The Transatlantic Security Agenda: A Conference Report and Analysis
Authored by Dr. Stephen J. Blank.
December 2001
50 Pages
Brief Synopsis
Immediately after the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, NATO members unanimously voted their support for the United States under Article V of the Washington Treaty. This unprecedented action, the first time such a vote has occurred in NATO's history, underscores the vitality of the Atlantic Alliance and its tremendous strategic value for its members. This vote conferred great legitimacy upon any response that the United States will make to those attacks and reminded us that the solidity of NATO allows the United States to defend its interests on the world stage with great confidence about European security.
Nevertheless, the Alliance is not a wholly untroubled or static relationship. In the first half of 2001, there were numerous public signs of stress among the allies as they faced new challenges. Many of the issues involved in these tensions are particularly important to the future of European security and must be resolved for NATO to move forward and continue playing the role outlined above.
Introduction.
Numerous media accounts give the impression that the Atlantic Alliance is collapsing or in danger of doing so. Certainly unhappiness and concern over American policies enjoy public popularity in Europe at the moment. In fact, these fears are vastly overdrawn; although Europeans allegedly regard America (and President Bush) as a rogue, cowboy state that mindlessly executes people, pollutes the environment, disregards arms control and international treaties, and is generally destroying Western civilization as we know it. More precisely, the disparities between the U.S. and European approaches to international security represent what one report called both sides’ sense of mutual grievance. And similar complaints about America have surfaced in every post-war decade. Moreover, often these complaints are as much salvos in each state’s domestic politics, as they are presentations of their foreign and defense policies. Thus Pierre Moscovici, France’s Minister for Europe, commented that Prime Minister Anthony Blair’s reelection in Great Britain was good for Europe because “In the final analysis, Europe is the natural place for the expression of the progressive values that the left, whether Labour, Socialist, or Social Democrat all cherish.”1 Obviously the Bush administration and nonleftist parties across Europe reject this partisan analysis, but it helps explain some of the current mood. Finally, to some degree, these complaints also represent the price of American leadership in Europe.
Nonetheless, serious issues are at stake in the transatlantic dialogue over European security. Consequently, we must overcome the real and serious disputes that affect this dialogue. Therefore as we approach a new period of European enlargement—i.e., the enlargement of both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU)—repairing the often fractious interallied dialogue is an essential precondition of progress in securing Europe, our most important alliance. With this concern in mind, the Strategic Studies Institute, with Harvard University’s Belfer Center for the Study of Science and International Affairs, cosponsored a conference on the future of the alliance with prominent European elites. This conference took place at the Belfer Center at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on March 26-27, 2001. While everyone spoke off the record to encourage an open, candid discussion, this monograph summarizes the issues they raised and analyzes the conference’s significance.
The issues discussed included NATO and EU enlargement, these organizations’ mutual relationship now that the EU is creating its own defense arm, the European Security and Defense program (ESDP), defense spending and interoperability among the NATO allies, and engagement with Russia on a wide range of issues. Obviously most, if not all, of these issues share a common subtext, i.e., the question of adjusting the transatlantic alliance to changing realities stemming from the enlargement of Europe.
Reaching a functioning consensus on all or most of the key issues that comprise the European and transatlantic security agenda is a vital American interest. The transatlantic alliance enables the United States and Europe securely to project shared power, values, and interests even beyond NATO’s borders.2 U.S. statesmen have always known that, if any one undemocratic power dominated Europe and isolated America from other democracies or if Europe collapsed into constant wars for lack of a legitimate and durable political order, those situations would threaten American security.
If the former condition prevailed, then Europe might conceivably become, in President Thomas Jefferson’s words, “a Breakfast for Bonaparte." Europe was the Cold War’s primary “theater" so that it did not become a breakfast for Soviet power. On the other hand, if a general European anarchy prevailed, it would lead to the renationalization of European security policies and then to incessant wars in Europe. In that case, the danger was that one, probably antiliberal, power would then ultimately prevail and threaten American security as in World War I.
Furthermore, to the extent that genuine allied solidarity exists, we and our allies can then face issues beyond Europe’s geographical boundaries that materially affect European security. These include Mediterranean security issues from Morocco to the Middle East and issues of security in the former Soviet Union. Signifying that common concern for so-called out-of-area issues, NATO has invited the Commonwealth of Independent States’ (CIS) governments into the Partnership for Peace (PfP) and the Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and created its own Mediterranean Initiative. For its part, the EU has established many important socio-economic programs with CIS governments and devised its own Mediterranean Initiative in Barcelona in 1995.
Conversely, diverging approaches to European security issues ensure discord regarding both Mediterranean and CIS issues. That discord generally impedes progress in resolving these issues. Then neither the United States, nor NATO, nor the EU can realize their objectives and interests in those regions. And we know all too well that local conflicts in the CIS and around the Mediterranean can easily become major international crises. These considerations amply justified the discussions at Harvard.
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