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By William Drozdiak
These days, there is a great deal of talk about the dawn of an Asian century -- hastened by the rise of China and India. Meanwhile, the fractious Atlantic alliance, enfeebled by two wars and an economic crisis, is said to be fading away. But the West is not doomed to decline as a center of power and influence. A relatively simple strategic fix could reinvigorate the historic bonds between Europe and North America and reestablish the West's dominance: it is time to bring together the West's principal institutions, the
When NATO's 28 leaders gather in Portugal later this year to draw up a new security strategy for the twenty-first century, they will consider a range of options, including military partnerships with distant allies such as Australia, Japan, and South Korea. Yet the most practical solution lies just down the road from the alliance's sprawling headquarters near the Brussels airport. Genuine cooperation between NATO and the 27-nation
NOT-SO-FRIENDLY NEIGHBORS
Anybody who spends time in Brussels comes away mystified by the lack of dialogue between the West's two most important multinational organizations, even though they have been based in the same city for decades. Only a few years ago, it was considered a minor miracle when the EU's foreign policy czar and NATO's secretary-general decided that they should have breakfast together once a month. An EU planning cell is now ensconced at NATO military headquarters, but there is scarcely any other communication between the two institutions. With Europe and the United States facing common threats from North Africa to the Hindu Kush, it is imperative for Western nations to take advantage of these two organizations' resources in the fields of law enforcement, counterterrorism, intelligence gathering, drug interdiction, and even agricultural policy.
Past efforts to build bridges between the EU and NATO have routinely foundered due to mutual suspicions between France and the United States. When France left the NATO military command in 1965, it sought to establish a European defense capability as a counterweight to U.S. dominance. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was unclear whether the United States was willing to remain the primary security actor in Europe; painstaking negotiations eventually led to the "Berlin Plus" arrangements in 2003, which allowed European nations to use NATO assets when the United States or other NATO members chose not to get involved in peacekeeping missions. But the Balkan wars of the 1990s had by then humbled Europeans' ambitions to take control of their continent's security. More recently, in 2004, when the Republic of Cyprus joined the EU, its accession sparked tensions with the NATO member Turkey -- which administers the northern half of the island. To this day, Ankara refuses to give its consent to Cypriot cooperation with NATO on diplomatic, intelligence, and military matters, and Cyprus continues to prevent Turkey's participation in the
Now that France has fully rejoined the Western military alliance, there is an unprecedented opportunity for closer collaboration between the two organizations. The simultaneous expansion of both, to embrace former communist states in the East, has created greater overlap in their membership than ever before: 21 states are now members of both the EU and NATO. In addition, the enormous budgetary pressures created by the recent global economic downturn have compelled the United States and its European allies to reconsider their collective defense commitments and try to figure out how to adapt their partnership to cope with transnational challenges.
When Barack Obama spoke in Berlin to a crowd of more than 200,000 people during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, he referred to the West's triumph in bringing down the Iron Curtain and declared, "The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand." Now that he is president, Obama and his administration should lead the way in breaking down bureaucratic barriers between the EU and NATO.
A NEW PARTNERSHIP
A strong connection between the EU and NATO would serve Western security interests on every major issue. Although Russia still regards NATO with trepidation, Moscow is eager to cultivate broader economic contacts with the EU. Dialogue with Russia could move beyond the issue of Western military encroachment to include energy security, investment in Russian infrastructure, and enhanced trade. Such talks may well convince Moscow that cooperating with the West serves its own security interests because the greater long-term threats come from Chinese intrusion on Russia's eastern border and the spread of Islamic radicalism to its south. In the Balkans, the prospect of future EU and NATO membership could become a tantalizing reward for good behavior, just as Hungary and Romania were prodded into resolving their long-standing ethnic dispute in Transylvania in order to qualify for EU and NATO membership. Indeed, Serbia's government now says that it wants to become a full-fledged member of the EU-NATO community of nations, a welcome change from the past, when it wallowed in victimhood and spouted self-defeating nationalist rhetoric. And in the Middle East, increased funds for peacekeeping forces, humanitarian aid, and trade and investment programs could yield new incentives to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians -- perhaps including shared security partnerships with NATO and an open trading zone with the EU. Israel's president, Shimon Peres, has often visited Brussels seeking to draw lessons from Europe's postwar reconciliation in the hope of one day establishing a common market in the Middle East.
Preparing for future threats will be just as important, and it will require imaginative policymaking. Burgeoning conflicts over cybersecurity and Internet freedoms have already emerged as a new source of tension with China and Russia.
Meanwhile, the Arctic Circle has become a hotly contested region; according to the
The enormous military, financial, and psychological burdens of fighting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past decade may give the U.S. government pause before it undertakes future overseas adventures, but Washington cannot afford to resort to isolationism. More than ever, the United States will need to share costs and burdens with allies while still maintaining an active military posture. Although Obama has vowed not to make any cuts to next year's $700 billion defense budget, he has made it clear that he expects NATO members to make greater contributions -- if not in the form of combat troops in Afghanistan, then certainly through development aid, police training, or education to help rebuild war-ravaged nations.
UNDER ONE ROOF
Merging the U.S. missions to the EU and NATO as quickly as possible is an important first step. Doing so would send both a substantive and a symbolic message to European leaders. At the same time, it would shatter old mindsets and encourage new approaches to dealing with security threats that require more than firepower. Today, many of the organizational structures of the
This approach would also encourage European countries -- the vast majority of which are both EU and NATO members -- to build a new strategic partnership with the United States that reaches beyond their respective foreign and defense ministries and draws instead on all their government resources, including agencies not usually associated with national security policy. Finally, in confronting today's threats -- whether they come from al Qaeda terrorists, Afghan heroin traffickers, Somali pirates, or Congolese warlords -- there will have to be closer coordination than ever before between federal agents and counterterrorism analysts in Washington and their counterparts in Europe.
The long-awaited passage of the Lisbon Treaty has further integrated the EU, allowing Brussels to finally focus on shaping a new European security strategy. Gone are the grandiose visions of building a United States of Europe with a multinational army, a single European seat on the
As the world's most successful experiment in multinational government, the EU boasts some of the world's highest living standards for its 500 million citizens, and its $16 trillion economy is larger than that of the United States. The EU also offers some of the world's most generous aid programs, encourages democratic reforms among those of its neighbors that aspire to become members, and provides a good model of regional integration, which has been emulated in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Its military contributions to NATO pale in comparison to the United States', but they still matter: European nations have provided about one-third of the forces in Afghanistan and have suffered about 40 percent of the fatalities there since 2001, according to NATO figures.
Still, Europe will never come close to acquiring the military power of the United States; its leaders and its voters have no desire or ambition to achieve that goal. Since Europe is prepared to pour its tax money and resources into noncombat roles, the United States should encourage its European allies to do what they do best -- and what their people and their politicians are willing to support. Washington must accept that European leaders will almost always choose the soft-power option, leaving the exercise of hard power to the United States. In nearly all cases, that will mean that the United States will continue to assume the dominant role in supplying military firepower, while Europe steps up its extensive aid efforts in such fields as economic reconstruction, police training, health care, and education.
COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGES
The prospects for Western success in conducting counterinsurgency efforts in failing states will improve dramatically if the NATO military command structure and the well-funded EU foreign aid programs learn to cooperate. Afghanistan is a case in point: in January, German Chancellor Angela Merkel responded to Obama's urgent appeals for more troops by sending only 500 additional soldiers. However, she doubled Berlin's development aid to Kabul and provided an extra $70 million to help entice Taliban insurgents to lay down their arms. This is a classic case of how Europe's most powerful nation, Germany, always opts to spend money on development programs rather than troop deployments. Given their history, Germans are even less willing than other Europeans to allow NATO to become an "expeditionary alliance" -- as former President George W. Bush once prescribed.
A new initiative to pair EU and NATO institutional resources in ways that combine U.S. military capabilities with Europe's economic and political clout will not please everybody. In Afghanistan, U.S. soldiers look with scorn at their European counterparts, whose governments have imposed stringent rules of engagement. (Among U.S. soldiers, the initials for the NATO mission known as ISAF stand not for the International Security Assistance Force but rather for "I Saw Americans Fight.")
Yet the ongoing struggles in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrate that modern warfare does not depend completely on military prowess and technological wizardry. More than ever, the United States needs to recognize that its overwhelming firepower will not be the most effective tool in twenty-first-century warfare. Much of Europe's reluctance to follow the United States' lead in Afghanistan is based on the belief that military force, particularly when it results in civilian casualties, only produces more recruits for the Taliban. By embracing Europe's arguments in favor of economic reconstruction and civic development projects over the use of brute military strength in counterinsurgency missions, the United States can revive public faith in the most successful alliance in history.
Until now, the policies of Western nations toward the EU and NATO have rarely been coordinated. Foreign ministries still operate on separate tracks when sending instructions to their respective EU and NATO missions. Unless policymakers revolutionize their thinking, the West's most important institutions will be condemned to mediocrity and eventual irrelevance. It is time to give the EU and NATO a new lease on life by endowing them with a common transatlantic mission.
Available at Amazon.com:
Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field
Empires of Mud: Wars and Warlords in Afghanistan
At War with the Weather: Managing Large-Scale Risks in a New Era of Catastrophes
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