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European Affairs
Defense and Security
The Allies Must Try to Pick Up the Pieces
By Ronald D. Asmus
In the aftermath of the war in Iraq, NATO will have to devise a strategy to pick up the pieces following one of the worst political disasters in the more than half century of its existence. Western leaders have to face the fact that, rather than unite against a totalitarian dictator, in the shape of Saddam Hussein, they allowed their differences to create deep rifts in the Atlantic Alliance – both between the United States and Europe and among European governments.
There is undoubtedly a wonderful book to be written about what future historians might call "The Great Transatlantic Train Wreck of the Spring of 2003." In her classic study The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman wrote that the First World War was largely an unintended result of a series of decisions and mistakes by key actors on all sides that made war increasingly inevitable.There is a wonderful Barbara Tuchman-like aspect to this current crisis as well. None of the key leaders – George Bush, Jacques Chirac or Gerhard Schröder – wanted this outcome. Yet they all contributed to it through their decisions and behavior.
Iraq, however, while the most obvious reason why NATO suffered a diplomatic train wreck, is not the only problem facing the Alliance. The last few months have revealed deeper differences that will have to be tackled if NATO is to have a viable future. It is both possible and desirable to put the pieces back together, but it will not be easy.
The sudden emergence of rifts in the Alliance in the spring of 2003 was largely unexpected. After all, it was only a few months earlier that NATO had emerged from a successful summit meeting in Prague with what appeared to be a new sense of resolve and common purpose. Having largely ignored NATO following the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, the Bush administration tacked back to the center in the course of 2002.
Washington put its shoulder to the wheel to transform the Alliance so as to confront the strategic challenges facing the West in the 21st century through a series of initiatives including the admission of seven more members and the creation of a new military rapid response force. President George Bush's decision in the early fall of 2002 to go to the United Nations to build an international coalition to confront Iraq opened the possibility of narrowing differences on how to deal with Saddam Hussein.
In Prague, all this culminated in an historic set of decisions aimed at re-launching the Alliance. Today, that unity seems as if it were almost a political century ago. In retrospect, Prague was but the lull before the storm.
The debate on the underlying causes of the disaster, and how they should be addressed, is already under way. At one end of the spectrum are what one might call the "structuralists," who argue that the growing asymmetry of power is so fundamentally reshaping American and European views of threats and the response to them that such a breakup was increasingly likely, if not inevitable.
This view has been most eloquently and forcefully articulated by Robert Kagan, a Brussels-based American analyst, in an article published in Policy Review last year. The article was subsequently expanded into a book, entitled Of Paradise and Power, that has become a cause célèbre in Atlantic circles.
The opposing view is that this conflict was not inevitable and is largely attributable to the different impacts of September 11 on American and European thinking, compounded by the mistakes and ineptness of leaders on both sides of the Atlantic. Its proponents argue that while the asymmetry in power across the Atlantic is real, it is not determinative. Similar differences have existed, and not prevented close cooperation, in the past. The real problem is the lack of a common sense of strategic purpose.
Such different analyses of the problem will inevitably also spill over into different policy prescriptions for the way forward. If the problem is rooted in a deep, growing and immutable asymmetry in power and outlook, then there is little prospect of changing it in the short-run, if at all. The implications of this train of thought for the Transatlantic relationship are clear and ominous.
The United States, the structuralists argue, should be grateful that Europe has ceased to be the grand strategic problem it was in the 20th century. The old continent will remain important as a place where Americans study, travel and conduct business. But Europe will not be an important strategic partner and NATO will not be a central institution as Washington confronts the challenges of the future, they conclude. Differences in views of the world, priorities and the use of power are already great and are likely to be unbridgeable.
In this view, NATO has accomplished what it set out to do – to build peace in Europe – and can now be retired with honor. Americans and Europeans should not become hysterical over this state of affairs, but rather accept it as a new reality and get on with their respective lives and agendas.
A second school of thought is less extreme. It wants to preserve NATO but to avoid the kind of fractious debates that nearly tore the Alliance apart in recent months. Its motto is "damage limitation." Proponents will argue that NATO needs to be maintained at any cost, if only to keep the peace in Europe, preserve Transatlantic link and sustain a pool of military forces for use on an ad hoc basis to form future coalitions of the willing.
At the same time, such advocates will shy away from overtly pushing NATO to assume significant new missions beyond Europe, where the danger of deep differences paralyzing the Alliance is simply too great. Rather than count on Europe as a whole acting through NATO, Washington should be content that some subset of allies will almost always be willing to work with the United States. Indeed, in a bigger and looser Europe, the emphasis of U.S. policy should be less on institutions but more and more on rebuilding bilateral ties with those countries that share American views and priorities.A third school will draw yet another conclusion, namely that the only way to save the Alliance is through a radical reform that offers the hope of harmonizing strategic perspectives on both sides of the Atlantic. Once the dust has settled in Iraq, it will advocate a "pick up the pieces" strategy that tries to put the Transatlantic relationship together again. It argues that the current crisis could have been avoided and is largely the result of a lack of a common paradigm on how to handle future threats, exac-erbated by the bad judgment and mistakes of both U.S. and European policy-makers.
The best way to heal the wounds left by Iraq, in this view, is to get on with new projects that will demonstrate the West's ability to turn the page and coalesce around the need to handle new challenges. Such a course would invoke the legacy and spirit of Harry Truman and the founding fathers of the Alliance to push for a renaissance of Transatlantic cooperation.
The author of this article belongs to the third school. In my view, the fractures in the Transatlantic relationship were not inevitable, and the relationship can and should be put together again.
Strategic cooperation between the United States and Europe is an essential reason why the second half of the 20th century was so much better than the first half. That cooperation must be maintained and expanded if we are to cope successfully with the challenges of the 21st century. Most of those challenges are now concentrated outside Europe, especially in what is now referred to as the Greater Middle East.
Neither the United States nor Europe has the ability to master these challenges by itself. But we might succeed if we again pool our creativity and resources as closely as we did in toppling communism and winning the Cold War.
At the same time, I have no illusions about the hurdles ahead if we are to rebuild the Transatlantic relationship successfully. The Atlantic Alliance is about shared risk and responsibility. The fundamental dilemma facing the Alliance today is that we no longer have a shared view of the risks or how we should share responsibilities in meeting them.
For the United States, the most direct and immediate threats to its security no longer emanate from Europe, but from beyond. If NATO is to remain central in the thinking of its leading power, it needs to be seen as relevant to addressing those concerns.
For many Europeans, in contrast, the work of completing the peace on their continent is far from done and the threats from beyond are seen as less urgent. Today there is no framework in which this disconnect across the Atlantic is being addressed in a systematic fashion, let alone resolved.The costs of this are already evident. The surge of pro-American feelings after September 11, the biggest in decades, has been replaced by the largest wave of anti-American sentiment in recent history. As a result, America went to war in Iraq with several of its key allies openly trying to stop it.
U.S.-French relations have always been testy, but have now fallen to their lowest point since De Gaulle pulled France out of the Alliance's military command in the 1960s. Germany has lost its standing as one of Washington's most dependable allies in American eyes. Although the governments of the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy and most of Central and Eastern Europe have sided with Washington, their publics often have not. One thing that has become clear in recent months is that splits across the Atlantic inevitably divide Europe as well – with a result that leaves all of us as losers.Both NATO and the European Union's common European foreign and security policy are paralyzed, at least for the time being. And the costs and risks that the American soldier and taxpayer ended up bearing in blood and treasure were only greater as a result of the fact that France, Germany and Turkey were not part of the coalition.
To resolve this dilemma, the allies must face the basic question: what is NATO for in a world without the Soviet Union and communism? Is the Alliance's purpose essentially to keep the peace in Europe, or is it to deal with the major threats facing its members, even if they now come from distant sources?
NATO has wrestled with this issue since the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War. In the early and mid-1990s, the Alliance coalesced around a new post-Cold War rationale – the use of its power to build a Europe whole and free. In addition to intervening to stop ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, NATO opened its doors to new members in Central and Eastern Europe and reached out to build a new and cooperative partnership with its erstwhile adversary, Moscow.
While each of these moves was controversial at the time, today they are accepted as having successfully made Europe more democratic, prosperous and secure than at any time in its history.By the second half of the 1990s, however, commentators were already beginning to ask whether NATO should further expand its missions to deal with new threats from beyond Europe that potentially involved terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. The first official attempts to lay the foundation for NATO to act beyond Europe came with the rewriting of NATO's strategic concept in the run-up to the Alliance's 50th anniversary summit meeting in Washington in April 1999.
Whereas the Clinton administration wanted to open the door to the possibility of the Alliance acting beyond Europe, and focus it on weapons of mass destruction in particular, most European allies preferred to keep the focus limited to peacekeeping missions in and around their continent. Although a compromise was found, even then the bone of contention behind the scenes was Saddam Hussein and how to deal with his weapons of mass destruction.
September 11 led to the next attempt to expand the missions of the Alliance beyond the old continent. Only this time it was Washington that fumbled the ball. In an historic move, the European allies invoked Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, providing for a collective response to an attack on an ally, immediately following the terrorist attack on the United States.
Yet, according to Bush at War, a book by Bob Woodward, the Bush team was too preoccupied, divided and unilateralist in its approach to grasp the opportunity. Although several leading Senators put forward specific ideas on how to involve NATO in Afghanistan, those ideas were never taken up.
Nonetheless, the administration got the message that it needed to figure out what new missions it wanted NATO to embrace other than enlargement. Administration officials admitted that they had made a mistake in not trying to find a role for NATO in Afghanistan. At a ministerial meeting in Reykjavik in the spring of 2002, the Alliance boldly decided that it should be able to confront new threats wherever they came from, i.e. that there would be no geographic limits to future NATO actions.
Throughout the spring and summer of 2002, Washington worked through a series of proposals for the Prague summit that would culminate in the call for a NATO Response Force (NRF) and a new package of capability goals. One year after he had told NATO that the United States foresaw little if any role for the Alliance in Afghanistan, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz returned to Brussels to offer a range of options for NATO help with Iraq – exactly what the Bush administration's multilateralist critics had urged it to do.
But it was too late. The administration already had a growing credibility problem on Iraq. The tide in elite and public thinking was running against it in Europe. When the United States tried to implement the first and politically easiest of those measures – defense planning for the defense of Turkey in case of a war in Iraq – it led to one of the worst crises in Alliance history, with France, Germany and Belgium bitterly opposing the American proposal.
So, what is NATO's future once the dust has settled in Iraq? Will it be possible to come up with a strategy to pick up the pieces? What would such a strategy look like? For starters, it could include the following steps:
First, President Bush should be magnanimous in victory and extend an olive branch to President Jacques Chirac of France, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany, and other European opponents of his policy by expressing his desire to turn the page and open a new chapter in bilateral and Alliance relations.
Second, both sides of the Atlantic should roll up their sleeves and work together in the major project of reconstructing Iraq. In spite of our differences over the war, both the United States and Europe have a profound and shared interest in winning the peace. After all, if the United States fails to reconstruct Iraq successfully, the consequences and the price will be felt in Europe as well.
Third, both the United States and Europe must now make a major and common push for progress in the Middle East peace process. Washington will never be seen as a champion of democratization and modernization in the Arab world unless and until it again puts its shoulder to the wheel resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The President's embrace of the road map proposed by the so-called Quartet (the United States, the U.N., the European Union and Russia) is only the first step of what must become a top priority of this administration's foreign policy.
Fourth, the web of informal and formal Alliance consultations that successfully worked in narrowing differences over how to deal with Moscow should be recreated and applied to the Greater Middle East. The question of what to do about Iran looms large as another potential showstopper in Transatlantic relations. Unlike totalitarian Iraq, in Iran there is the possibility of democratic change coming from below – a Middle East version of a "Velvet Revolution." But there are other, bloody and more worrisome scenarios. If we want to avoid a repeat of what we just went though on Iraq, the Transatlantic alliance needs to get ahead of the curve on this issue.
Fifth, at its spring Ministerial in Madrid in early June, NATO should reconfirm the strategic direction set in Prague and its commitment to tackle new threats from beyond Europe. The Alliance should agree to take over the international peacekeeping forces in Afghanistan, and offer to play a role in peacekeeping in Iraq. We should start thinking about a process similar to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) for the Middle East and how one starts to build a broader regional security framework.
In sum, President Bush's trip to Europe in June should become a Transatlantic reconciliation trip in which both sides would underscore their commitment to ensuring that the Alliance does not come off the rails again for a long time to come.
Harry Truman once remarked that the accomplishment he was most proud of was the creation of the Atlantic Alliance and the transformation of former foes into allies. Truman would be aghast if he could see the damage done in recent weeks and months to the Transatlantic relationship today. It would be the ultimate indictment of leaders on both sides of the Atlantic if the need to deal with Saddam undoes Harry Truman's greatest legacy.
Ronald D. Asmus is a Senior Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and an Adjunct Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of Opening NATO's Door: How the Alliance Remade Itself for a New Era (Columbia University Press, 2002). He served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State responsible for European security in the Clinton Administration under Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright from 1997 to 2000.