Military

Overview

Adequately addressing the subject of these hearings requires answering three questions.  First, what are the foundations on which a renewed transatlantic partnership can and should be built?  Second, what are the obstacles to building such a partnership?  Third, how can those obstacles be overcome or managed?  This statement will cover each of these three questions in turn. 

In answering the first question, emphasis will be placed on the policies of the Bush administration, both because it is those policies that are often alleged to have weakened the transatlantic relationship and because U.S. leadership will be the essential basis for its renewal.  The conclusion will be that the foundations for a strong transatlantic partnership remain in place and are recognized by leaders and experts on both sides of the Atlantic.

A response to the second question is essential because of the mass of commentary from both official and unofficial sources in recent months about the problems of achieving greater transatlantic cooperation.  The analysis here will focus on the concrete changes in the United States, Europe and the world beyond that have challenged the policies and practices of the transatlantic partners in the past several years, especially since September 11, 2001.  It will highlight the ways in which these changes opened the door to the acute transatlantic tensions and disagreements of recent months.  The conclusion will be that the damage wrought by these disagreements will not be easily or quickly repaired, but that repair is both possible and necessary in the interests of both the United States and European countries.

This analysis lays the foundation for answering the third, and most important, question about how to overcome the obstacles to renewing the partnership.  Three dimensions will be emphasized: the role of leadership; the potential for policy cooperation on the central international challenges of the coming months and years; and the institutions within which the partnership must be renewed and more effective dialogue conducted. 

A brief conclusion argues that if the governments on both sides of the Atlantic are willing to make the effort required to strengthen their cooperation in the changed international circumstances they confront they will create a new partnership that, while inevitably and appropriately quite different from that during the Cold War, will enable them to advance their interests more surely than either could do without the support and assistance of the other.

RENEWING THE TRANSATLANTIC PARTNERSHIP: WHY AND HOW?

Introduction

Mr. Chairman, Members of the Subcommittee on Europe, I would like to thank you for giving me this opportunity to appear today to discuss a matter of critical importance to our foreign policy and one that is at the heart of the mission of the Atlantic Council of the United States.  I commend you for your decision to hold hearings on the transatlantic relationship at one of the most difficult times in the modern history of that relationship.

The Foundations of a Renewed Transatlantic Partnership

Recent months have seen an almost unprecedented amount of commentary about the transatlantic relationship by political leaders and nongovernmental analysts alike on both sides of the Atlantic.  The reasons for this wave of attention are not far to seek.  But the volume and nature of this commentary are in themselves revealing.  Not only have they confirmed the commonplace observation that relationships of any kind are hard to capture adequately in words.  But they have also strongly suggested the importance that people on both sides of the Atlantic attach to this relationship.  The fact that the commentary often invokes the imagery of a marriage relationship and seeks conclusions by analogy with marriage merely confirms this impression and underlines what anyone concerned with transatlantic relations should keep constantly in mind—that the state of those relations is often as much a matter of psychology as of reality.

In this situation it is perhaps useful to review some basic propositions about the first question posed by the title of these hearings: Why renew the transatlantic partnership?  Given the alleged lack of concern of the Bush administration for transatlantic relations, a good place to start is with some of the relevant recent statements of the administration’s leaders.  For example, President Bush in his speech in Krakow on 31 May:

The United States is committed to a strong Atlantic alliance, to ensure our security, to advance human freedom and to keep peace in the world…Europe and America will always be joined by more than our interests.  Ours is a union of ideals and convictions.  We believe in human rights, and justice under the law, and self-government, and economic freedom tempered by compassion.

The President gave another reason for the importance he attaches to the relationship, none the less important for its pragmatism:

To meet these goals of security and peace and a hopeful future for the developing world, we welcome, we need the help, the advice and the wisdom of our European friends and allies.  New theories of rivalry should not be permitted to undermine the great principles and obligations that we share.  The enemies of freedom have always preferred a divided alliance because when Europe and America are united no problem and no enemy can stand against us.

In the same vein, Secretary of State Colin Powell, in a press conference in Paris on 22 May, outlined a conception of the relationship as it is likely to evolve in the future:

There will be disagreements, there will be fights, but there will be more on which we agree, more areas on which we can come together as a transatlantic community to deal with some of the transatlantic and now increasingly international problems we face…let us remember what keeps us together: shared values, shared beliefs, and a commitment to help our people to a better life.  But more importantly, as the wealthiest part of the world, a commitment on the part of all of us to help the people around the world to a better life.  As long as we keep our eyes on those values, the transatlantic community is going to be fine, and I’ll let others decide whether unipolar, multipolar, bipolar, whatever, you know.  [sic]  I don’t use those terms very often because I am not sure what they mean.

Some will doubtless say that statements of this kind are mere rhetoric designed to calm European fears about current U.S. policy, but unlikely to be observed in practical policy.  Time alone will tell.  Yet others will note, equally cynically, that the U.S. administration means everything it says on this subject provided that Europeans are willing to follow the U.S policy lead uncritically.  But several recent events suggest that one should consider the possibility that the rhetoric means very much what it says.  The increasingly close U.S.-European cooperation on the post-war reconstruction of Afghanistan, the engagement of NATO in post-war security arrangements in Iraq, initially in a supporting role, continuing close transatlantic cooperation on the Balkans, the agreements at the Prague NATO summit, the contentious, but real cooperation within the Quartet on the Israeli-Palestinian problem, close cooperation on counterterrorism—all these testify to an ongoing pragmatic U.S. and allied approach to difficult challenges even when there may not be complete agreement on every aspect of policy.

The Committee will be hearing separately from European experts, but as one who spends much time in discussion with Europeans of many different stripes, I believe that most Europeans engaged in international relations would endorse the sentiments of the U.S. leadership quoted earlier concerning the importance of a strong transatlantic partnership.  This is not to deny their anxieties, for which they can, and no doubt will, produce ample chapter and verse, that the United States has lost interest in Europe or sees it as too weak and divided to be a useful partner in dealing with the most important international challenges.  Nor does it deny their skepticism as to the U.S. intention to follow through on its words.  But those anxieties and that skepticism lead back into the psychology of the relationship.

This broad similarity of opinion on the relationship underlines an important point that is often lost in the discussion of disagreements across the Atlantic, namely that the range of views on most policy issues in the United States and Europe is substantially the same.  What differs is where the political center of gravity of opinion lies at any given time.  Just as there are prominent Americans who strongly criticize the way in which the Bush administration has dealt with its European allies in recent months, so there are prominent Europeans, including in France and Germany, acutely distressed at the course their governments have taken in recent transatlantic arguments.  There are no greater risks in trying to understand the future of the relationship than overgeneralizing trends and attitudes and relying on snapshots of opinion instead of looking at the moving picture formed by the evolution of thinking on both sides of the Atlantic.[1]

In summary, as the statements quoted above show for the U.S. side, there are several components of the foundation for a strong transatlantic relationship in the future as in the past that are widely accepted on both sides of the ocean.  At the risk of gross oversimplification these can be expressed as follows:

If the assessment that there are powerful forces pushing governments on both sides of the Atlantic toward renewing and preserving a strong transatlantic partnership is correct, the second question in the title of today’s hearing immediately arises: How can that partnership be renewed?  Answering that question requires an assessment of the obstacles to doing so and the ways in which those obstacles can be overcome.

The Obstacles to a Renewed Transatlantic Partnership

First, the obstacles.  Many theories and images have become part of the currency of the recent debate.  None have been more widely commented on than Robert Kagan’s statements that Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus and that the United States lives in a Hobbesian world and Europe in a Kantian one.[4]  But others have spoken equally vividly of the United States as a contemporary Gulliver being tied down by European Lilliputians, of a U.S. insistence on unipolarity contrasted with a European preference for multipolarity, of the confirmation of the realist theory that every international hegemon evokes a countervailing alliance of weaker states, of the ‘continental drift’ of societal values that will force the two sides of the Atlantic further apart, of separation and divorce, and so on. 

Many of these analyses and images contain grains of truth, but all contain a large amount of chaff.  None satisfactorily accounts for the ambiguous, complex and multilayered reality of the relationship as it is today and will remain tomorrow.  Unfortunately for analysts, that is a goal at which they can continually strive, but rarely, if ever, attain.  Several aspects of the profusion of analysis are, however, worth noting as the foundation for prescribing a remedy for what ails the transatlantic relationship at present.

First, the relationship has lived through many cycles in which the countries on the two sides of the ocean have had to adjust with more or less ease and grace to new realities concerning both themselves and the world outside the North Atlantic region.  This is not the place to rehearse the history of these various cycles.  In many ways history is quite likely to judge the present trough in the relationship as the most serious and most difficult to overcome, if indeed it is successfully overcome.  But the point remains that the current problems fit well into a pattern that has become familiar.  As often as not, the root of the problem has been a shift in the relative power of the United States and a Europe recovering its strength and international aspirations following the Second World War.  It should be no surprise that a major constituent of the current tensions is the unresolved issue of how far the recent move within Europe toward closer cooperation in foreign policy is likely to go and the implications of this both for the United States and for the institutions of transatlantic cooperation.  The suspicions aroused in the United States by the EU’s adoption of its European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) initiative in the 1990s illustrate this point.

Second, underlying the recent tensions has been a major strategic shift to which both the United States and European countries are still adapting.  This is the shift from the Cold War situation in which the security of Europe was a, if not the, primary strategic concern of the United States (though it was certainly never the only such concern) to a situation in which the principal strategic challenges have their geographical source in what has been variously called the arc of crisis, the axis of evil, the Greater Middle East, and other terms.  Thus, the strategic center of gravity has moved from an area in which the interests of the United States and European countries were broadly similar (though still a continuous source of policy debates) to another area on which the track record over the same period has been one of almost continuous and substantial transatlantic policy disagreement.  Only in the unusual circumstances of the 1990s, when first the Gulf War and then the Oslo peace process brought a remarkable convergence of policy across the Atlantic for much of the decade, have the transatlantic allies managed to achieve substantial cooperation on the Middle East broadly understood.  With the collapse of the Oslo process in early 2001 and growing differences of view on the management of the post-Gulf War situation, that brief period of relative harmony ended.[5]

Third, although the deterioration in the transatlantic relationship was already evident well before late 2001 and even before the advent of the second Bush administration, the impact of the attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001 was very differently felt on the two sides of the Atlantic both by the publics and, equally importantly, in terms of the obligations they imposed on the leaderships.  Much was known in advance of 11 September about al-Qaeda and the threat it represented to both the United States and European countries.  But on neither side of the Atlantic was there a clear disposition or a political consensus for a strong and decisive reaction to this threat. 

The intensity of the reaction on the U.S. side after 11 September was both inevitable and warranted.  It created a situation in which political leaders had no choice, even had they wished to find one, but to treat the prevention by all reasonable means of a recurrence of the disaster as the highest political priority.  In Europe, by contrast, the threat still seemed somewhat distant and abstract.  It was arguably much more directed at the United States than at any European countries, especially ones that elected not to associate with U.S. policy too closely.  And it was also plausibly comparable to the internal terrorist threats that many European countries had confronted in recent years and in several cases either faced down or contained.

Arising from this differentiated reaction to the events of 11 September there developed a series of episodes which aggravated the transatlantic rift.  With its understandable and correct sense of urgency, the U.S. administration saw little reason to plan and undertake the military operation in Afghanistan jointly with its allies, given the premium on speed and efficacy and the novelty of both the theater and the type of warfare contemplated, for neither of which was NATO policy or planning prepared.  That sense of urgency carried forward into the development of U.S. policy on Iraq during 2002 and the elaboration of the administration’s much discussed National Security Strategy.  It was only slightly slowed by the president’s decision to seek United Nations consensus on the need to tackle the Iraqi problem, by force if necessary, as a matter of high priority. 

Given the sense of urgency and priority widely attached to these actions in the United States, it is not obvious how any ally that had principled doubts about the wisdom of U.S. policy could have expressed those doubts effectively, and certainly publicly, without attracting the displeasure, or worse, of the U.S. administration.  Few would dissent in principle from the proposition that the status of ally and friend differs from that of uncritical follower.  But the situation in 2001-2003 has been such as to make acting on that proposition highly risky for any would-be friend of a U.S. administration publicly dedicated to the proposition that other countries are either with it or against it.

Yet this very history also suggests that the adaptation of policy and strategy that 9/11 forced on both sides of the Atlantic has been, and remains, incomplete. 

This gradual evolution of the approaches and assessments—both on the two sides of the Atlantic and among Europeans—is likely to continue as the experience of recent years is assimilated.  To what extent there will be a complete convergence of opinion is hard to foresee, however, and will in any case depend to a large extent on events yet to occur.

Fourth, recent events have cast into sharp relief a longstanding difference of view within Europe as to the proper course of development of the European Union.  Crudely represented as a disagreement between Britain and France, this difference of view dates back at least to the founding of the European Economic Community.  But the decision of the European Union (EU) to enlarge substantially by 2004, with the attendant threat that enlargement will undermine the ability of those countries that have largely dictated the direction of the Union hitherto to continue to do so, has given a new salience to an old divergence.  The fact that Britain is, for the first time since it joined the EEC in the early 1970s, led by a prime minister with both the ambition and, at least in theory, the potential to challenge French leadership of the EU has merely made the situation more delicate.  The Iraq crisis, and the distinctive pro-U.S. position taken by Tony Blair from early on, brought this hitherto largely latent rivalry to a head and invested it with significance going well beyond the confines of Europe.

Notwithstanding this disagreement, there is a shared commitment by all the EU member countries to continue to work toward greater cooperation in the foreign and security policy arena through the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP).  In part this determination is a consequence of U.S. strength and the perception among Europeans that they will only be heard in the United States if they speak with a single voice.  But it is also, in part, a reaction to the perceived inconstancy of U.S. policy across several administrations and a consequent sense that Europe needs to acquire the ability to act in circumstances in which the United States, for reasons good or bad, does not wish to act or tires of doing so.  This was a lesson that Tony Blair, among others, drew in the summer of 1998 in connection with Kosovo and that subsequently catalyzed the British decision to try to accelerate defense cooperation in the EU.

It would be unwise to believe that this shared commitment on CFSP and ESDP will be a casualty of differences among Europeans over Iraq.  While there is certainly nothing inevitable about the development of closer European cooperation in these areas, especially in the light of the forthcoming enlargement, the long, if episodic, movement in this direction responds to a certain logic that is more likely than not to continue.  The Thessaloniki summit has reinforced this conclusion.  The question for the United States, therefore, is whether it should attempt to stand in the way of this development, despite having generally encouraged it for so long, or whether it should seek to accommodate and even support it. 

The former course may seem irresistible in the heat of the crisis of transatlantic confidence over Iraq, especially as many Europeans are already convinced that the U.S. administration is doing precisely that.  To this observer, however, that would be a misguided conclusion.  Better by far to calculate that the United States has enough friends within the EU, including many of the soon-to-be new members, to be confident that the CFSP will not evolve in such a way as to make the EU an adversary of U.S. interests and to realize that a more coherent Europe represents a potential asset to the pursuit of those interests.

Fifth, as mentioned earlier, the increasing economic integration of the countries of the North Atlantic region represents a strong bond engaging them with one another.  Admittedly, history abounds with examples of erroneous predictions that increasing economic integration is both irreversible and a source of greater cooperation among nations.  There is no certainty that those who make such predictions today are any more correct.  But for the time being the welfare of all the societies in the region is dependent on the depth of that integration, which has recently been amply documented.[6] 

As the process of integration proceeds and as what were once indisputably domestic policy concerns increasingly affect the interests of other countries, new disputes are bound to occur, as they have done continually in the past.  It is the nature of boundaries, political and economic alike, that they are the focal points of friction.  At present, the area in which such frictions are most likely in the transatlantic context is that of economic regulation, as has already been apparent on issues as diverse as aircraft noise, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and corporate taxation.[7]  Many ideas have been proposed to enable the United States and the EU to manage these frictions better than they have often done in the past, but it is notable that even in his relatively conciliatory Krakow speech, President Bush saw fit to take the EU to task for its policy on GMOs.

Sixth, the frequently heard, and rather simplistic, allegation that the current U.S. administration is ‘unilateralist’ whereas most European governments are ‘multilateralist’ does serve as a proxy for real issues concerning the proper role of international norms, agreements and institutions in shaping and limiting the power of nations.  The majority of leaders on both sides of the Atlantic have for many decades shared the view that the best interests of all the countries concerned and of the world as a whole would be best served by the development of such international instruments and institutions.  Consequently, the United States and its allies in Europe, under strong U.S. leadership, have made a considerable investment of time and effort in creating a new international system based on agreements and institutions in the security as well as the economic arenas.  Few would deny that this effort has been only partly successful and that the centerpiece of the system, the United Nations, has proven to have serious flaws in its structure and operations.  As a result, both the United States and European countries have been willing to act without the authority of the United Nations on many occasions.

The problem of the legitimacy of action without U.N. sanction has, however, been made considerably more difficult and sensitive by at least two factors: the progressive emergence, mostly since the 1990s, of the concept of legitimate ‘humanitarian’ intervention in what hitherto had been regarded as the internal affairs of states; and the multiplication, beyond anything imagined at the time of its creation, of independent countries members of the United Nations.  The NATO interventions in the Balkans in the 1990s were classic examples of the dilemma presented by the former development.  The difficulty of reaching consensus within the United Nations has been greatly affected by the latter. 

Moreover, although the structure of the Security Council has come to reflect poorly the real distribution of weight within the international system, there is no incentive for those countries which benefit disproportionately from the existing system, notably France and Britain, to accept any change that would undermine their position.  Quite the contrary, that position offers them the congenial opportunity to continue to play a role in world affairs beyond their true power and influence.

Taken together, these and other factors have resulted in a concern about the legitimacy of the use of power—and especially the power of the strongest country, the United States—without U.N. approval.  This concern has divided the allies without leading to any serious attempt on their part to come to a common understanding of the extent and significance of the problem and how it can best be addressed. 

On one side, many in the United States assert that all countries, and especially the United States, as the country primarily responsible for the maintenance of peace and security in the world and as the primary target of the forces of disorder, will on occasion have to act without the formal legitimacy of a U.N decision.  Some would press this view to the point of suggesting that U.S. interests would be best served if the United Nations were to disappear and the United States were to be freed from the constraints of many international agreements to which it is a party.

By contrast, many in Europe believe that the propensity of the United States to exploit its power in this way represents, except in the most egregious cases, the application of double standards and will undermine such progress as has been made toward a rule-based international order.  In this European view, the United States needs to be constrained to act within internationally agreed limits.

These are the principal features of the current international landscape that, taken together, raise the question whether the transatlantic allies can reach a common strategic assessment on enough of the critical challenges they face to make a meaningful and enduring alliance or true partnership possible.  The least that can be said in answer to this question is that it will not happen easily or quickly.  Not only are the wounds incurred in the recent disputes quite deep and painful on both sides, but the real issues underlying those disputes are difficult and complex.  As President Bush said in Krakow, equipping the Alliance to meet the challenges of our times is a matter of capability and will.  At the present moment, neither exist in adequate proportion. 

Perhaps they never will.  Many well qualified and perceptive observers have concluded that the Alliance is essentially beyond repair.  One typical such analysis, under the heading of The End of Atlanticism, argues that the Bush administration’s policies and diplomatic style, notably its certitude and ‘religiosity,’ represent a tipping point in transatlantic relations which, while not leading inevitably to the end of the Alliance, will do so unless there is a change of approach soon.[8]  Yet others, from the opposite perspective, believe that President Chirac has irrevocably set France on the path of creating an international counterweight to challenge U.S. power and that this French decision precludes the reestablishment of any real transatlantic partnership worthy of the name.  Many citations of this pessimistic view could be made from commentators on both sides of the Atlantic.

Yet if one believes, with President Bush as quoted earlier, that the renewal of the Alliance is of critical importance to the interests of Americans and Europeans alike, finding the cooperative policies and processes which can catalyze that renewal is an urgent task.  It is to this final question—how the current problems in the partnership can be overcome—that the analysis must now turn.

Overcoming the Obstacles to a Renewed Transatlantic Partnership

Renewing the transatlantic partnership will require actions of several different kinds—relating to leadership, policy cooperation and institutions.  Each will be addressed in turn.

Leadership.  The impetus for renewing the partnership will have to come to a substantial extent from the top.  The leaders of the major countries must state clearly, as President Bush has done recently, the importance they attach to reweaving, and indeed strengthening, the fabric of the relationship.  And they must enforce their stated intentions on their governments at all levels and make plain that they will not allow those intentions to be undermined by people with different views.  As part of this process, the leaders need to speak more frankly with one another about their concerns and political constraints and seek, as the practical politicians they are, to find ways of accommodating their respective positions to the extent possible.  One of the characteristics of recent years has been for high level meetings, both bilateral and multilateral, to become occasions for public displays of harmony unaccompanied by serious discussion of difficult and sensitive issues.  This is no basis for partnership.

This assertion that there has been a deficiency of dialogue among the key governments, and between the United States and the EU on areas within the competence of the Commission and the High Representative of the Council of Ministers, may seem paradoxical.  Surely, it will be objected, there has been a profusion, if not a proliferation, of transatlantic meetings, visits, exchanges of all kinds and at all levels in recent years.  Scarcely an hour goes by when ministers or presidents are not meeting somewhere or picking up the telephone to talk (although some observers have claimed that in quantitative terms meetings at the highest levels have not been as frequent as in the past[9]).  Yet for all the contacts that undoubtedly occur, many participants as well as observers admit that there has been a deficit of serious, intensive and sustained strategic dialogue such as typified the relationship on European security during much of the Cold War period.

Even with the best dialogue in the world, however, consensus will not always be possible.  In such cases, the governments must accept that honest disagreement honestly arrived at need not be a sign of disloyalty to the partnership.  In a relationship characterized by such close and intense dialogue, which is certainly not what we have witnessed in recent times, there would be no place, or need, to consider punishing or ostracizing partners with whom agreement on a particular issue proved impossible to reach.  Such forbearance, especially at a time of great anxiety about security and economic growth, may seem a lot to ask.  But it should not be too much to grant in view of the priority that all the major governments concerned profess to attach to the outcome.  And the failure to do so will only lead to repeating the experience of recent months in increasingly adverse situations.

Some might object that the state of personal relationships among several of the key leaders at present is such as to preclude their acting together decisively to renew their partnership.  Without doubt the different styles and political ideas of Presidents Bush and Chirac and Chancellor Schroeder, not to mention their recent experiences with one another and public reactions to their differences, make their task a difficult one.  But if politics makes strange bedfellows, national interests often make for uncomfortable ones.  If the logic of a strong partnership is as persuasive as is argued here, the recent tensions should be as much a spur as a hindrance to a serious effort to repair the damage it has sustained.

The failures of communication of recent times have been the responsibility of leaders on both sides of the Atlantic.  But there is one challenge that is specific to Europeans.  For too long, European leaders have been prone to determine their approaches toward many international problems as a function of their relations with the United States.  Agreeing, or in some cases disagreeing, with the U.S. position has been almost more important than the merits of the issue at hand.  For the United States, by contrast, transatlantic relations have increasingly been seen as a function of approaches to the international problems themselves.  As the strategic center of gravity has moved outside Europe to the Middle East and beyond, it has become vital for Europeans to shoulder a greater degree of strategic responsibility for dealing with these problems and to be less inclined to shape their policies toward them as a function of what the United States thinks or wants.  While this might on the face of it seem to imply that there would be more rather than fewer transatlantic policy disagreements, paradoxically there is a good chance that the result would be a stronger partnership in which each side would have more to contribute to the other.

Policy Cooperation.  The governments need to proceed issue by issue to define those areas on which they agree and can cooperate and to narrow and understand better those on which they cannot find a basis for cooperative or complementary policies.  In recent months, the Atlantic Council has convened working groups on a broad range of issues—including trade and regulatory issues, European security, the future of Russia-West relations, the Middle East and the Gulf, and Asia—with a view to outlining areas of potential transatlantic cooperation.[10]  Others have also worked along similar lines.  One such exercise resulted in the Declaration on Transatlantic Relations, issued in May and signed by 21 European and U.S. foreign policy experts and former officials, including myself.[11]  This declaration outlines a basis for restoring transatlantic cooperation on a broad range of critical issues.  One may hope that these efforts outside governments can stimulate and inform the needed work by the governments themselves.

For present purposes, it is worth outlining how transatlantic policy cooperation might be effectively pursued in a number of key areas.

There are other issues of great importance on which it is harder to see a basis for transatlantic cooperation in the near future.  These include agriculture, global environmental policy, the International Criminal Court, the role and reform of the United Nations, and so on.  Some of these stand as testimony to the failed management of the relationship in earlier years.  Others reflect strong domestic interests.  Yet the number of areas in which the prospect of serious cooperation is good, not to mention those on which such cooperation is already occurring, is impressive.  The transatlantic partnership has never been characterized by across the board agreement on critical issues and it never will be.  The essential point is that there should be a set of institutions through which the partners can work to find common or complementary policies wherever possible and which can help them manage their inevitable differences. 

Transatlantic Institutions.  The search for better institutional arrangements through which to build a stronger transatlantic partnership is a quest for perfection in which the seeker is doomed to disappointment.  Nevertheless, it is important to understand the ways in which the deficiencies of existing institutions make the improvement of the relationship harder and to look for devices which can ameliorate this situation.

There are many factors that make current transatlantic institutional arrangements unsatisfactory—among them the asymmetry of power between the United States and European countries and the differing memberships of NATO, the EU and other institutions.  Of these factors, none is more problematic or, in present circumstances more intractable, than the condition of the European Union as a partially integrated political entity which aspires to, but cannot yet achieve, greater cohesion and unity in its international presence.  As a result, European countries collectively have difficulty delivering on the promise of greater integration, for their own and U.S. interests, while at times appearing to expect that they will be able to act as if that promise had already been realized. 

The general dissatisfaction with the institution of the U.S.-EU summits, the current structure of which almost inevitably means that the European leaders able to decide and act on the most important issues are not present, is a consequence of this problem.  The U.S. frustration at often being unable to bring its concerns to bear on the EU’s multi-dimensional decision-making process as effectively as it would like is another example of the problem.  The United States is in effect a non-member member of the EU, as Simon Serfaty has put it.[14]  But that status is still hardly satisfactory, especially during this transitional period in the development of the EU.

This situation is not susceptible of perfect resolution.  The best that can be hoped for is that the countries in question will make the most they can of the institutions to hand and improve them in ways that are within the realm of the possible.  By far the most important thing, as already mentioned, is the launching of sustained and intense transatlantic dialogue on the most important issues in whichever institutional venues seem most appropriate—whether it be NATO, U.S.-EU channels, more restricted (and therefore more controversial) groups such as the Quad or the Quint, ad hoc contact groups, or bilaterally.  Beyond that, however, there are some areas in which institutional improvement can be realistically considered.  Among these are:

No doubt there are other ideas that should be pursued.  The purpose of this discussion is to establish the importance of identifying the institutional deficits that exist and to suggest that there are incremental ways of dealing with them.

Of Alliances, Partnerships, Posses, Coalitions, Unions and Functional Families

In the welter of recent commentary about the future of the transatlantic relationship the prospects have been variously described as an elective partnership, pragmatic cooperation, à la carte partnership, coalitions, of the willing, posses, and so on.  This debate about nomenclature is relatively unenlightening.  Of greater importance is the substance and spirit of the relationship.  On this there are a few things that can be said with certainty. 

First, the relationship will be very different from that of the Cold War, when one of the greatest challenges was to mount a static defense against a well-defined and presumptively overwhelming threat coming from a fixed direction.  Since the challenge inevitably to some extent determines the response, the welcome disappearance of that particular threat means that whatever response the countries of the North Atlantic region offer to new challenges will be different in nature.

The second, equally obvious, but no less important, observation is that the future of the relationship depends to a considerable extent on what the leaders of the countries concerned choose to make it.  What can be inferred from what we know about the current intentions of both Americans and Europeans?

On the U.S. side, the stated intentions of the current administration have already been cited at some length.  If, as the administration’s spokesmen insist, with a good deal of chapter and verse to support them, President Bush’s word is as good as his bond, there should be no doubt about his intention to work strenuously to reaffirm a close transatlantic partnership in the U.S. interest.  This conclusion is certainly not taken as axiomatic in Europe, at least if by ‘close’ the President is also assumed to imply ‘balanced,’ with mutual respect for the judgments and policies of both sides.  Nevertheless, any European not pre-committed to building Europe as an independent counterweight to the United States would certainly seem to have an interest in acting as if the President’s words mean exactly what they say.

This raises the further question of the kind of Europe that the current and future U.S. administrations are willing to entertain as true partners.  Many Europeans believe that the Bush administration is already working to divide Europe and to isolate those countries that are not willing to accept U.S. priorities and policies on U.S. terms.  Whatever the truth of this claim (and to this observer, the critics of the United States are far from having made their case), there remains a real question whether the United States would willingly contemplate a partnership with a Europe that was more nearly a unitary international actor in security and political matters as well as in trade and economic ones.  This has, of course, been a concern of Europeans at almost every stage of the process of European integration.  Thus far the European skeptics have been proved wrong. 

This pattern is likely to continue.  The reasons for which European integration in partnership with the United States has prospered with U.S. support are likely to remain persuasive.  U.S. and European interests in the world remain sufficiently similar and closely tied together that the opposite outcome—a Europe united in opposition, or as a counterweight, to U.S. power—remains less likely, although it is certainly not inconceivable.

On the European side, the continuing rivalry between the French and British conceptions of Europe will make the willingness of the major European countries to put their shoulders to the wheel of renewing a strong transatlantic partnership uncertain for some time to come.  The paradox is that neither of the protagonists in the intra-European struggle is well placed to prevail.  On the British side, the persistence of public and political skepticism about the European project means that Mr. Blair will have difficulty pursuing his goal of establishing strong British leadership within the EU effectively, not least as he cannot for the foreseeable future take his country into the European Economic and Monetary Union, which is increasingly a key element of European integration.  On the French side, German support for the line adopted by President Chirac seems essential to its success.  Yet the Germans are evidently unhappy with the position in which they find themselves and anxious to find ways to restore a more normal set of relationships, notably with the United States.  The U.S. interest lies in doing everything reasonably possible to encourage them in this direction.

This being so, the most likely outcome is a gradual return to a process of slow European integration which will not confront the United States with unacceptable choices and will leave it with strong supporters within Europe.  However, this happy outcome could be severely compromised if in the coming months both sides fail to make a major commitment to rebuilding their partnership, instead of taking the line of least resistance and preferring to abandon the quest, or at least to postpone it, until there is ‘regime change’ on both sides of the Atlantic that will make a fresh start easier politically.  The world is unlikely to stand still long enough to permit them this luxury.

Third, renewing the partnership will require above all a systematic effort to come to a broadly common assessment of the nature, dimensions and urgency of the critical challenges that the partners need to confront together and the policy options that they have for doing so.  This will require a degree of flexibility on both sides.  Europeans must be ready to accept that the Bush administration’s international agenda not only has more to recommend it than they may have thought hitherto, but will also require the selective and judicious use of military power to achieve its objectives with, or occasionally without, a U.N. mandate.  Americans, by the same token, must be willing to recognize two things: first, that they are more likely to achieve their objectives if they enter into systematic and not just ad hoc cooperation with the major European governments; and, second, that the interests of the United States in the longer term require the resumption of the massive task of building international institutions and norms within which international relations can be conducted and by which the United States is prepared to bind itself and the use of its power.

Fourth, success in renewing the partnership is unlikely if governments on both sides of the Atlantic are not willing to lower the rhetorical temperature and concentrate on conducting their relationship and managing their disagreements with a higher degree of discretion.  Debates such as those of recent months, in which Europeans have tended to accuse the United States of being arrogant and simplistic unilateralists, and Americans have accused Europeans of being, at best, irrelevant wimps, are no way in which to work toward improved relations.  The media can be relied on to sniff out enough of the flavor and substance of inevitable disagreements and give them more than adequate airing without their being aggravated by official statements either on or, as is more often the case, off the record.

Fifth, and finally, governments will need to pay heed to trends in public opinion, which have recently been in the wrong direction if one is concerned about renewing the transatlantic partnership.  Such trends are notoriously ephemeral and susceptible to change in the light of both strong political leadership and the evidence of policy success.  At the least, governments, whose control of ‘messages’ is ever more sophisticated, should ensure that they do not, advertently or inadvertently, encourage public opinion to move in directions opposite to those of their intended policies in relation to the transatlantic partnership.

Such an effort conscientiously undertaken would lead to the reestablishment of habits of cooperation and mutual comprehension, as well as corresponding capabilities for action in the economic and security fields, that would fully justify the term partnership.  Just as the United States has developed a new concept of ‘capabilities-based’ military planning to deal with the world in which threats can emanate from many different directions, so the transatlantic partnership will need to become more ‘capabilities-based,’ with the same sense of both flexibility and intensity, for dealing with a world in which uncertainty and unpredictability are likely to be the rules for some time to come.  It is a task worthy of the heirs of the great period of creation that enabled the world to prosper after the Second World War and to survive the challenges of the Cold War that succeeded it.  But success will require the same degree of support and focused attention from the Congress as well as the Executive Branch, and from European governments and legislatures alike, as was manifested in the 1940s and 1950s.