The Future of NATO

This is a review of two recent books on US-European relations:

Allies at War: America, Europe and the Crisis Over Iraq by Philip H. Gordon and Jeremy Shapiro (New York; McGraw-Hill; 2004)

Friendly Fire: The Near-Death of the Transatlantic Alliance (Washington; Brookings Institution Press; 2004) by Elizabeth Pond

These two books look at the recent crisis in relations between the United States and the European Union countries, with particular reference to its current and possible future effects on what has been the US' most important military alliance since 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).  The crisis was by no means limited to differences over the Iraq War, though it was that event that produced what Philip Gordon and Jeremy Shapiro call "the worst transatlantic crisis in nearly 50 years."

The NATO alliance was founded to counter the threat of Soviet conventional invasion of western Europe. Though it provided definite advantages to the US, the Europeans needed it for their own immediate protection more than the Americans did for theirs. The Europeans were more immediately threatened by potential Soviet aggression.   

The disintegration of the USSR and the end of the Cold War changed this.  Although both America and the European NATO members have still seen mutual advantages in the alliance, the relative advantages have shifted.  When NATO was used in the 1990s for interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, US leadership and military power was still a decisive advantage for the Europeans, who were more directly menaced by the Balkan Wars than the US.

But it was symbolic that the only time that NATO's military mutual assistance clause has ever been evoked was after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the United States.  The NATO allies were fully prepared to assist the US in the Afghan War - and the Bush administration refused to make the action a NATO mission.  The Republican administration shared a general distrust of coalition warfare, and a negative view of the US experience with NATO allies in the Kosovo War in particular.

Official statements of policy still pay lip service to NATO as an alliance.  But in practice and in statements by administration officials, it's clear that the Bush Doctrine views NATO in practice as a kind of farm team which will provide troops for ad hoc coalitions for missions to be determined and controlled by the US.

So relative dependencies have shifted.  Europe is now capable of defending itself from any immediately apparent conventional military threat.  The EU countries collectively had more troops under arms than the United States, even before the recent expansion. But a US committed to Rumsfeld's vision of "military transformation" that envisions a relatively small number of troops, and to a goal of an international division of labor in which the "transformed" US military fights the conventional wars and leaves "nation-building" to the "coalitions of the willing", now needs the NATO allies more than Europe needs the US.

And as the European Union (EU) continues to develop common foreign and military policies, there is no reason that the EU itself couldn't assume NATO's former role of defending Europe.  So now a viable future for NATO means defining a mission on a worldwide scale, or at least a larger scale than Europe.  The current international force in Afghanistan is now a NATO force, for instance.  NATO interventions in the Balkans in the 1990s provided hopeful models for a possible future for the Atlantic alliance.  But the Iraq War raised a serious question of whether NATO is viable at all.

The Iraq War

Both Allies at War and Friendly Fire take close looks at the US and European disputes over the Iraq War, which of course included disputes among EU members and potential members as well as between European governments and the US.  The accounts are complimentary, in that Elizabeth Pond looks more closely at the internal politics in Europe driving the European actions, while Gordon and Shapiro focus more on the America positions and details of the diplomatic manouevering among the allies in the lead-up to war.

Britain, Spain and Italy were the core EU supporters of the Iraq War, with Britain being by far the most signficant in terms of its military participation, while France and Germany led the antiwar camp.

Both books recount the major steps in the development of that crisis, beginning with Bush's 2002 State of the Union address in which he introduced the phrase "axis of evil" to describe Iraq, Iran and North Korea.  The speech signalled to the NATO countries that he meant to confront Iraq in an immediate sense, with or without their support.

The following months were followed by discussions that involved public dissent by European nations, including even expressions of caution by Blair's government, warning the US against precipitous military action against Iraq.  Both books reviewed here give a good summary of those discussions, including attention to Robert Kagan's essay Power and Weakness (Policy Review (June-July 2002), which was eagerly taken up by neoconservatives and Republicans generally as a statement of their case against the European democracies.  Although short on analysis and long on propaganda - albeit a highbrow varient - Kagan's essay was able, as Pond observes, to "capture a partial truth at a point when their aperçu [insight] seizes the public imagination."  It popularized such ideas as, "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus" and the notion that Europe saw itself as realizing "Kant's 'Perpetual Peace'" while the US "remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable."

On a close reading, Kagan's famous essay offers little beyond sophomoric stereotypes of about European pacifism and American nobility and mission, as well as an ideological gloss on the Bush team's inclination to disregard "unreliable"inconveniences such as "international laws and rules."  But this particular formulation conveniently fitted the aggressive unilateralism of the Bush administration.  And it provided an ideological framework for "Martians" like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney to bash the European democracies and spew contempt at their concern for international law and settling disputes by diplomacy rather than war.

And it was Cheney's speech of 08/26/02 that kicked the dispute over Iraq into high gear.  "Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon," he declared.  And in another statement from that speech that has since joined the one just quoted in the annals of Bush administration deception of the public, Cheney announced, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."

European diplomats were confused as to exactly what American policy was at that point.  As Pond puts it, at this point "a number of European observers began musing about the dark arts of neo-Kremlinology that were now needed to decipher American policy."  While Cheney's speech was taken as a rallying call by the Republican faithful, the reaction was very different in Europe.  And it had an immediate impact in the German election campaign then getting underway.  Pond's explains the background this way:

From its inception in 1949, the Federal Republic [of Germany] had been trained, especially by the occupying Americans, not to glorify the military, but rather to eschew any resolution of disputes by force.  So swiftly and thoroughly had West Germans internalized these lessons that founding father Konrad Adenauer already had to fight a major political battle to reconstitute a German army in the 1950s.  Germans as a whole prided themselves on being a model "civilian power" and making a clear division between (moral) defense and (immoral) offense in the use of military force.

Pond recounts the evolution of postwar German attitudes toward war, which included providing assistance to Israel when it was attacked by Iraqi Scud missiles during the Gulf War of 1991.  Eventually, the "red-green" coalition government headed by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer successfully persuaded their parliament to support active German participation in the Kosovo intervention of 1999.  She also takes notice of an event that was little appreciated and quickly forgotten by Bush partisans:

And after 9/11 the chancellor [Schröder] even put his own office on the line in a touch-and-go vote of confidence inparliament to send German forces into combat, for the first time since World War II, alongside U.S. and British troops in eastern Afghanistan.

But when Schröder publicly opposed an immediate war on Iraq in his re-election campaign, the Bush Republicans reacted with a fury that I can only explain by two factors: the intense anti-Europe bent of Republican foreign policy today, and the Bush dynasty's extreme emphasis on personal loyalty.  Both books describe this chain of events in some detail.

But neither seems to fully appreciate the obvious.  Most German voters opposed the Iraq War and opposed their country participating in it.  Germany emphasizes the observance of international law, especially when it comes to launching wars of aggression, and one would think any remotely sane American with even the most superficial sense of history would be glad of that fact.  And German officials doubted the accuracy of the Bush administration's claims on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and the imminence of the danger Saddam presented to Western interests and, well, they were right.

Imagine that: a democracy where the public is suspicious of war, and where the elected officials aren't willing to send their soldiers to kill and die in a war based on false claims on non-existent threats.  The fact that two books that are highly critical of the Bush administration's conduct in many ways seem to find that a matter in need of special explanation is itself disturbing.

Gordon and Shapiro point out that Cheney's August 26 speech put pressure on Schröder at an awkward time.  They relate this telling tidbit:

According to scholar Stephen Szabo, when asked whether Vice President Cheney had considered the potential impact on the German election of his tough Iraq speech in August 2002, a close confidant of Cheney's responded, "Why should he care about the reaction in Germany?"

Schröder won his election, and Tony Blair persuaded the Americans to go to the UN for a resolution authorizing military action against Iraq.  Schröder joined up with French President Jacques Chirac in negotiating a compromise resolution that demanded immediate acquiesence to UN weapons inspections by Iraq, but contained wording that the antiwar camp could claim did not authorized automatic military action in case of non-compliance and that Bush and Blair could claim did so. Security Council Resolution 1441 passed by a unanimous 15-0 vote in November 2002, threatening "serious consequences" for Iraqi failure to comply.

Another milestone event was the publication in the Wall Street Journal of the "Letter of Eight" of 01/30/03.  The eight being Britain, Spain, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Denmark, Portugal, and the Czech Republic, and the letter being a general statement of support for the Bush administration's hard line against Iraq.

Gordon and Shapiro accept the official version that the Bush Administration was not involved in the preparation of this letter, "although U.S. officials were aware of it."  Yet they tell a story of its origins that raises more than one question. 

In fact, the contents of the letter were not particularly controversial; officials from France and Germany later said that they had no objection to the language in the text.  The timing and symbolism of the letter, however, were highly significant.  The idea of such a letter originated with Michael Gonzalez, the deputy editorial page editor at the Wall Street Journal Europe, who did not believe that the Franco-German vision of Iraq or transatlantic relations was shared by other European leaders.  Gonzalez thus contacted the office of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to propose that Berlusconi write an op-ed piece setting out his own, more Atlanticist, views.  Berlusconi like the idea, but wanted to associate it with other like-minded leaders, so he contacted Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar, who in turn got in touch with Portuguese Prime Minister José Manuel Durao Barroso and Britain's Tony Blair.

This event intesified the conflict, and raised suspicions among the antiwar camp that the US was trying to divide Europe in order to dominate its policies.

NATO's decision on defense of Turkey early in February 2003 was another occasion for conflict.  In substance, the question had to do with a fairly technical issue of NATO military planning in the even of Turkish participation in the Iraq War.  Gordon and Shapiro relate the diplomacy at some length.  It was finally resolved by a compromise, and in any case the Turkish parliament soon voted against participation in the war.

Gordon and Shapiro make it clear that this particular crisis was largely cooked up by the Bush team:

Knowing that several NATO members were not yet willing to proceed with NATO plans for Turkey's defense, the United States could easily have avoided the controversy and ensured that the defensive measures were taken on a bilateral basis.  During the Cold War, Washington never made support for its out-of-area activities - such as the Korean or Vietnam wars - a litmus test of lyalty to the alliance as a whole.  And given Washington's snubbing of NATO in Afghanistan little more than a year earlier, it was hard to argue that it pushed a NATO role this time out ofdevotion and loyalty to the alliance.

The Americans who denounced the German and French positions, moreover, overlooked the fact that Turkey itself was never particularly concerned aobut having NATO play a role, and that both France and Germany were prepared to do whatever was necessary to actually help Turkey, just no to have NATO do it.  As a German official put it, "We promised to supply the Patriots to Turkey bilaterally and asked the Untied States please not to force us to be an obstruction within NATO.  But the Bush administration was determined to make life difficult for  Schröder by having Germany vote yes to the deployment, thus undermining the Chancellor's own position against the Iraq war.  That was a really nasty bit of political game playing, and we viewed [it] as bullying, pure and simple."

There seems to have been a desire on the US side to denigrate and possibly deliberately damage the alliance.  Secretary of State Colin Powell expressed his fear on this occasion that NATO was "breaking itself up because it will not meet its responsibilities."

Pond also observes of the US approach to this particular issue of NATO assistance to Turkey:

Substantively, the specific NATO dispute may have been risible.  But what was at stake was indeed the survival of the alliance.  After fifty-four years of protecting Europe, introducing unprecedented confidence building in open shared military planning ,socializing generations of American and German and Turkish and Greek officers to mutual trust, and helping the new post-cold war democracies to tame their armies, NATO now faced potential obsolecence, given American indifference verging on contempt.

For the Americans [in the Bush administration] it was clear that Paris was the villain in gratuitously demolishing the transatlantic alliance.  Some in Washington were so angry at the French - and at Tony Blair for getting them into the UN mess in the name of a spurious multilateralism - that they were ready to punish Europe by themselves helping to demolish NATO.  For the French, the sparring may still have beeen a game, which they were winning on points.  But to some Germans, Washington iself was the villain in sacrificing the alliance to its obsession with invading Iraq.  Their real worry was that the aggrieved United States might now declare its independence from an encumbering europe.  In the end only the hegemon [the US] that created the post-World War II cooperative institutions, in the belief that they magnified U.S. influence, had sufficient power to snuff out those institutions, in the belief that Washington was now strong enought to manage the globalized world on its own.

But there also seems to have been a notion at work that threatening the survival of NATO would intimidate the Europeans.  Even though with the Bush Doctrine, the US needs the NATO allies more than they need the US.

The low point for intra-NATO relations came in the controversy over a second Security Council resolution to authorize force against Iraq, which the US and Britain sought but ultimately failed to obtain over active opposition by France in particular.  At the same time, the US began a rapid military buildup in the Gulf that dramtically increased pressure for early military action.

The Gordon/Shapiro account of the diplomacy around the second resolution highlights the way in which Tony Blair's domestic need to have UN endorsement for war exacerbated tensions among the NATO allies.  The Bush administration agreed to go to for a second resolution to accomodate Blair.  As it turned out, they failed to get it, but had another round of confrontation with the antiwar Europeans led by France's Chirac.  Thus, they write, "By the time the war began [in March 2003], relations between the United States and some leading European governments were so strained that the veryfuture of the alliance was open to question."

Future Prospects

Gordon and Shipiro are more optimistic than Pond about the future survival of the alliance, though she too is more optimistic than recent experiences seem to warrant.  Gordon and Shapiro argue that bad diplomacy itself was largely to blame for the crisis.  But in fact, they themselves indicate the flaw in that argument, in what is stated as an even-handed description of mutual miscalculations between the prowar and antiwar camps within the alliance:

Both sides made some real miscalculations.  Bush administration officials, hewing to a theory of leadership that weaker allies would have little choice but to follow America's lead if the direction of U.S. policy were clearly spelled out, never believed that opponents in Europe would dare challenge U.S. power.  They were thus surprised and appalled when France, Germany and Russian - let alone Mexico, Chile, Cameroon, and others on the Security Council - did just that.  The Americans, so convinced they were right about what to do in Iraq, vastly underestimated the resistance to war in Western Europe, in Turkey, and in the rest of the world.  For their part, many Europeans - particularly the French - for too long did not believe that even the assertive, unilateralist Bush administration would, in the face of widespread public opposition, be able to go to war based mostly on alleged flaws in a highly technical Iraqi weapons declaration.  They thus misread Bush as badly as some in Washington misread the French.

But what do the "miscalculations" on the two sides have in common in this description?  On the prowar side, there was the arrogant faith of the Republican administration in the power and disirability of unilateral military action to achieve the desired results.  On the antiwar side, there was a failure to understand just how intense was the arrogant faith of the Republican administration in the power and disirability of unilateral military action to achieve the desired results.

NATO was fundamentally founded on a system of international order and law, one which excludes preventive wars, of which the Bush administration's war of choice in Iraq was one.  Neither the NATO alliance, or any other long-term cooperative military arrangement with the European democracies, are going to work when there's an American administration committed to preventive war, as this one is and will remain, and the European democracies are committed to a system of international law and order that rejects preventive war.

In  a subsequent article, Lurching Back Together (Internationale Politik 1/2004 Spring issue, accessed 05/29/04), Pond notes hopefully and with amusement that some of the leading neoconservative Martians have at least adopted a more humble tone recently:

Neoconservative apostle Robert Kagan sounds almost Kantian as he not only revels in US power, but now worries as well about the perception of US legitimacy in the world. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Under Secretary of State John Bolton, and Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle, on their most recent visits to Old Europe, were notably restrained and are no longer demanding either an invasion of Iran or the resignation of Gerhard Schröder as German chancellor.

She notes that European leaders have been diplomatically refraining from crowing over the disaster that the Iraq War has turned out to be.  Though Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder most likely would not dispute Al Gore's assertion that Bush "has created more anger and righteous indignation against us as Americans than any leader of our country in the 228 years of our existence as a nation - because of his attitude of contempt for any person, institution or nation who disagrees with him."  But they are refraining from expressing their sentiments so explicitly in public.

Pond sees these and other changes, such as well-received efforts by Tony Blair's Britain to strenthen relations with its EU partners, as providing hopeful prospects, for which the June 2004 meetings of NATO, the G-8 and a US-EU summit will be bellweathers.  She believes the US setbacks and failures in Iraq over the last year have provided a crucial shift in perspective for US policy-makers that make them more receptive to improved US-European relations.