By JOHN VINOCUR
Back in 2011, when the United States killed Osama bin Laden in the middle of the Pakistani night, Barack Obama said that “as a nation, there is nothing we can’t do.” Mr. Obama told the world that America would be “relentless in defense of our citizens and our friends and allies.”
Two and a half years later, the Obama Administration doesn’t seem to be relentless in defense of anything beyond its direct domestic political interests—with the exception of its undiscerning spying operations on countries that pass as extended family.
What’s novel here is that in Europe, doubts about America’s wisdom, strength and resolve are increasingly focused on the person of the president. Beyond the espionage, think of Mr. Obama’s hesitations on Iran and turnabouts concerning Syria—or his role in lengthening the U.S. budget shutdown, or in providing America with a new but crippled national health program.
These days, and to varying degrees, the governments of France, Britain and Germany regard Mr. Obama as a problem. No longer expressed only in private, the notion represents a decline in the reflexive acceptance and respect that had cushioned European attitudes about his historic presidency.
In Germany, Die Welt, a consistently pro-American newspaper, regretted things were now at a point where it appeared the U.S. was trying to confirm every prejudice against it. This was happening, the paper’s publisher wrote in a front-page editorial last month, “under an American president who was once longed for in Europe like the Messiah, and whom Old Europeans finally saw as one—a president who didn’t arrive wearing Texas cowboy boots, and instead tucked his copy of Kant under his pillow. But that was fiction.”
Last Thursday, just as negotiations with Iran picked up in Geneva, I heard doubts from a high-level European security official, somewhat akin to Saudi Arabia and Israel’s concerns, about how much reality Mr. Obama wanted to deal with concerning Tehran’s drive toward atomic weapons.
The main subject of an hour’s conversation was whether Iran believed the U.S. and the West would attack if Tehran refused to dismantle its nuclear program. In relation to Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad holds on to power in increasing comfort, Mr. Obama had stated on American television in September, “My suspicion is that the Iranians recognize they shouldn’t draw a lesson that we haven’t struck [Syria] to think we won’t strike Iran.”
Referring at first to circumstances in January, when the Obama Administration pulled away from a plan to furnish military assistance to the Syrian rebels alongside France and Britain, the European official said, “it remains true that Iran doesn’t believe the U.S. and the West will strike.”
He added: “This is even more the case since the most recent Syrian episode. The Iranians have discarded the idea.” The U.S. announced Friday that it was withdrawing one of its two aircraft carriers operating in the Persian Gulf region—a gesture certain not to add to Iran’s caution.
Mr. Obama has also described a combination of “credible threat of force” and “rigorous diplomatic effort” as being able to lead to “a deal” with the Iranians. He accompanied this with an assurance that regime change in Iran is not an American goal.
The European official’s view of this approach was negative. Rather, he said, to create adequate pressure on the Tehran leadership, “You have to challenge the Iranian homeland and the Islamic Republic as a unique world model.”
One of the allies’ problems in dealing with the president, according to the official, is that Mr. Obama “does not do consultation, and he doesn’t do discussion with allies. He reports, and he describes his analytical process.”
This was in remarkable contrast to the public assertions in Geneva of total solidarity among the nations of the West—France, Britain, Germany and the U.S.—pressing for an end to Iran’s development of nukes.
But there is a striking public side to the concerns about Mr. Obama.
In ” Angela Merkel : The Chancellor and Her World,” a biography by veteran journalist Stefan Kornelius that was published in Germany in July, Mrs. Merkel is described as regarding the president as inscrutable. According to the book, the chancellor has exchanged expressions of discomfort with Nicolas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown about why Mr. Obama is “so peculiar, so unapproachable, so lacking in warmth” (my translation).
The book goes on to describe contact with the president as “revealing another Obama than the public image would let you suspect.” According to the book’s account of the chancellor’s thinking, she has diminishing confidence that Mr. Obama’s politically “dysfunctional” America is capable of understanding itself. And she is irritated by stereotypes like “Obama, the Angel of Peace.”
An English translation of Mr. Kornelius’s book, bearing the added words “The Authorized Biography” on its jacket, is scheduled for publication this week in the U.S. The book’s “authorized” aspect was legitimized by Mrs. Merkel’s presence at the Berlin launch party for the original German edition.
All of this came before the disclosure that the U.S. was spying on the chancellor’s cellphone calls. The man she defeated for re-election in September, Peer Steinbrück, suggested a week ago it was unlikely that Mr. Obama was not aware of her surveillance.
The French and the British are observant of the chancellor’s struggle to revive her trust in Mr. Obama. When it comes to the president, France and Britain’s different histories, and their different sense of nuance and diplomatic opportunity, shape their own real doubts.
* Mr. Vinocur is former executive editor of the International Herald Tribune.