Remain active in the world, Obama tells EU

US president Barack Obama played commander- and salesman-in-chief at the Hanover trade fair yesterday, urging Europe to buy more American goods – and to buy into doing more for its own security.

Failing to do so, he warned, would bring even greater threats outside to Europe’s door as, within, populist forces continued to capitalise on peoples’ economic frustrations and security fears.

Quoting William Butler Yeats, Mr Obama warned that dangers in Europe now lurked where “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”.

“If a unified, peaceful, liberal, pluralistic, free-market Europe begins to doubt itself, begins to question the progress that’s been made over the last several decades, then we can’t expect the progress that is just now taking hold in many places around the world will continue,” he said.

At the end of a six-day tour, Mr Obama said the world needed a “strong and prosperous and democratic and united Europe”.

But, in these “unsettling times”, all the world saw was vocal European critics of TTIP, the controversial proposed EU-US trade deal, and a surge in support for populists who “try to exploit those fears and frustrations and channel them in a destructive way”.

“When the future is uncertain there seems to be an instinct in human nature to withdraw to the perceived comfort of our own tribe, our own sect, our own nationality: people who look like us, sound like us,” said Mr Obama. “But in today’s world more than in any time in our human history that is a false comfort.”

Mr Obama took a tour of the Hanover trade fair with German chancellor Angela Merkel and, in a speech, warned an audience that Europe must resist temptation to follow “dangerous forces” who “threaten to pull the world backwards”.

Hard-hitting speech

In a hard-hitting speech directed as much at Donald Trump supporters in the US as far-right cheerleaders in Europe, Mr Obama warned that such “twisted thinking can lead to oppression, segregation, internment camps and to Srebrenica” – the 1995 genocide that claimed 8,000 Bosnian lives.

Drawing a line to European frustrations over economic divisions, Mr Obama said it was essential that people saw globalisation as a force for good, capable of fighting tax evasion and spreading wealth fairly.

“If neither the burdens nor the benefits of our economy are being fairly distributed, it’s no wonder that people rise up and reject globalisation,” he said. Days after warning British voters against leaving the EU, he underlined once more that the European Union “remains one of the greatest political and economic achievements of modern times”.

Further efforts at European unity were the best means of tackling inequality, he said, rather than a return to nationalist thinking. US-European co-operation had ended the Cold War peacefully, overcoming the financial crisis and sealing the Paris climate deal. Mr Obama also singled out Dr Merkel for not turning away from “our fellow human beings who are here now and who need help now”.

Ahead of July’s Nato summit in Warsaw, Mr Obama announced a quadrupling to about 300 of US special ground troops in Syria. Despite facing unprecedented global security threats, Mr Obama noted his announcement stood in sharp contrast to ongoing European excuses for still falling short of Nato military spending targets.

In a recent interview, Mr Obama dubbed Europeans “free riders” for relying on US financing of their own military defence. He chose gentler language in Hanover, telling his audience: “Sometimes Europe has been complacent about its own defence.”

But he had a chance to repeat his arguments in more robust terms at a closed-door meeting with Dr Merkel, UK prime minister David Cameron, Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi and French president Francois Hollande.

Eight years ago in Berlin, a younger Mr Obama promised, if elected president, to end the unilateralism of the early Bush years, telling a euphoric Berlin crowd: “No one nation, no matter how large or how powerful, can defeat such challenges alone.”

That message held yesterday, as an older and wiser Mr Obama warned Europe: “The answer is not to start cutting off from one another, rather it is to work together.”