II. The Domestic Contexts of Transatlantic Relations

Independent Task Force Report
The Future of Transatlantic Relations

February 1999

Council on Foreign Relations

 

Recent years have produced an increase in national domestic preoccupations throughout the industrial democracies. This is not necessarily a reason for unconstrained melancholy. With the end of the Soviet threat, governments and citizens are right to recognize that this is a period in which the sharp reduction of classical external security threats permits them to concentrate more than in most of this century on the challenging tasks of reforming and revitalizing their societies. Politicians and voters have become more inward-looking and less disposed to commit substantially to foreign endeavors, especially if they may be costly. Their willingness to take seriously calls from national security elites to engage in long-term strategic thinking or action is equally restrained. This is certainly true of publics in both Western Europe and the United States and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future in the absence of a major external event that folks believe affects their personal lives and prospects. Transatlantic governments are importantly limited by these domestic factors as they attempt to cooperate to defend their national interests, to meet proximate threats, and to try to shape the international environment for the new millennium.

In Europe, politicians and public opinion are largely self-absorbed by a range of national problems: stimulating economic growth, lowering unemployment, downsizing the welfare state, dealing with the consequences of an aging population, ensuring adequate health care, combating crime, and reducing drug use. (Many of the European policy responses to these challenges seem increasingly borrowed from across the North Sea and the Atlantic.) All these problems are properly matters of debate in the parliaments and in other public discourse within the nations of the European Union and in EU bodies themselves. Most of whatever energy, resources, and political will that remains within the EU apart from these domestic tasks is devoted to the important efforts of Brussels to implement Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) successfully, to reform the internal decision-making structures and practices of the Union, to stabilize east central Europe through EU enlargement, and, most fundamentally, to construct a “Community of Fate” among Union members.

All this means that Europe’s willingness and perhaps even capacity to join with the United States in dealing in any strategic and comprehensive way with the challenges and opportunities of the international system apart from those on or near the continent in the next five years may be modest. In some sense, this is understandable. Both EMU and EU enlargement remain unfinished tasks. Both could go quite wrong without continuing concentrated attention from Europe’s heads of government, senior civil servants, and to a lesser extent, parliaments. At the same time, as we shall see throughout this report, such absorption by Western Europe with its own immediate problems and vicinity does leave managing most of the world’s other international security responsibilities primarily to the United States, often with minimum assistance from America’s European Allies.

This is especially true with respect to the instinctive hesitancy of most European countries, except for Britain and to a lesser degree France, to join the United States in the threat or use of force outside the continent to meet serious dangers to vital Western interests. With their almost exclusive emphasis on nonmilitary instruments to deal with virtually every international security problem, allied timidity with respect to the use of force will be a persistent problem for America and for the transatlantic alliance in the period ahead. Nothing less is required on the part of the Europeans than to create, with American assistance as desired, a new post-Cold War strategic culture for the nations of the European Union that is consistent with the global security challenges facing the West in the next decade.

This brings us to the United States, which has also been going through its most insular period in more than 60 years. There are good reasons for this. The United States as a society is safer and more content than in many decades. There is no present competitor to American global leadership and probably none on the horizon for the next decade or more. Serious security threats to U.S. vital interests are at present confined, except on the Korean peninsula, to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction into the hands of America’s enemies, either rogue nations or nonstate actors, and to international grand terrorism. The U.S. domestic economy has been fundamentally sound and performing well for seven years, even so far in the face of the global consequences of the economic crises in Asia and beyond.

This relatively benign external situation has permitted most Americans, including the political class, to center their attention on the many challenges that confront U.S. society: the state of the economy, education, crime, drug abuse, health care, and welfare reform. In addition, many other issues have been driven from public scrutiny in 1998 by the domestic scandal engulfing the White House and questions related to the legal ramifications of President Clinton’s actions and statements regarding his personal behavior. All this has meant that foreign policy concerns are not of much day-to-day interest to most Americans (the domestic effects of economic globalization and international terrorism are sometimes exceptions). More than anything else, this explains why the U.S. media are so domestically oriented, and why coverage of foreign affairs is now so limited, indeed poor, in the United States.

Every opinion poll shows that U.S. citizens, like their European counterparts, want their government to concentrate primarily on the nation’s domestic problems. This does not mean that there is a new wave of isolationism on this side of the Atlantic. The U.S. public recognizes that American interests are ever more entwined with the international system, particularly with regard to the country’s economic prosperity. It is noteworthy that despite the end of the Soviet threat and changing demographic patterns in the United States, the percentage of Americans today who believe that the United States should maintain or increase its commitment to NATO is a strong 64 percent, compared with 70 percent in 1986. U.S. citizens do appear to be willing to support in principle a leading U.S. diplomatic and military stance in the world. (Polling suggests that 73 percent of Americans believe that the United States will play a greater international role in the next ten years than it does at present.)

Concurrently, Americans are very cautious about Washington’s leadership and activism in the world if it brings with it a heavy price for the United States, either in blood or in treasure. To put it differently, the U.S. public seems willing to allow its government to engage vigorously in the world as long as it does not get into trouble in regions or on issues that are not vital to the United States, and if the burden of this international activism—and this is a crucial point—is fairly shared over time by others, especially America’s allies. At the same time, as we saw in 1993 in Somalia and in 1982 in Lebanon, sharp international reversals, particularly in situations not connected to vital or important American interests, can cause the United States to pull back in a spasm from overseas involvements, with or without the allies.

The general lack of curiosity about events abroad on the part of the U.S. public produces a situation in which special interest groups and one-issue lobbies have more influence on U.S. foreign policy than ever before. And most of these groups, whether they concentrate on human rights, abortion, environmental matters, or the concerns of various ethnic diasporas, have no particular connection to the Atlantic relationship. (Business lobbies with a transatlantic perspective are an important exception to this trend.) Thus, when inevitable disputes arise across the Atlantic on individual issues, these interest groups are often likely to have more influence in Congress—a Congress less attentive to foreign affairs than any since the late 1930s—than do more general calls for transatlantic solidarity on behalf of broader regional and global purposes. This, in part, explains the inclination of some in Congress instinctively to want to punish our allies through sanctions when they do not agree with the direction or details of U.S. policy.

These domestic factors, as well as a sustained U.S. difficulty in dealing with the new geopolitical situation, have in recent years sometimes led to a problem of inconstancy in American policy. The allies can hardly be expected to back U.S. policies if they are not sure such policies will be in place tomorrow or the next day. There is thus a palpable worry in European capitals that on any particular issue, Washington may well change its mind overnight and, without consultation, leave the allies in the lurch or retreat because of domestic scandal from its international leadership responsibilities, at least for a time. The past few years have also seen occasional triumphalist attitudes emanating from Washington that are arrogant, self-righteous, and not backed up by U.S. action and resources everywhere they are needed, and that harmfully feed the psychology of dependence among the allies.

In virtually the same moment, one often hears wails of American frustration that its transcendent power does not seem to mean that it can get its way quickly in the world, or sometimes at all. This U.S. frustration occasionally leads to unilateral American action that, while in certain instances the only realistic U.S. recourse, generally makes it more difficult for European governments to support the United States even when they agree. In the long run, it is this temptation in Washington to act without the allies—not American isolationism, which every poll shows is quite unlikely—that will cause the most difficulties from the U.S. side in the transatlantic relationship. With respect to its European allies, Washington does not consult enough; it does not listen enough; it does not respect the views of the allies enough (good ideas are not invented only in Washington); and it does not sufficiently acknowledge allied contributions to international peace and stability (including European financial contributions to the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund [IMF], and other international organizations).

These domestic preoccupations on the two sides of the Atlantic, along with the adjustment of their traditional working democracies to globalization and its effects, do not make robust U.S.- European cooperation easy. Nevertheless, as is indicated in this report, there are numerous examples in recent years of successful transatlantic collaboration on behalf of common interests and international peace and security. But these factors, along with the fact that the U.S.-European relationship is based less these days on emotion and sentiment and more on perceptions of national interests, do suggest that parliaments and publics in both Europe and the United States are less inclined to think in a transatlantic context than during the five decades of the Soviet global threat.