Additional Views

Independent Task Force Report
The Future of Transatlantic Relations

February 1999

Council on Foreign Relations

 

   G. Jonathan Greenwald:

I endorse the broad thrust of the report but append the following additional view. This report properly concludes that strong transatlantic ties remain a vital mutual interest and contains excellent prescriptions. It has, however, one important failing. While updating specific issues from the Cold War’s end, it focuses anachronistically on security’s political-military aspects and gives inadequate weight to interdependent political-economic aspects. Its thrust is that with NATO’s relevance reaffirmed, security questions in Europe have been answered, and it is time for Europeans to step up to “out of area” military challenges where the United States shoulders a disproportionate burden. In fact, the great European strategic issue remains open. The report acknowledges allied preoccupation with making the European Union a larger, more effective global actor, but it implies this is relatively marginal, if not diversionary, from the age’s main requirements. However, the EU agenda for Europe’s political integration—common currency, internal reform, enlargement, common foreign policy—is the historic challenge of the new millennium’s first decade. In an era fortunately lacking world-class threats to U.S. military dominance but increasingly requiring political, economic, and financial muscle to solve problems that affect every nation’s stability, it has great security importance to Americans. How well the EU succeeds will determine whether Europe is stable and whether the United States acquires a global partner to address increasingly significant nonmilitary threats to common security. I regret the missed opportunity to educate citizens about a poorly understood institution and the stakes in its endeavor to create preconditions for a modern security partnership—including how problematic what the United States desires for NATO will be if the EU fails. Too little is thus done to stimulate reflection on the difficult changes required in America’s approach to transatlantic relations if we find ourselves soon with a partner tht has strength and standing to demand genuinely equal, not junior status.

 

   Bruce Stokes:

I endorse the broad thrust of the report, but append the following additional view. A key recommendation of the report is that it is in American self-interest that Europe play a greater role in global affairs. In the past, because a united Europe ensured a strong American ally, the United States vigorously supported Europe’s efforts to form the European Community, to create a single internal market, and to launch the Euro. But European preoccupation with these tasks has inhibited European engagement in the Middle East, Asia, and other regions of the world where the United States and Europe have common interests. In the future, before the United States supports an even larger European Union and bigger NATO, it should weigh the benefits of that expansion against the costs of having a Europe that continues to be self-absorbed and thus unable to more fully share the burden of world leadership. In theory, a more tightly knit Europe will be a stronger one, better able to be America’s partner in the world. That has always been the implicit bargain Washington has made with Brussels. But that deal breaks down if European unification is open-ended and, as a result, in any relevant time frame, Europe will never be quite ready to be America’s global partner.

 

   Gary Hufbauer:

I endorse the broad thrust of the report but append the following additional view. The financial crises that have engulfed many emerging countries in Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe show that the International Monetary Fund is not adequate for the challenges of the next century. To carry out its stabilizing role, the fund must acquire more of the characteristics of a world central bank. It must create the incentives for genuine financial surveillance and transparent accounting by banks and large corporations throughout the world, and it must publicly assess the ability of national central banks to adhere to their exchange-rate regimes and inflation targets. Finally, it must have the resources to act as lender of last resort for those countries and banks that have maintained prudent financial practices and policies.

The only way a new, meaner, and well-financed fund can emerge is through cooperation between the United States and Europe. Prime Minister Blair has issued the call. The leaders of Europe and the United States should now respond.

 

   Gregory F. Treverton:

I share the thrust of this thoughtful and honest report—that America and Europe have an opportunity to build on shared interests to move toward a more global, and more real, partnership. That goal will not be achieved today or tomorrow, but it is the right goal. However, the report somewhat overstates, I believe, the Russian and loose-nukes predicament for transatlantic policy. Russia surely shares the U.S. and European stake in not seeing its nuclear wherewithal spread into its neighborhood. If Russia fell into chaos or civil war, which does not seem likely, that would be a real danger. It is not, however, one the United States and its partners can do much about. The partners should be generous with Russia, but government assistance is not going to rebuild Russia; only Russian policies that make the country attractive for private investment can do that. So far, the record of helping Russia is perhaps the worst of all worlds: what the transatlantic partners have done is enough to convince their publics, especially in the United States, that Russia is a bottomless, futile pit, while Russians rightly regard the response from abroad as niggardly.

 

   Charles Gati:

Although I endorse the broad thrust of the report, this otherwise excellent document deals with U.S.-West European rather than U.S.-European relations. It thus misses the transformation of Europe since the end of the Cold War.