposes only," says the report, titled "Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq." But the comparisons they enable show that average casualty rates for Iraqis have sky-rocketed from just over 20 per day in the first quarter of 2004, to nearly 120 per day between May and August of 2006. (...) By way of comparison, Human Rights Watch has estimated Saddam Hussein's regime killed 250,000 to 290,000 people over 20 years.

Thanks to the colossal cock-up in Iraq, virtually no one has taken a hard look at the flailing occupation of Afghanistan and asked whether, in retrospect, it was also a mistake to invade that country. No one asks that. Afghanistan's the ultimate uncontroversial war—even liberals point to it approvingly to show they're not reflexively dovish. But Stephen Zunes is right -- the Afghan war's not going that well, Osama bin Laden has eluded capture, and second-guessing the various decisions made back in 2001 to go to war really shouldn't be out of bounds.