What If McCain Wins?(International Edition; POINT OF VIEW)(John McCain )(Essay)

Byline: Denis MacShane; MacShane is a Labour M.P. and Britain's former minister for Europe.

If John McCain becomes the next U.S. president, it will send europe into a fit of despair not seen on the old continent in decades. After all, Barack Obama is Europe's candidate, so much so that French President Nicolas Sarkozy--so happy to spend a vacation day with George W. Bush--turned Obama's fleeting summer stopover in Paris into an orchestrated photo op, to milk maximum publicity from the Democratic candidate. In Britain, Conservative M.P.s seem to have forgotten that McCain had been the keynote foreign speaker at the Conservative Party

conference just last year and now openly wear Obama buttons as they gossip in the House of Commons corridors and tearoom. German Christian Democrats from Angela Merkel's party swelled the 200,000-strong crowd who listened to Obama in Berlin in July. For the European left, Obama is the savior, McCain irrelevant. The intelligentsia and the political weeklies in every European capital seem to have long ago agreed to write off McCain and splash Obama's face on every front cover. If he loses, narrowly or otherwise, there will be a sense that America has lost its senses.

Ever since McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, Europe has looked down its collective nose at the thought of a McCain presidency. Little matter that Europe is awash with populist politicians of its own. Italy's Silvio Berlusconi or the late Jorg Haider in Austria proved that crude sloganeering and appeals to the gut rather than the intellect were as common in Europe, despite the self-regarding belief of Europeans that their political life is conducted on a higher plane than in America. McCain has been seen as the quintessential American from Mars who appeared to Europeans from Venus as a politician who never saw a geopolitical problem that could not be solved by throwing troops at it.

By contrast, instead of taking steps on its own to shape a united European Union that is willing to invest in security, extend the euro to Britain and lower the protectionist barriers that distort the single market, Europe has invested all of its hopes for a happy tomorrow in Obama. But in the excitement of waiting for the end of the Bush-Cheney years, which Europe blamed for all the woes of the world, few have examined the small print of his ideology. He has made clear that America would never take orders from the United Nations, yet the Europeans said they wanted more multilateral global decision making. He has said Jerusalem should be the undivided capital of Israel, while Europeans have long ago awarded half of Jerusalem to ...