European parliamentarians from the new European Conservatives and

Reformists bloc told an audience at the Heritage Foundation Thursday

that the transatlantic alliance was being harmed by the pursuit of
deeper European Union integration on defense policy, and what they
claimed was a lack of commitment to the alliance on the part of the
Obama administration. Geoffrey Van Orden of the British Conservative
Party, Adam Beilan of Poland's Law and Justice Party, and Jan Zahradil
of the Czech Civic Democratic Party spoke at a discussion moderated
by Sally McNamara, Senior Policy Analyst for Heritage's Margaret
Thatcher Center for Freedom.

McNamara and Van Orden began the discussion by lamenting the

European Parliament's recent rejection of a bank data sharing deal
with the US, which they said was crucial for cracking down on terrorist
financing. The vote, they said, had been driven by anti-Americanism,
and Van Orden described how left-wing MEPs had stood up and
cheered the result as a great victory. The ratification of the Lisbon
Treaty was "regrettable," he said, since it had given additional powers
to the parliament enabling it to kill the agreement. He went on to
describe how Lisbon and its backers were threatening to undermine
NATO by increasing the EU's power in defense and military policy, even
though this would not bring any additional defense capabilities to the
table. The British Conservatives and others had left the center-right
European People's Party grouping to join the European Conservatives
and Reformists because many EPP politicians favored further
integration and bringing European nations under "diktat from
Brussels." Creating a unified EU defense structure, Van Orden said,
was really just an effort to make the EU a separate, rival power to the
United States, rather than the close partner it should be. Van Orden
pledged that if the Conservatives won the upcoming election in Britain,
the new government would work to reform and revitalize NATO and
preserve the translatlantic partnership.

Zahradil and Beilan focused on the European missile defense system

that had been planned under the Bush administration, with
installations to be built in the Czech Republic and Poland. The threat
from Iran, Beilan said, made such a system critical to the security of
the West. They were extremely disappointed by the Obama
administration's decision to cancel the plan--which, as Beilan and
McNamara noted indignantly, was announced last September 17, the
70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939. Obama's
move, Beilan and Zahradil both agreed, was a cynical political
concession to Russia, part of the effort to "reset" relations with Russia.
This reset, they said, was bound to fail, as Russia had made no real
concessions in return, was still obstructing Western efforts to stop
Iran's nuclear program, and continuing its aggressive designs on its
former Soviet neighbors. Beilan said that Moscow was illegally issuing
Russian passports to members of the Russian ethnic minority in
countries such as Estonia and Ukraine, in order to set up a pretext for
aggression. The same thing had been done in the breakaway regions
of Georgia prior to the 2008 war, when Russia had invaded in the name
of protecting its own "citizens."

All the participants agreed that continued US partnership with Europe,

through NATO, was crucial to the security of all involved. Missile
defense and standing up to Russia were both necessary components of
this engagement.