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III. European Security and Political Economy
Independent Task Force Report
The Future of Transatlantic Relations
February 1999
The core of U.S.-European relations will remain the transatlantic ability to cooperate on issues related to Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals. Led by the United States as a European power, success in that respect will not necessarily produce broader collaboration in the global system. But failure to work closely together to promote stability in Europe would probably fatally undermine the possibility for comprehensive joint action elsewhere. Moreover, Europe’s first preoccupation is, and should be, the promotion of stability on the continent. If Europe is seriously unstable, there will be little or no chance that the allies will be prepared over the longer term to look beyond Europe to a broad partnership with the United States to lead in the management of global international security and political economy. So increased peace and security in Europe through intense U.S.-European cooperation is a sine qua non for further extending those benign European conditions and successful transatlantic comity into the rest of the world, especially the greater Middle East and East Asia. And the situation in Europe in recent years is mostly good, particularly when compared with the past several hundred years.
This matters a great deal because the United States retains—as it has most of this century—vital and important national interests vis-a-vis Europe writ large:
No Hostile Hegemon
The good news is that these U.S. national interests are for the most part not seriously threatened. The demise of the Soviet Union and the current extraordinary weakness of Russia—the only plausible candidate for a country with a dominating continental appetite—means that the emergence of a hostile hegemonic threat to Europe appears quite unlikely for at least 15 to 20 years at the earliest.
Weapons of Mass Destruction
There is also no sign at present that any nonnuclear nation in Europe aspires to acquire weapons of mass destruction. With respect to the allied export of sensitive technologies to important and unstable regions of the world, the European performance has improved markedly in recent years. EU export controls in this regard are now nearly as rigorous as those of the United States, another significant transatlantic accomplishment. As is indicated in the next section of this report concerning the greater Middle East, a crucial U.S.-European challenge for the period ahead, which is not now satisfactorily being met, will be to develop compatible strategies for dealing with miscreant states and criminal nonstate actors seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction, notably in areas of the world that matter a great deal to the transatlantic community.
U.S.-European cooperation with respect to safeguarding the Russian WMD arsenal also needs improvement. On the nuclear side, this entails 7,000 Russian nuclear warheads mounted on strategic missiles capable of reaching the United States; 5,000 tactical nuclear weapons; and 70,000 nuclear weapons equivalents in stockpiles of highly enriched uranium and plutonium. This is a problem on which the United States has spent a good deal of time, energy, and money since the early 1990s. The U.S. accomplishment in persuading Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to give up the nuclear weapons on their soil after 1991 was one of the singular American diplomatic accomplishments of recent decades. And through the inventive Nunn-Lugar program, Washington has devoted about $400 million annually to try to minimize this danger. In sharp contrast, the allies have basically ignored this issue. Although there are minimalist EU efforts in play, the European political classes and publics either do not take this threat seriously or believe that the United States will deal with it satisfactorily.
The meltdown of Russia’s political and economic structures in mid-1998, along with the fact that most elements of the Russian armed forces, including the nuclear forces, do not receive regular salaries, should set off warning sirens all over Europe. Curiously, this does not seem to have happened. From an American perspective, such indifference on the part of the allies is deeply worrisome be-cause the danger of a transfer of “loose nukes” as well as chemical and biological weapons from the Russian arsenal to enemies of the United States and Europe in the Middle East and Persian Gulf is the only serious threat to U.S. vital interests emanating from Europe for the foreseeable future. Early Duma ratification of the START II Treaty and a swift continuation into START III negotiations would also make an important contribution to meeting this challenge.
A Europe Whole and Free
The European Union is now playing an indispensable role in exporting stability to the eastern side of the continent. The EU decision to open membership negotiations with the six “fast-track” countries of Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Estonia, Slovenia, and Cyprus, and the consequent intense daily interaction this entails between the institutions in Brussels and these nations, is one of the strategic reasons why U.S. interests in Europe are thriving. Moreover, prospective EU membership for those applicant countries that are not in this current enlargement tranche provides considerable incentives for them to move persistently along the pluralist and free-market paths.
Some American experts and many in EU candidate countries are critical of what they regard as the slow pace of the Union’s enlargement. In turn, EU politicians and officials stress the extraordinary technical complexity and difficulty of these membership negotiations and upon occasion irritably dismiss these U.S. reproaches, reminding Americans that getting EU enlargement done right is more important than getting it done quickly. Most Americans probably underestimate the economic equities and thus the domestic political sensitivities at stake for EU member states in the enlargement process. At the same time, EU officials sometimes give the impression that highly technical economic details are entirely driving the pace of EU enlargement, and that the strategic importance of this historic process to Europe and to the United States does not play a sufficiently important part in the calculations of Brussels. Thus, it is probably right for Washington to keep up the pressure on its allies to move the next phase of enlargement along as rapidly as possible while recognizing that U.S. opinions will remain on the margins of EU decision-making on this complicated subject.
With respect to Economic and Monetary Union in January 1999, there is a debate across the Atlantic regarding the consequences for transatlantic relations of this action on the part of 11 EU countries. Critics argue that the economies of the EU are too diverse and at different stages of growth for EMU to work well; that weaknesses in labor mobility, differing cultures and languages, and the absence of an adequate and systematic mechanism for fiscal transfers to countries and regions that may suffer from EMU will undermine the idea’s implementation; that EMU will further worsen unemployment, raise interest rates, impede growth, and decrease Europe’s fiscal flexibility; that Europe’s banks and companies remain unprepared for the Euro; that EMU will create a two-tier Europe; that the EMU process will distract Europe from developing a common foreign and security policy, modernizing Europe’s defenses, and joining the United States in managing global security; that the Euro will quickly join the dollar in a bipolar currency regime and increasingly compete with the dollar for international investment; and that EMU will cause Europe to be-come more protectionist and thus weaken transatlantic and perhaps even global trade. This is quite a list.
While it is certainly true that EMU carries with it significant risks, that it could go disastrously aground, and that it will undoubtedly encounter many bumps along the way, the overall analytic balance regarding transatlantic relations is decisively in favor of economic and monetary union. It will lower transactional costs that will save both money and time for European individuals and businesses. It will eliminate exchange-rate volatility within the EMU zone. It will likely foster fiscal discipline and help keep inflation rates low among EMU nations. It will unleash the full potential of the EU single market and thus stimulate economic growth and wealth creation in Europe. It will bring about big new opportunities for American businesses. It will not produce a plausible reserve currency to challenge the dollar for many, many years, if then. And, perhaps most important of all, it will create a stronger European Union with greater economic, political, and social cohesion. Thus, the United States should worry not that EMU will succeed but that it could fail.
Although by no means guaranteed, this EMU process could also over time promote enhanced cooperation and coordination between the European Union and the United States in economic, security, and diplomatic matters. If EMU is successful and Europe’s economic growth increases, it will in addition be good for American exports, and therefore for the U.S. economy and U.S. businesses. Having come down firmly on the side of economic and monetary union in this report, it is also important to stress that it will bring new challenges to U.S.-European policy interaction. Although it has been the conventional wisdom during the past five decades that both Europe and the United States can only benefit from the strengthening of the other, the allies wonder on occasion whether this is really true with America as the sole superpower. In the same way, the new and emerging organization of Europe does not automatically mean a boost for America and closer transatlantic collaboration and burden sharing. It is possible for the EU to integrate further and at the same time to decline to share equitably international responsibilities with the United States. And if representatives of a more integrated EU deal with the United States in a bureaucratic manner reflecting a rigid Union consensus, this would be a recipe for enduring problems across the Atlantic. The model for U.S.-EU strategic collaboration in the long run should be U.S.-U.K. policy interchange, which is usually marked by transparency, candor, and mutual respect.
The final transatlantic issue with respect to the European Union is the EU’s relationship with Turkey. There seems little reason for U.S. sympathy for the Union’s distressing approach to this significant NATO ally and Western asset. Turkey is located on a critically important strategic intersection, facing as it does the Persian Gulf, the Caucasus and the Caspian basin, and southeastern Europe. Imagine the geopolitical consequences for the transatlantic community if Turkey were to lose Atatuerk’s secular orientation and become a destabilizing nation animated by the aims of aggressive political Islam. That would be a disaster for Western interests in all three regions that Turkey abuts.
Yet although the European Union proudly and rightly proclaims its intensifying mission into east central Europe, its policies toward Ankara often ignore Turkey’s strategic importance in favor of a hectoring and even arrogant approach to this NATO ally that was so faithful throughout the 40 years of confrontation with the Soviet Union. Why does the EU not have an equally intense desire to project stability into Turkey? The Turks often answer that it is their Muslim faith that leads Europeans to be hypercritical of the Turkish government’s problems with human rights and its Kurdish minority. It is difficult to argue that this is completely wrong. At the same time, EU members are right to stress the many structural economic difficulties and political challenges that prevent Turkey’s early entry into the Union. (In this respect, it is counterproductive for Americans to call for rapid Turkish membership in the Union; that will not happen and such statements further damage relations between Brussels and Ankara..) Furthermore, the Turkish minorities in Union member states, notably in Germany, generate domestic political opposition to improved relations with Ankara. And Greece makes any EU moves toward Turkey exceedingly hard to accomplish.
For all these reasons, the transatlantic interest of projecting stability eastward on the continent is not being successfully implemented with respect to Turkey. As is demonstrated by Italy’s misguided handling of the capture of Kurdish guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan, quite the contrary. This does not mean that the United States and its European allies should ignore the problems in Turkey related to human rights, the rule of law, and treatment of minorities. Constant subtle pressure on Turkey in these respects should be a major element of U.S.-European policies. This should occur, however, in an environment in which it is made clear to the Turkish elite and general populace that Western Europe and the United States regard Turkey as “one of us,” a longtime ally and friend.
Unlike policy toward Turkey, the successful reform of the North Atlantic Alliance in recent years and its preeminent role in exporting stability eastward in Europe has been a striking example of consummate transatlantic cooperation and another preeminent reason why U.S. vital and important national interests in Europe are being skillfully promoted.
This superb alliance record has been evidenced most importantly in NATO enlargement to include Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary; in NATO’s noble if belated effort to stop the killing in Bosnia; in the alliance’s largely unsung achievement through the Partnership for Peace in strengthening ties and promoting security reform in the dozens of countries east and south of Poland that will not be NATO members in the near future; and in the alliance’s conceptual attempt to bring Russia closer to the center of NATO decision-making regarding the current and prospective challenges of European security.
This splendid record did not happen by accident. It was the sustained and systematic result of enlightened and collaborative policies by governments on both sides of the Atlantic, led by the United States. Thus, the questions of the early 1990s concerning the relevance of the alliance in the present era have been answered decisively. The deeply reformed NATO is the indispensable hub of the post-Cold War European security system.
This does not mean, however, that NATO can be complacent as it shapes its role in Europe in the period ahead. With respect to both NATO enlargement and the Balkans, trouble may well lie ahead for U.S.-European relations and for the continent. Conceptually, the alliance cannot now retreat from its open-door policy with respect to new members. But inviting any other nation to join NATO in the next three to five years would be unwise. It is exactly during this period that NATO should be considering its future strategic orientation. No additional nations should be offered membership in the alliance before that prolonged analytical and prescriptive process is completed. In addition, NATO needs to digest carefully the entry of the three new members in 1999 to ensure that its decision-making in routine and crisis situations can be maintained. We must not turn the most successful alliance in world history into a debating club through rapid expansion. Finally, but less important, NATO should take into account Russia’s attitude to further enlargement as the alliance decides the pace of expansion.
If the alliance were to proceed with an early round of enlargement, such a decision would probably further weaken practical concerted action between NATO and the Russian Federation. Although this collaborative interaction is thus far mostly only on paper, the alliance should persist in attempting to draw Moscow responsibly into the management of European security. This will be very difficult to accomplish given the chaos in Russia and its instinctive opposition to transatlantic security objectives in Europe and almost everywhere else. Nonetheless, NATO should persevere in looking for responsible ways to take account of Russian perspectives on European security, as long as the essential missions and values of the alliance are not compromised. (There seems to have been some progress in this respect at the December 9, 1998, meeting of NATO’s Permanent Joint Council.) This is a key part of the transatlantic effort to help bring long-term peace and stability to all of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals.
The Balkans also present important challenges for NATO, both real and potential. This is a situation in which European vital interests are at stake because of the region’s proximity, while vital or important American interests are not directly engaged in this particular piece of real estate. Nevertheless, the United States should be a major participant in NATO’s stabilizing effort in Bosnia. With European political will to act in combat situations without the United States at its usual low ebb, Washington’s failure to become involved on the ground in Bosnia would probably have produced a continuing bloody, and perhaps spreading, disaster in the Balkans. This, in turn, would have overly preoccupied the European political scene; made it less likely that the allies would have been available for the many other important tasks of European security (not to say the challenges outside the continent); and deeply undermined the relevance and effectiveness of NATO at a critical time after the Cold War. So although American national interests are not directly connected to the future of the Balkans, they are fundamentally entwined with NATO’s health and the allied capability and willingness to join the United States in the broader challenges of international security. This is a realpolitik answer to those who ask why U.S. forces should intervene in Bosnia to reduce human suffering but not in many other places in the world.
Alliance military policy in Bosnia has been brilliantly executed since the summer of 1995. Because of the tranquilizing presence of U.S. and allied military forces, the killing has been stopped in Bosnia and the ethnic cleansing there has been slowed dramatically. On the political side in Bosnia, the West’s policies have been much less effective and they may well be based on a faulty premise, i.e., that the three communities can be brought to regard themselves as integral parts of one country. As the September 1998 elections in Bosnia may have demonstrated, this might turn out to be too difficult a task for outsiders to accomplish. Nevertheless, NATO, the European Union, and the international community should continue to try for a broad political outcome in Bosnia because the alternative could be communal pressures to resume the conflict. In any case, NATO forces, including those of the United States, should remain on the ground in Bosnia for years to come. Given the bloody and destabilizing alternatives, this is a cost-effective way to expend alliance resources. Thus, there should be no NATO and no U.S. exit strategy from Bosnia. To formulate one would increase substantially the likelihood that the fighting would break out again. In short, NATO security policy in Bosnia is working well. Let us not try to fix it.
Kosovo is another matter. At present and in light of the October 13, 1998, deal brokered by Richard Holbrooke, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic may again intend to skillfully outmaneuver the West, as he did during the early years of the Bosnian crisis. Time will tell. In any case, with the alliance hesitant to become militarily involved in a complicated Balkan ethnic dispute, Milosevic was free to employ brutal force in Kosovo for over six months—destroying villages, producing again an untold number of civilian deaths at Serbian hands, and causing hundreds of thousands of refugees to take to the roads. In the fall of 1998, with the Balkan winter approaching, NATO finally began making preparations to intervene to stop the conflict, and by early October, air strikes seemed imminent. To avert such action, Milosevic agreed to end the crackdown, significantly reduce Serb forces in Kosovo, begin negotiations with ethnic Albanians on a political settlement to the crisis, and permit the stationing of 2,000 international monitors on the ground and NATO reconnaissance flights. Nevertheless, at this writing, Milosevic’s compliance with the terms of this agreement seems quite uncertain and the two sides seem to be preparing for war in the spring of 1999. As U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke warned in mid-December, the warring sides in Kosovo are “playing with dynamite.” Complicated issues of self-determination for the Kosovars are a critical part of any eventual solution. But with the armed resistance in Kosovo gaining increasing political influence, there will be no easy answer to the ultimate division of power between Belgrade and Pristina.
What is not tolerable is for the transatlantic community to stand aside militarily while ethnic conflict again engulfs southeastern Europe and Milosevic again systematically brutalizes massive numbers of innocents. As with Bosnia, the southern Balkans must be tranquilized, with or without U.N. Security Council authorization, to provide a secure European pillar to transatlantic collaboration in the next century. That is the fundamental reason why the two sides of the Atlantic should be decisive in ending for good the conflict in Kosovo and why America should be centrally engaged in this endeavor.
Some on this side of the Atlantic will wonder why the allies cannot take care of Bosnia and Kosovo without U.S. leadership and direct military involvement. Given the security challenges that America faces in the Middle East and in East Asia for the next decade and beyond, the United States would certainly benefit if Europe were to play a larger role in solving the continent’s security problems up to the eastern Polish border. This is why Washington should support the concept of a European security and defense identity, including the early December 1998 initiative by Britain and France, as long as it is backed up by actual modernized military capability and harnessed to transatlantic security objectives. The problem here is not the decline of European military capabilities but their unsuitability. U.S. forces have shrunk more than European forces since the end of the Cold War, and the American defense budget has declined as much as those of the allies. But the United States is putting its resources and investments generally into modernizing military forces, while the allies, except for the United Kingdom, are spending far too much to maintain obsolescent forces. If these trends continue and Europe falls even further behind in the revolution in military affairs, at some point in the not-too-distant future the two sides of the Atlantic will not be capable of effectively going to war together. To close this growing gap will require cross-Atlantic defense industry investment and a free market in the information technologies on which new defense systems are based.
Such an increased allied component in European security and enhanced European weight in transatlantic decision-making related to the continent will produce some heartburn in Washington from time to time. But this somewhat reduced U.S. security influence and exposure in Europe would be consistent both with increased transatlantic burden sharing and with American security responsibilities in the rest of the world. In the end, however, only the Europeans can make this happen, and regrettably they seem to be producing little progress at present.
A more tolerant, even supportive, U.S. approach with respect to growing allied influence on matters of European security does involve some changes. It should not encourage the Europeans to become even more preoccupied with their own concerns on the continent at the expense of an increasing partnership with the United States to shape the international system in the new era. Here, NATO’s new Strategic Concept, which will be adopted at the April 1999 Washington summit, becomes acutely relevant. That document should capture the current strategic actualities facing the West as it approaches the next century: a Europe that is progressing well in a security sense but with work still to be done; a Russia that will probably be problematic for the transatlantic community for decades to come; and crucially, a set of security challenges outside of Europe, especially in the Middle East, that are likely increasingly to threaten Western vital interests in the years ahead. (Any effort in this context by the new German government to push for a NATO no-first-use policy regarding nuclear weapons would be seriously wrongheaded.) If NATO is not relevant to security challenges outside Europe, the United States may over time drift somewhat away from its central alliance vocation in favor of other instruments to promote and protect its vital interests. To put it in a more positive way, NATO’s integrated military structure is the only serious transatlantic instrument for detailed joint military planning, and it should progressively be used to plan for all security threats to vital and important transatlantic interests. Although this will not happen overnight, NATO should accelerate the process. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s speech in this respect at the December 8, 1998, NATO Ministerial meeting was a step in the right direction. But as the tepid or worse allied reaction on that occasion showed, Washington will have to keep its mind centrally on this subject for months and years to come.
Russia
Impossible as it is to capture in print in any enduring way the twists and turns of that enormous country and its current profound time of troubles, there are some fundamental points to be made regarding transatlantic policy toward the Russian Federation. First, it is difficult to see much else the West could have done in the past few years to try to promote the emergence in Russia of a genuine market economy. There may have been an opportunity in the early 1990s to drive a highly conditional Grand Bargain with the new Russia and a vigorous Boris Yeltsin in which far greater Western resources would have been committed over a shorter time period to promote and ease the Russian political and economic transition. But that may well not have worked either because of the same internal Russian political and societal dynamics that have produced the current crisis.
In any event, in recent years the United States and Europe have constantly faced the same dilemma with respect to policy toward Russia. Since 1993, the IMF could try as it might to exact from Moscow the most stringent possible conditions regarding tight budgets, low inflation, wage arrears, tax collection, implementing fair privatization, breaking up monopolies, and so forth, tied to segmented tranches of IMF loans. But Western governments could never in the end permit those negotiations to fail. To do so could have set Russia on the nightmarish path of the disintegration of a nuclear superpower. So Russian economic reform over this period was always halting, hesitant—too little, too late, and never supported by the Russian Duma.
That these Western economic efforts did not produce success in Russia and that the August 17, 1998, economic meltdown occurred should not be cause for the donning of transatlantic hair shirts, especially given the effects on Russia of a 50 percent fall in the price of oil, the Asian financial crises, the deep incompetence of the Yeltsin government, and the growing infirmity of Yeltsin himself. There are some public policy problems that turn out simply to be too hard. The United States and Europe did what they could but that rightly did not include trying to take over Russia and force domestic economic reforms on the country. In the final analysis, Russia is responsible for its current calamities because of the failure of its political institutions and public morality, and only the Russian political process can find a way out. Given the very low support for reform among the Russian populace (15 percent or less), one cannot be very optimistic in the short to medium term.
This does not mean that the Western effort was flawless. While doing what they could to support Russia’s economic transformation, the United States and Europe should have devoted many more resources to helping develop democratic institutions in the federation. Such an effort would have entailed a fraction of the money that was devoted to the economic side and would have given political reformers in Russia more of a chance to overcome the negative shadows of the country’s one-thousand-year history. Curiously, the West instead concentrated almost entirely on an approach that seemed to imagine that economic factors would produce benign and democratic political outcomes in Russia.
What now? When this report is published in early 1999, as dem-onstrated in the assassination in late October 1998 of liberal reformer Galina Starovoitova, virtually any outcome is possible in the coming months. But whatever the trend of events there (and they are highly unlikely to be positive), the transatlantic community should not disengage. The safety and security of Russia’s enormous nuclear arsenal in particular would make such U.S.-European disconnection extremely unwise. Imagine a Russian government so enfeebled that it could not prevent the sale of nuclear, chemical, and biological materials and/or weapons as well as even more advanced missile technologies to the Middle East. Or imagine a Russian government so hostile to the United States and other Western nations that it decided to transfer weapons-grade nuclear, chemical, or biological material or even the weapons themselves and perhaps the missiles to carry them to these rogue states and/or nonstate actors.
So the transatlantic community must continue to struggle to help a Russia whose own actions make the success of such assistance extremely questionable. The West should continue to stress that it will resume IMF loans to Russia and reschedule Russia’s foreign debt if Moscow takes decisive steps to stabilize the economy through serious reforms and to restore investor confidence, with the concurrence of the Duma. If the Russian government does not proceed with these domestic economic reforms, if it seeks to deal with the present crisis principally by printing money (which would likely lead to hyperinflation), then there is nothing the transatlantic nations can or should do with resources to assist Russia through this crisis. In short, strategic patience is called for on the part of the United States and Europe, but it surely will not be easy to maintain. And while trying hard to forestall worst-case outcomes in Russia, both sides of the Atlantic should be prepared for them over the long term.
No Return to the Past
Finally, there is the U.S. national interest in ensuring that Western Europe does not again succumb to the bloody national rivalries of the past. America, with 100,000 troops in the European theater, remains the indispensable honest broker to ensure that the enormous gains of European integration in the past four decades are not reversed. It is in this most historic sense that economic and monetary union is important. EMU is, on balance, likely to bring more prosperity to Europe and to be a positive factor in the world economy. Americans should wish it well for those reasons alone. But most fundamentally, EMU is a further step in Western Europe’s integration, a process that has deeply served U.S. national interests in the last 40 years.
Prescriptions
continue to do what it responsibly can to promote economic reform within the country, if the Russian government takes the necessary steps, and increase greatly its support for democratic institution building in Russia.
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