Getting it Right with Europe - From "Day One"

American Foreign Policy Interests (October 2008 issue)

Amb. Robert E. Hunter

RAND Corporation

The US president will face one of the most daunting sets of challenges in foreign policy and national security in recent memory.  In terms of crafting strategies to serve the US well in the years ahead, perhaps no president has faced such a monumental task since President Harry Truman set directions for American foreign policy that defined the basic terms of the emerging Cold War right through to its end.  One hastens to add that that period was far more dangerous than the one in which we are now engaged – the price of error or failure could have been the end of humankind in a nuclear holocaust – but today's world is just as complex if not even more so.
 
The very fact that today there is no central challenge like that from the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, allied with a communist movement that reached into four continents, adds to the complications facing the next US president.  US foreign policy will not revolve around a few simply-stated paradigms regarding a massive geopolitical and ideological challenge.  Terrorism has preoccupied the United States and some other countries for the last several years, but it is a tactic of adversaries not a unifying phenomenon.  The key underlying locus of terrorism, in limited sectors of radical Islam, poses serious challenges but – at least if terrorists do not gain access to nuclear or biological weapons -- it hardly compares with the direct threat to the homeland and to allies and friends abroad which the US faced in the Cold War.
 
This complexity without a single set of straightforward, unifying concerns or principles is more history's norm than the exception.  For the first time since the United States emerged permanently onto the world stage after Pearl Harbor, it must operate in a milieu that requires more ongoing strategic calculation and recalculation than ever before, more engagement and integration in a systematic way of different tools of statecraft, less ability to demand allegiance of allies and friends as the price of our protecting them against shared threats, more reliance on the voluntary support of other countries to secure our own national interests, and thus the need to engage in what, for the US, will be unprecedented give and take with others.
 
The agenda facing the new president includes several obvious requirements. The Middle East and Southwest Asia top the list, with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. To deal with either, the US will also need to deal with Iran, in particular to explore possible areas of strategic compatibility. The US will have to show regional states that it will remain an effective power in the region, and at some point it will have to take an active part in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.  Beyond the Middle East, the new president must begin reshaping relations with re-emergent Russia and creating a solid basis for long-term relations with China and India.  He will have to deal with issues that have domestic as well as international dimensions, including trade, immigration, energy, and modernization of the sinews of US economic power, especially in education, health, and infrastructure. He will have to rebuild the US military, especially the Army and Marine Corps, define its future roles, and begin creating the required tools. And he will have to make up for lost time in setting the US on a productive course regarding climate change and other environmental demands.
 
In the midst of all these practical considerations, the new president must also set about reviving America 's reputation in the outside world, which sank in recent years to unprecedented levels. This is a reputation not just for moral leadership – what Americans like to call the US role as a "city on a hill" – but also for strategic, political, economic, and military reliability, leadership, and clarity of perception.
 
Further, the United States remains the most powerful country in the world, certainly measured in the size of its economy and military forces.  But its ability to mobilize assets, to turn incipient power into lasting influence, is not as straightforward, particularly compared to the Cold War era.  The phenomenon of globalization has also introduced a large number of new actors into international politics with the ability to influence events, for good or ill; many of these actors are not governments.  Indeed, the US private sector itself has considerable influence on America's role in the world, at times and places rivaling or even surpassing that of the US government.  
 
Even though there can be no simply-stated and unifying paradigms to guide the United States in the years ahead, certain themes run through the issues listed here. One major theme is the importance of US relations with Europe, indeed, to a degree not seen since the Cold War's end brought to a close the historic struggle over the European heartland that was the central focus of US interests abroad during the great European civil war that raged between 1914 and 1989.  Throughout that period, US grand strategy was dominated by the need to prevent the success of a hostile hegemonic power in Europe, twice Germany and once the Soviet Union. Two US presidents, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, then did the necessary work of creating a framework for post-Cold War security in Europe, enshrined in Bush's short-hand and historic phrase, a "Europe whole and free and at peace." In the process, NATO was reformed to help make that grand vision possible, including taking Central Europe off the strategic chess board, offering a role to Russia , and halting conflict in the Balkans.  Meanwhile, the European Union advanced its reach as "soft hegemon" across the Continent but one not at odds with fundamental US interests.
 
To begin with, there is what should be seen as good news in the US-European relationship: the US needs the Europeans, and the Europeans need us. That is obvious in regard to managing the global economy, developing coherent and effective energy policies, getting on top of the generations-long requirements to deal with climate change, and working together on the vast range of environmental issues that can no longer be left to future generations but demand choice and sacrifice today to make possible success tomorrow.
 
In more classic "security" areas, there is similar "good news" in mutual US-European dependence. In the last few years, especially flowing from experience in Iraq, it has become clear that "the US can make war alone but it can't make peace alone."  That is not strictly true: the United States has considerable capabilities for post-conflict peacemaking, including significant capacity to promote nation-building.  But the American people prefer that we not act alone and not have to bear burdens of securing interests shared with allies and friends; and many of these allies and friends have skills and capacities that either are in short-supply in the United States or where they have a comparative advantage.
 
For their part, the Europeans want the United States to play an effective role, indeed a leadership role, in helping to secure objectives that benefit them. The Cold War is over but Russia's future is still not assured and some Russian behavior in recent years has reminded European states – both "old" and "new" – that the United States alone can provide viable insurance if Russia goes wrong in terms of European security, defined broadly to include energy and cyberspace.  Along with most European public opinion, many European governments opposed the US invasion of Iraq, but they are becoming aware that what happens in the Middle East is critically important to the Continent, that the adage "the US broke it, now let it fix it" is a feckless approach since Europe will be vitally affected by what happens now, and that US withdrawal from the region, a sloppily-handled drawdown, or failure to sustain a reputation for leadership and strategic purpose would leave a hole that European power could not fill even with political will to do so.
 
More good news for transatlantic relations comes from the outcome of the US presidential primary campaigns that produced two pro-Atlanticist candidates. The US presidential campaign this year has itself renewed faith in American democracy not just at home but also among publics abroad that have been highly attentive as well as critical of some recent US history.  The Bush administration has itself for some time been "talking the talk" in US-European relations that the allies want to hear, although this came too late for it to gain credit for beginning to reverse the decline in America's reputation.  No serious person in US politics now favors weakened ties with Europe; indeed, just the opposite.  Meanwhile, three key European countries – Germany, France, and Britain – have "cleared the decks" of leadership that was deeply engaged in the struggles, as much within Europe as across the Atlantic, about the invasion of Iraq.  Relatively new teams in Europe will have a chance to work with the new US president in drawing on a relatively "clean slate."
 
There is, however, some immediate difficult – if not bad – news.  To be sure, the US president will reach out to the European allies, creating a decided break from the practice a half-decade ago.  He will commit his administration to sustaining the positive economic relationship between the US and the European Union which contrasts so sharply with the imbalance between the US and China.  He will inaugurate a honeymoon in political relations with Europe and will seek to restore Europe to a more central place in overall US perspectives on the outside world.  But then will come the due bill, it will be significant, and the Europeans will be surprised when it is presented by a new US president whom they almost universally expect to be so different from his predecessor.
 
Most important -- and certainly most immediate -- will be the Middle East. The president will need to change the US approach to Iraq.  The United States will want a good deal more help from the Europeans.  Some will just be an extension of what is being done now, especially to augment the NATO Training Mission in Iraq (NTM-I), which includes 14 European NATO allies (plus Ukraine). This mission provides support that will be critical to the future of the Iraqi armed forces; it also shows the American people that European allies are willing to help, even in a limited way, with what now has to be a common goal within the Alliance – to enable Iraq to emerge from current turmoil without being a constant source of threat to European as well as US interests.  The US president will almost certainly ask for much more, however: including European training of other Iraqi security forces and major support for economic rebuilding and development.  Allies and the European Union as an institution have the capabilities; they cannot just sit on the sidelines as important shared interests in Iraq's future are at stake just because many of them opposed the original decision to intervene.
 
Less problematic in Europe and less likely to be a surprise when America comes knocking is Afghanistan.  NATO is there by common agreement, based on UN Security Council resolutions and unanimous decisions of the North Atlantic Council.  All 26 allies have sent troops or other security personnel to serve with the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan (ISAF). The Alliance itself has pledged itself to succeed and, while it is probably an exaggeration to say that NATO has "bet its future" on success in Afghanistan, what happens there will clearly be important both for the alliance and for US-European relations.
 
More combat forces are needed in Afghanistan.  Equally important, several European allies impose what are called "caveats," limitations placed by national governments on where and how their forces in Afghanistan can be employed.  This significantly reduces commanders' flexibility to move forces to where they are needed, when they are needed.  There are also significant equipment shortfalls, especially in helicopters.  But this is only part of the problem.  By common agreement, the larger part is non-military, the need to promote good governance, rebuild so much of the country, and undertake development.  These three qualities are keys to convincing the Afghan people to ally themselves with the Kabul government and its outside supporters rather than the Taliban.  Unfortunately, resource commitments from the West and especially from Europe fall far short of even minimal needs.  In three areas, drug eradication, police training, and judiciary reform (where Britain, Germany, and Italy, respectively, have lead responsibility), European commitments have not been fulfilled. 
 
With the United States facing critical difficulties in Iraq, failure in Afghanistan, especially if it derived in major part from Europeans' unwillingness to pull their weight, could have serious impact on US-European relations, including with US public opinion.  The Europeans need to step up their contributions to governance, rebuilding, and development; and the European Union should appoint a senior official of ministerial rank to coordinate these efforts.  The US will expect no less; and the consequences if the European response is inadequate could be severe.  Fortunately, there are few "fault lines" in a related area of US concern – the war on terrorism.  Ever since 9/11, the allies have been strongly supportive, even when there have been differences of view about precise responses and the balance to be struck between preventive efforts ("draining the swamp") and dealing directly with terrorism threats, including military force.
 
Two other areas are consequential for US-European relations in the Middle East.  One is Iran.  Currently, the United States is focused on the effort to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons.  For their part, the Europeans – represented by Britain, France, Germany, and the European Union's High Representative for the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP) – are supporting the US effort to impose stronger economic sanctions on Iran if it will not suspend uranium enrichment and then enter into negotiations on issues of concern.  However, the Europeans have an even more important objective: to keep the United States from going to war with Iran, an act that could have a devastating impact on the NATO Alliance, to say nothing of the deeply negative consequences for the United States and the West in the Muslim world.  Whoever becomes US president needs to try a different approach to Iran , going well beyond just the possibility of direct negotiations.  So far, the US has been unwilling to offer security guarantees to Iran even if it were to accommodate US interests and concerns – something the current administration has already done with regard to North Korea.  Negotiating offers have also been stymied by a "poison pill:" the requirement that Iran suspend uranium enrichment before talks begin rather than making that the first item on the agenda with a time limit to reach agreement.  As part of securing European support for other US objectives in the Middle East, the president will be under pressure to change the US stance on negotiations and Obama has already promised to do this.  This would also be in America's own self interest for reasons that extend far beyond the nuclear issue, especially to determine whether Iran will play a positive role in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan, where Iran did so until the US blocked NATO cooperation with it.
 
The allies will also press the new US president to be deeply engaged in peacemaking between Israel and the Palestinians. This is also in the US interest but timing for the new president will be important.  He will not want to undertake this difficult task right at the beginning, certainly not before crafting an approach to Iraq that has a chance of working both in the region and in American politics.  How much the US president becomes involved in Arab-Israeli diplomacy and when to begin will depend in some measure on how important this is to the allies as a price for their supporting the United States wholeheartedly on other parts of its Middle East agenda.  The allies now say that this is critical from the outset of the administration; the new US president will need to take his own political reading at the time.  But there can be no doubt that the US has to play a deeply engaged and lead role in promoting Israel-Palestine peace.
 
Beyond the Middle East, the US president will need to play a traditional role of US leadership in the Atlantic Alliance in defining, with its allies, the future of NATO.  Next April, NATO will hold its 60 th anniversary summit in Strasbourg, France, and Kehl, Germany. That summit is slated to launch the crafting of a new Strategic Concept, but its primary work will no doubt focus on Afghanistan and related Middle East issues.  As usual, the United States will press its allies to increase their contributions to defense, especially to create deployable forces that can be fielded and sustained abroad.  And the allies' response will likely be limited, a problem that does not augur well for smooth transatlantic relations.
 
Further will be the question whether the United States will genuinely see NATO as the primary forum for considering major strategic questions, something it has not done in recent years.  That will depend in major part whether the two sides of the Atlantic can agree about respective commitments: US willingness to renew its focus on Europe-related security issues, including those involving Russia's future; and European recognition that US strategic preoccupation has shifted toward crises in the Middle East and the future of Asia and will require significant European support, especially in the former area.  At the moment, neither the United States nor the European allies is disposed to think and act as the other hopes.  A key test of leadership on both sides of the Atlantic will be whether the new US president and his European counterparts shift their respective governments in the needed directions and bring popular opinion to accept the return to a shared political and strategic perspective that can meet each side's basic needs.  In seeking to enlist European support for promoting US interests, the United States will also need to make one further adjustment in marked contrast with recent practice – indeed, practice during much of the Cold War: sharing with allies decision and influence at the same time that the US asks them to share risk and responsibility.  The time is over when the US could call (most of) the shots and ask the Europeans to write at least some of the "checks" without having a substantial role in deciding what they are helping to pay for.
 
The alliance also needs to recognize a major development that has been influencing US approaches toward military engagement abroad, especially in relatively low-level combat, including counter-insurgency and other forms of asymmetric warfare that are increasingly prevalent.  The United States has learned from experience in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan that it must integrate different instruments of power and influence in military engagement, as well as in many other areas of foreign and national security policy.  This requires military and civilian agencies to work closely together, engagement of non-military parts of the US government, increased cooperation between the US , NATO, the United Nations, and the European Union, and interaction with non-governmental organizations and the private sector. 
 
Similar lessons need to be learned by NATO and the European Union.  These two institutions have historically operated on different tracks, with high walls between them.  These began to come down in the 1990s but not nearly far enough.  At the moment, NATO-EU cooperation is stymied by Turkey, which blocks NATO action over the issues of Cyprus and Turkey 's thwarted ambitions to join the EU.  NATO-EU cooperation must also sort out the relative distribution of influence between the two institutions, with the United States the largest single factor in one and not a member of the other.  France's movement toward rejoining NATO's integrated military command structure is easing some of the difficulty; but the next US administration needs to make fully-fledged cooperation between NATO and the EU across the board a top priority of its European policy.  As part of this effort, NATO's experimentation arm, Allied Command Transformation, should work on civilian as well as military activities and become an agency of the European Security and Defense Policy as well as of NATO. 
 
These steps can help reinvigorate NATO and US-European relations overall.  It will also be important to develop much closer relations between North America and the European Union directly – a new "US-Canada-EU strategic partnership" that creates cooperation and common efforts in a host of fields necessary to help shape conditions and events in many parts of the world, especially areas that today are lagging behind in development, experiencing high levels of disruption, or facing conflict.  The US, Canada , and the EU countries are all democracies with stable governments and highly-educated populations. Together, the three dispose of a major part of the world's economic strength and capabilities in health, education, economic development, and good governance – precisely areas most needed to help modernize the Middle East and some other regions of the world, as well as to undercut terrorism's appeal.  Fostering this strategic partnership should be a major initiative of the new US president, to be launched at the summit level at the same time and place as the NATO summit next April.
 
Finally, it is always tempting in US-European relations to believe that it "will all come out in the wash," that common interests and largely compatible (but not coterminous) social and political values mean that the two sides of the Atlantic are fated to work together.  This is true from the perspective of rational calculation -- economically, politically, strategically, and socially.  But it still may not happen.  The unprecedented shock to transatlantic relations at the time of the Iraq War was chastening.  There has been slow creeping back to comity across the Atlantic but the process is far from complete.  It is also not clear that the next generation of young Americans and Europeans will share the instinctive kinship that sustained the Atlantic Alliance for the past 60+ years.  For anyone under 65, memories of the Second World War have largely faded; for Americans and Europeans under about 25, that is also true of Cold War memories.  There is a paradox of globalization: today we see far more exchange of information at a faster pace than ever before, but that does not necessarily translate into acceptance that different societies must work together to common ends, especially when it is less easy to define those common ends and what appropriate, shared responses should be.
 
This is partly the task of leadership.  With the inauguration of a new president there is a new chance to try. Given the global agenda facing him and the fact that success at that agenda must include success in forging and sustaining relationships with governments and peoples across the Atlantic, this area has to be among the very top priorities for the new U.S. Chief Executive "from day one."