Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (2003) (35 page)

The impotence was reflected by the experience in Yugoslavia. Luxembourg was in the chair of the EU in 1991, when ethnic clashes broke out in Bosnia, and Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister Jacques Poos flew to what he thought was the rescue, proclaiming that ‘this is the hour of Europe, not the hour of the Americans.’
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Poos is still choking on those words.

The EU proved hopelessly unable to cope with the situation, and it was the Americans who eventually crafted the Dayton agreement that ended the fighting. Even more significant was the embarrassment of Kosovo. Not only was the EU unable to mount a credible military operation in its own backyard, it could hardly even support the U.S. operations. Moreover, although it profoundly disagreed with the U.S. strategy of air strikes mainly on Belgrade and would have preferred using ground troops in Kosovo itself, the EU had no power to alter the American game plan. Europe’s reaction was complex: relief that the American efforts brought down the Milosevic regime, embarrassment at its own inadequacy, and surprise and chagrin at the technological gap between the American and the European military forces. This experience sparked the decision, in 1999, to accelerate development of a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) by appointing Javier Solana as Europe’s High Representative for the CFSP, responsible for, among other things, creating an independent EU rapid reaction force of some sixty thousand troops with the equipment and firepower to enable them to handle situations like Kosovo without calling in NATO and the Americans. Here was Kissinger’s phone number, or at least the answering machine.

But given that NATO could easily create its own rapid reaction force, and in fact subsequently did so, one could reasonably ask what was the point of the EU force? Although cloaked in the garb of undying friendship and mutual cooperation, the answer seemed mainly to be that the Americans would not be in it. As Tony Blair asserted, ‘Whatever its origin, Europe today is no longer just about peace. It is about projecting collective power,’
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which it promptly displayed with initiatives toward North Korea and the Middle East, traditional regions of American dominance.

Like the union itself, the EU foreign policy is a work in progress. Nevertheless, there are some important indicators of its likely tone and substance. The first major consideration is the ongoing enlargement of the EU. The addition of ten new members in 2004 will not only dramatically enlarge the EU but, as Elaine Sciolino noted, constituted the biggest voluntary surrender of sovereignty in twelve hundred years.
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While this is important economically, it is a foreign policy initiative as well, for it extends the stabilizing and democratizing influence of the EU to the borders of Russia and Ukraine as well as toward the Middle East. Judging from its internal practice of building consensus through endless discussion, the EU will be relentlessly multilateral in foreign policy and will insist on dealing with global issues through the UN and other international bodies. Robert Kagan and other conservative U.S commentators argue that this may be partly a manifestation of a strategy of the weak using the UN Lilliputians to tie down the American Gulliver, but it is also an affirmation of the validity of the European post-World War II experience. After centuries of war, Europe became distrustful of claims of absolute sovereignty and found the conference room a better path to glory.

Thus the Europeans insisted on proceeding against Iraq through the UN Security Council in order to legitimize any action, and have reacted with concern to the U.S. call for coalitions of the willing to carry out preventive war. Javier Solana says, ‘Maybe terror needs a new form of containment, but preventive use of force needs wider legitimation either through the UN or some form of multilateral backing. If the United States claims that power for itself, it will only foster resentment and undermine its national interest.’
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Added to multilateralism will be a focus on attacking root causes of unrest through economic and social programs. Here Solana notes that while the United States tends to emphasize military solutions, the EU believes military operations alone cannot solve the problem of terror. ‘The EU,’ he says, ‘has a specific culture based on conflict prevention through dialogue and sensitivity to the economic and social roots of violence.’ His colleague, External Affairs Commissioner Chris Patten, adds, ‘I am not so naive to think if you drop 20 million aid packages on Afghanistan that terrorism is going to disappear tomorrow, but I do believe there is a relationship between global inequity and state breakdown and violence and instability and terror.’
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In that context it is worth noting that Europe’s $30 billion expenditure on development assistance is nearly three times what the U.S. spends.

Finally, the EU is skeptical of the moral passion that imbues U.S. foreign policy as well as of its ‘twists and turns’ in places like the Middle East. The London School of Economics professor William Wallace says that ‘The United States thinks only it can promote democracy and that it is the only valid model, but its strident tone of moral and economic superiority creates a backlash while its policies like those of supporting Israel and at the same time building huge bases in the Saudi Arabian heartland of Islam make no sense.’
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Thus, in the words of Martin Wolf, ‘a balancer [read the EU] is a self-fulfilling prophecy.’

The United States has long been ambivalent about Europe. Speaking at Independence Hall on July 4, 1962, President Kennedy said: ‘The United States looks on this valiant enterprise with hope and admiration. We don’t regard a strong, united Europe as a rival but as a partner. To aid its progress has been the basic objective of our foreign policy for the past 17 years.’ He went on to call for a ‘Declaration of Interdependence’ between the United States and Europe. But as Europe has become stronger, this view has changed. The EU Intergovernmental Conference of 1991 contained proposals to give the EU a security dimension and eventually a military capability. In view of frequent U.S. complaints that the Europeans were not sharing enough of the burden, many thought this would be welcome to the Americans. But Washington reacted with dismay and warnings about the dangers of undermining NATO, and the proposals were dropped. Six years later, in the wake of the Bosnia experience, the United States fully endorsed the proposal for development of an EU security and defense identity. At the same time, however, the United States pushed through, without consultation, the enlargement of NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Then, as the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy apparatus began to take shape and plans for its rapid reaction force moved ahead in 1999-2000, Washington again erupted with concern and warnings. Senator Jesse Helms attacked the ‘Euro army,’ calling it ‘a dangerous and divisive dynamic within NATO’; his comments were echoed by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Secretary of Defense William Cohen.
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The transition team of incoming President George W. Bush called the rapid reaction force ‘a dagger aimed at NATO’s heart.’
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Thus U.S. policy has vacillated between urging Europe to share more of the defense burden and trying to block development of an independent European military force. The dynamics here are not complicated. As former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has noted, ‘Europe is a protectorate of the United States.’
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Washington needs Europe as a staging base for operations in the Middle East and as part of its global communications network. NATO is the American seat at the European table, so the United States wants more European support of NATO and of U.S.-led initiatives but is not at all keen on anything that might make Europe a real player.

As Europe has asserted its independence, commentary in the United States has turned distinctly negative. Even before September 11, analysts like the
National Review
editor John O’Sullivan were warning of the EU’s ‘drift to a rival and hostile set of policies.’
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O’Sullivan wrote that ‘there is no need for a European security force or policy. It is a pure expression of burgeoning statehood and nationalism masquerading as anti-nationalism.’
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Moreover, he saw a separate European policy as arising from anti-Americanism and a desire to challenge the United States. In the wake of September 11, Europe’s inability (with notable exceptions, like Britain’s special forces) to field forces as quickly and as well equipped as U.S. troops, and its hesitance to back the United States on getting rid of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein while insisting on elaborate UN procedures, confirmed to many Americans that Europe is not only a hopeless appeaser but also more interested in checking American power than in policing anyone else. Europeans, of course, noted it was they who provided the bulk of the peace-keeping troops and aid after the initial assaults in Afghanistan, and insisted that following the UN procedures is a fundamental matter of avoiding international anarchy. This argument cut little ice in the United States, which preferred Robert Kagan’s view of Europeans as being from Venus and Americans from Mars.

Kagan’s argument, in brief, was that, owing to America’s protective power, Europe is able to indulge both in the luxury of low defense spending and in the delusion that military power is to be eschewed in favor of laws and rules and transnational cooperation. In this view, since Europe does not understand the Hobbesian world in which America must operate, it sees America as a threat that must be constrained, and does not realize that its own fantasyland existence is enabled only by U.S. power.
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There is truth in this argument, but, unfortunately, not the whole truth. The Europeans, like the Japanese and others behind the U.S. defense shield, do not bear full responsibility for themselves and thus are able to see the world through rosier glasses. But this is how the United States prefers it. When Europe has moved in the direction of taking more responsibility, the United States has frequently objected and tried to undermine the effort.

For example, Europe is far more dependent on Persian Gulf oil than the United States, and any rational division of defense labor would have the EU countries deploying more aircraft carriers and troops there than the United States. But America has never asked for that help because it doesn’t particularly want them there, lest their presence dilute U.S. influence and power. We believe it is easier, faster, and less complicated just to do the job ourselves: and, truth be told, we don’t really trust them. Their interests would be a little different from ours. In particular, they do not see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as we do. Letting the Europeans have a significant role in the region would not always comport with our perception of our own interests. But if we are not willing to let them take on the responsibilities of full-fledged sovereign powers, we can’t simultaneously gripe that they are wimps. We complain that Europe does not spend enough on defense and that its level of weapons technology lags woefully behind ours. Both complaints have merit. Certainly, the Europeans much prefer to spend money on medical care and long vacations than on defense. On the other hand, in the case of a real player like China, we constantly emphasize that it spends too much on defense, and use that ‘threat’ to justify our own buildups.

We also have systematically moved to hobble European weapons development. I worked in the Reagan administration at a time when licensing of technology exports was a hot issue. The United States restricts technology exports in a variety of ways that make it difficult or unattractive for foreign companies to do business with us. Moreover, the Pentagon, by far the biggest buyer of weapons in the world, works hand in glove with U.S. arms suppliers to help them maintain their global dominance. The restrictions on foreigners doing business with the Pentagon are such that the biggest foreign supplier, BAE Systems, accounts for less than 1 percent of Pentagon weapons and systems procurement. Pentagon funds for development of new weapons thus go overwhelmingly to American firms.
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Furthermore, the United States uses NATO as a way of trumping the EU in Europe. There was certainly no increased threat from Russia to justify the enlargement of NATO, and the new members added nothing to NATO’s power; indeed, they only increased its load without adding to its resources. The enlargement was done partly for reasons of internal U.S. ethnic politics and partly to tie the eastern European countries directly to the United States. For a place like Poland, for instance, with strong ethnic ties to the United States, NATO membership is very attractive. But as a NATO member it then has to upgrade its air force, and the Pentagon is right there to help sell it F-I6
s
, whose procurement by Poland undercuts the competitiveness of European aircraft producers. In addition, as noted earlier, it makes the Polish air force subject to numerous U.S. licenses, supply regulations, and usage requirements so that the United States effectively has some say in how Poland uses the planes. So if the Europeans are living in fantasyland, it is a fantasyland created and maintained by the United States. A second cold war with Europe is unlikely, but continued friction is very much in the cards, particularly in view of U.S. efforts to create a split between ‘old’ and ‘new’ Europe. U.S.-Iraq policy has also resulted in a chasm between Britain and the Continent. The irony is that the Russians now seem to be our quite good friends. If we want to pull out of the ABM treaty they accommodate us. If we want to deploy a national missile defense system, they go along, if reluctantly. But the Russians are in no position to challenge us. This brings us back to Peter Sutherland’s point. The global system rests not on a U.S.-Russian alliance but on the U.S.-EU Alliance, and if it really breaks down, the global system goes with it. All the differences we have recently discovered between us were there during the Cold War, yet we managed to submerge them in larger shared values and objectives. Because it is not in our interest, or the world’s, that the system break down, it is a matter of the utmost importance that the United States review its European policies and work out a new structure of cooperation with the EU.