GMF - The German Marshall Fund of the United States - Strengthening Transatlantic Cooperation

This essay was originally posted on the International Herald Tribune. It can be read here in its original form. 

The sigh of relief in Berlin was palpable. It’s not that Germans and Europeans had balked at the thought of a President Romney. Sure, remarks like ‘'Russia is our No.1 geopolitical foe'’ had raised eyebrows in the Continent’s capitals, but it seemed clear that a Romney administration would, if elected, pursue a fairly centrist foreign policy agenda.

Senior Romney advisers like Robert Zoellick or Robert M. Kimmitt are respected in Europe. And — although most European policymakers ended up working well with the Obama administration — there have certainly been disappointments and disagreements: Guantánamo, missile defense, drone wars, stimulus-vs.-austerity, to name but a few. It’s also true that President Obama’s new mandate is narrow. America, if last night’s snapshot is a remotely accurate guide, remains divided. Congressional gridlock and the Jan. 1 “fiscal cliff” have lost none of their menacing urgency.

So why the relief? Simple. None of us can afford the luxury of new beginnings. The feared re-run of a whipsawing election nightmare was averted. Yes, there’ll be a new secretary of state in Washington, but a candidate like Senator John Kerry would be another pair of safe hands. And a new administration would have been bogged down by innumerable and endless confirmation hearings. (For Americans echoing Henry Kissinger’s complaint about there being no single phone number in Europe: try calling a midlevel bureaucrat in Washington in the first year of a new administration.)

The plain fact is: now that the sometimes appalling, occasionally entertaining, and only intermittently edifying spectacle of these U.S. elections is behind us, it’s time to get serious again. The crisis on both sides of the Atlantic is not just about banks or mortgages. What’s still at stake is nothing less than the resilience of our economies, the fairness of our societies, the stability of our democracies — and the preservation of a free and decent international order.

Leaders on both sides of the Atlantic have limited credit and leeway from their worried publics to devote resources abroad that might be used at home. All of which means: disagreements or no, Americans and Europeans need each other now more than ever. And, frankly, it’s time for Europeans to step up and say: “Yes, we can, too.”

Constanze Stelzenmüller is senior trans-Atlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.