The establishment of an alliance between the democracies of North America and Europe was one of the most important developments of the second half of the 20th century. U.S.-European cooperation became the core of what has been known in common parlance as the West. Such cooperation facilitated the rebuilding of war-torn Europe, created the multilateral infrastructure for unprecedented global prosperity and the military infrastructure through NATO that deterred the USSR and eventually sealed the West’s Cold War victory. The Atlantic Alliance is thus one major reason why the second half of the century was so much better than the first.
Since the end of the Cold War, a central question has been whether this Alliance can continue to exist in any strategically meaningful sense. Was it a successful but temporary phenomenon spawned by the Soviet threat and Europe’s weakness during the Cold War? Or is the U.S.-European relationship, as a permanent alliance of like-minded countries, more important than ever in a globalizing world generating new challenges to our values and new threats to our interests? Are the United States and Europe still strategically compatible and capable of renewing this relationship and again acting together to shape the geopolitics of the 21st century?
In my view, the Western alliance is more essential than ever, albeit in a new form. The number of issues for which the United States and Europe need each other is growing. The fact that North America and Europe will constitute a diminishing share of the world’s population, economy and geopolitical power in the decades ahead is an argument for deeper Transatlantic cooperation. A multipolar world, too, if one in fact comes about, would require more Transatlantic cooperation, not less. But that would also require a new approach between the United States and the European Union, as well as a transformed NATO working in tandem.
There is a new window of opportunity to rebuild relations as the Bush era draws to a close. The unilateral moment has ended, and the limits of American power are now visible to everyone—so much so that regardless of who the next president is, America will likely be a more cautious and cooperative power, especially when it comes to the use of force. The American public, too, wants and expects its leaders to seek allies to face common challenges, and the continent they look to first and foremost as a partner is Europe.
In Europe, the notion of the European Union as a counterweight to American power has also imploded. Europeans, too, know the limits of their trying to go it alone. While European public support for the United States experienced a dramatic drop under President Bush, there are signs that Europe today yearns for a different and better relationship with the United States. Nearly all their leaders seek repaired relations in what they recognize as a dangerous world. The dream of a global Kantian peace led by the European Union has faded as sober Europeans witness the specters of nationalism and armed geopolitics rising along their borders. They know they need the United States to help them tackle many of the problems they face.
Old wounds can be healed. Hand wringing aside, the Transatlantic relationship did not break down because of major differences in values, threat perceptions or incompatible strategic cultures. They broke down because of bad policy decisions on both sides of the Atlantic. And what bad policy has created, good policy can repair. Polling data confirm that American and European publics have remarkably similar views when it comes to the threats we face and the agenda we want our leaders to focus on.1 Does anyone really believe that American and European values are more different today in an era of integration and globalization than they were, for example, in the 1950s or 1960s—arguably the heyday of Transatlantic cooperation? The issues on which Americans and Europeans do differ—like the death penalty, genetically modified foods and the political role of religion—while passionately held, rarely drive strategic behavior. Surely this is an example of people arguing over small differences when, for one reason or another, they overlook the larger commonalities that bind them together.
Americans and most Europeans do have different attitudes toward the utility of using force and the international legal norms that govern it. Today, in the wake of Iraq, this couplet of issues is in many ways the third rail of Transatlantic politics. But such differences are not new, and they did not prevent us from creating NATO or winning the Cold War. Moreover, the fact that Europeans are hesitant to go to war does not mean they will never use force or that they are not important strategically, or that they are incapable of using power in other ways. National security is about a lot more than simply using military force. It is about using the full range of instruments at one’s disposal to shape the world in a manner conducive to one’s interests and values. If we frame the matter in this way, Europe has much to offer in a re-invigorated Transatlantic partnership. There is a vast agenda for cooperation before us that never even touches divisive issues of war and peace.
If the U.S.-European alliance is to be rebuilt, two challenges must be met. First, we must define a new sense of shared purpose, giving rise to a common strategic agenda. We have to know what we want to achieve together. Second, we must reassess the instruments of U.S.-European cooperation. The first challenge, as we have seen, isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a major challenge at all. Our common goals should continue to be to protect our societies while increasing our prosperity, advance the cause of democracy and freedom, as well as build a liberal international order. Our instruments, however, are very much out of tune.
NATO epitomizes the American presence in Europe and remains critical. But a growing share of what the United States needs to do with Europe today falls outside NATO’s realm and into other realms, especially that of the European Union. Yet the U.S.-EU relationship remains essentially non-strategic. The United States and the European Union have yet to find a way to couple the West’s soft and hard power in an effective manner. During the Cold War, what was military in nature was strategic in consequence, and everything else was or seemed to be secondary. That is no longer the case. The functioning of global financial structures, problems of failed states and economic development, the ability to promote democracy and good governance, global health and environmental issues, and more besides all have clear strategic consequences. The result is a mismatch between our problems and our problem-solving systems, and it is clearly one reason for the growing confusion about how to get anything done using the chaotic alphabet soup of Transatlantic and European institutions. The next administration, together with America’s European partners, needs urgently to fix this.
The New Agenda
There is no shortage of issues on which the United States and Europe could cooperate, and there is less disagreement than one might think across the Atlantic over the list. First, we should get back to basics—namely, deepening economic integration across the Atlantic, an especially important task at a time of Western economic weakness. Chinese and Indian achievements notwithstanding, the Transatlantic economy is still by far the biggest in the world, with a joint GDP of more than $25 trillion (roughly 50 percent of global GDP) and more than 750 million consumers. Commercial ties between the United States and Europe generate roughly $3 trillion per year and 14 million jobs on both sides of the Atlantic. Strong trade links are reinforced by the deepest foreign investment flows in the world: three-quarters of foreign direct investment in the United States come from Europe, and Europe is the target of 57 percent of American investment.
The real prize in Transatlantic economic relations no longer lies in lowering tariffs or trade barriers, but in creating more common regulatory frameworks that eliminate barriers to trade and investment altogether. An OECD study has calculated that regulatory reforms and convergence could boost GDP per capita in the United States by 1.7 percent and in the European Union by 2.8 percent—equal to nearly one year of additional economic growth. German Chancellor Angela Merkel recognized this potential and made it the centerpiece of her efforts to improve U.S.-European relations during Germany’s EU presidency in 2007. The American response, however, was muted. This initiative will never produce those benefits unless it receives the strong top-down political support in the United States it deserves.
The deepening of the common Atlantic economic space is important for another, more strategic reason. The purpose of this exercise is not just to stimulate greater economic growth but to establish who will write the economic rules of the road for the 21st century. The United States and the European Union still enjoy an historical window in which their common economic clout allows them to set rules between themselves that can, in turn, create a global foundation. How long that window will remain open is uncertain, however, as economic power shifts to the east and south. Now is the time to work together to shape common regulatory frameworks that other countries would join. Just as the United States and Europe wrote the post-World War II liberal economic rules, Transatlantic leadership can ensure the stability and openness of the global economy in this new era.
The second issue on our new agenda with Europe should be the defense of our societies and borders from new risks and threats. The old threats required NATO to face down Soviet tanks across the Fulda Gap. Today we need to cooperate in new areas of homeland security to defend our societies against terrorist attack, including potentially catastrophic attacks involving weapons of mass destruction. The first and most important step in meeting that threat is not the willingness to intervene abroad but rather the determination to build up our defenses against such threats at home.
This means that a new Transatlantic alliance must define cooperation in homeland security—everything from law enforcement to intelligence cooperation to emergency response capabilities—as a strategic priority. Much of that cooperation will be with the European Union, not individual European countries. Some issues, such as intelligence cooperation, will remain bilateral. Various aspects can be supported through NATO, as well. Thus far, however, such cooperation has remained ad hoc and has lacked the political priority it deserves. The Secretary of Homeland Security should become as pivotal in Transatlantic relations as the Secretary of Defense was during the Cold War, and only the White House can make that happen.
The long-term goal of Transatlantic cooperation should be a common Euro-Atlantic space of freedom and security. Common standards for border protection and data exchange can create mutual confidence in other countries’ security regimes. Common standards for protecting critical infrastructure will lead to new Transatlantic projects and industrial cooperation. Cooperation should include joint research into vaccines and antidotes for potential bioweapons attacks, for example. The Cold War galvanized the United States and Europe to organize to meet the threat of Soviet communism. Hopefully, we will not need the shock of a WMD terrorist attack to teach us to do the same thing today. We also need a deeper dialogue on the right balance between civil liberties and security needs. On this issue, the gaps to be closed are as much within Europe as they are between it and the United States.
As we deepen our cooperation in the realm of homeland security, we should also increase openness and freedom across the Atlantic. Our goal should be fully liberalized visa regimes and travel between the United States and the European Union, including our newest allies in Central and Eastern Europe. As we gain confidence in our ability to jointly manage our borders, we should expand opportunities for business, tourism, education and cultural exchanges. Such openness has tremendous potential to touch the lives of average citizens and bring both sides of the Atlantic back together, and it is especially important for new generations of Americans and Europeans who did not experience the Cold War. Deepening personal contacts is one of the most effective steps we can take to change public perceptions and roll back the legacy of the Bush era.
Arebuilt Transatlantic partnership must focus foremost on ensuring our economic prosperity and protecting our borders, but it cannot stop there. The third item on a new U.S.-Europe agenda should be to work to promote democracy and freedom beyond our borders and embrace those who seek to join our larger democratic community. Along with stopping war and genocide in the Balkans, NATO and EU enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe was the core of the strategic project of the 1990s. We need a new Western strategy for the East—that is, for countries beyond NATO and the European Union’s current borders, including Russia. The Georgia war of August 2008 only underscores that need.
The challenge of the 1990s was to anchor democracy in the eastern half of the continent, from the Baltics in the north to the western edge of the Black Sea in the south. The challenge for the upcoming decade lies along a new southern geographic axis that extends from the Balkans into Ukraine and Eurasia, and across the Black Sea, into the southern Caucasus and Central Asia—while dealing with an increasingly assertive and competitive Russia fueled by petro-dollars and now laying claim to what it calls its area of privileged interest. Our current enlargement policy was increasingly out-of-date even prior to Moscow’s invasion of Georgia. Support for NATO and EU enlargement had fallen. Further EU enlargement is unlikely in the near term. The countries seeking to anchor themselves to the West today are weaker, more complicated candidates and have further to go to qualify for memberships than previous enlargement classes. At the same time, Russia has become more authoritarian, revisionist and hostile. Keeping our doors open and anchoring young democracies while confronting a more nationalistic and assertive Russia is again at the top of the Transatlantic agenda.2
The challenges facing the United States and Europe extend well beyond Eurasia, however, which is why expanded Transatlantic cooperation in the broader Middle East and South and East Asia makes up the fourth item on our new U.S.-EU agenda. The list of challenges starts in Afghanistan, where NATO and the West are now in danger of losing a war. It extends to Iran, where close coordination across the Atlantic is critical to any chance of convincing Tehran to halt or scale back its nuclear ambitions. Transatlantic cooperation is also key to managing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and civil instability in Lebanon. It is the sine qua non for finding a new and more effective long-term approach to bundling its civil and military efforts on peace and reconstruction to support democratic reforms in this critical region. It is time to start a serious Transatlantic dialogue over managing the implications of the rise of China and East Asia. Transatlantic cooperation in itself may not suffice to manage any of these challenges, but it is difficult to imagine any of them being managed effectively without it.
The same is true when it comes to efforts to stem the nuclearization of the Middle East, the breakdown of the non-proliferation regime and the danger of nuclear anarchy. Again, this is an area in which a core Transatlantic agreement could serve as a cornerstone for a new consensus that extends to other nuclear powers—first and foremost Russia and China, but others as well.
The fifth item for our new Transatlantic agenda (and certainly not the least) is energy and climate change policy. Apart from Iraq, this is the area in which our differences have fueled division and the widespread perception in Europe and elsewhere that the United States does not take its global citizenship responsibilities seriously. Happily, the American debate on these inevitably linked issues is now changing for reasons having little to do with Europe. A gap still exists, but it has narrowed considerably, providing an opportunity political leaders can use to defuse this issue.
One could go on, and the mere fact that one could demonstrates that there now exists a long and growing list of areas for cooperation that could constitute the foundation for a rebuilt Transatlantic relationship. These flow, as they always have, from the fact that we share a common civilization based on a very deeply held, if variably expressed, set of moral understandings. What we have lacked lately is wise leadership that understands the need to transform institutions to meet a changing global environment.
Getting the Plumbing Right
The United States and Europe today are not organized to pursue a new and broader Transatlantic agenda. Policymakers talk about it all the time, in speech after speech and in meeting after meeting, but they always seem unable to translate intentions into actions. We clearly need a wider framework and a clearer understanding of how to work together. We need to get both the architecture (the overall structure) and the plumbing (the day-to-day processes of working together) of a new Transatlantic relationship right.
Doing so requires first and foremost that we tackle an important division. Today the United States has a strong anchor with Europe through NATO, but there is no equivalent anchor or bond with the European Union. Yet in many of the strategic but non-military areas sketched out above, the European Union, not NATO, will be our key partner. The solution to this dilemma is not to weaken NATO or to try to sterilize the growth of security institutions inside the European Union, but rather to build a new, stronger U.S.-EU relationship overall.
It is not just a matter of which institution is up or down in Brussels at any given moment. The U.S.-EU relationship today is not set up to be a strategically meaningful relationship. Yet there are fewer and fewer challenges that military power alone—or NATO by itself—can solve. Afghanistan provides a lucid example of the problem and suggests the possible solution. NATO-led forces could do everything right there, even ultimately finding a way to field the right number of soldiers, but the Alliance could still lose the war for lack of an ability to provide or train sufficient police forces or key civilian personnel needed for effective reconstruction and governance. This is not NATO’s forte, to put it mildly, but such capacities exist in European countries. (Italy’s famous Carabinieri come to mind.) Yet increasingly, such capabilities are bound up in EU structures and politics, and can be accessed only through the European Union. No agreed framework exists that enables us to do so, however.
The truth is that Americans’ strategic needs have changed in a way that makes us more dependent on the European Union than ever before. The European Union’s role is central when it comes to maintaining peace and anchoring new democracies on Europe’s broad periphery. It will be a leading actor in global energy policy, health, the environment and many other policy domains. It is as important as NATO when it comes to devising a new common Russia policy because of the need for a common approach on energy. And for many Europeans, the European Union is a higher priority than NATO and the place where they are investing most of Europe’s political energy and capital. A majority of Europeans want the European Union to grow in importance and weight over time. There are, of course, endless debates in Europe over what exactly the European Union should be and do, but the area in which the public is most supportive of the European Union taking on more responsibility is foreign policy. Thus the United States cannot afford to have strong relations with NATO alone; it needs strategic engagement with both organizations.
Obviously, a better relationship with the European Union alone is not sufficient, for the European Union still has very real internal organizational weaknesses. It can’t do everything. Often it can’t do much at all. Just as NATO is limited by the terms of creation, so the European Union, originally envisioned as a way to render war within Europe impossible, is not set up to implement global strategy. The European Union is trying to transform itself into a political entity that pools sovereignty into a common foreign and security policy that could eventually extend to common defense. It works reasonably well in areas where questions of will and organization have been worked out, and it is ineffective in areas where they have not. In areas like trade policy, the European Union can bring the most powerful American corporations to their knees and play on par with the United States in global talks. Yet the same institution has so far proven unable to forge an effective energy policy to deal with Russia. It can barely manage to deploy a handful of civilian or military experts abroad because it lacks political will, agreement among member states and the right machinery to do so.3
In many respects the European Union is dependent on the American role, yet ambivalent about it. The European Union would probably never have survived through the 1950s and beyond without strong American support. It would not have thrived during the Cold War without the U.S. security umbrella and, just as important, U.S. support for an open international economic order. It probably would not have enlarged in the 1990s if NATO had not taken the lead by defusing concerns about security guarantees.
Dependency, however, has bred mixed feelings. Many Europeans have argued that the American role hinders European integration. Others have sought to define a new European identity in contradistinction to partnership with the United States. American attitudes and policies have ebbed and flowed as well. The United States initially supported economic and political integration, as long as the envisioned terminus of integration rested within the broader ambit of U.S. security policy. But support ebbed when Charles de Gaulle sought to make the European project one of liberation from American domination.
Today’s U.S.-EU structures and the overall timbre of the relationship reflect this checkered past. Thus the U.S.-EU framework has not been the preferred venue for American presidents and key European leaders to do strategic business. U.S.-EU summits are notorious for their technocratic agendas, and U.S. ambassadors to the European Union tend to be trade lawyers or businessmen, not strategic heavyweights with deep foreign policy experience.
The stars may be aligned for change, however. Apart from a few remaining pockets of hostility, American attitudes toward the European Union have become more positive, and the European Union is no longer the bastion of Euro-Gaullism Americans once feared. Indeed, both Commission and Council officials are surprisingly pro-American and Atlanticist in their outlook.4 The presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy not only portends a new relationship for Paris with NATO; it also seeks to put the U.S.-EU relationship on a more strategic footing. All the more reason that we should desire a framework that allows a new U.S.-EU strategic partnership to emerge in parallel to NATO and that eventually brings the two together as the European Union’s own internal capacities mature.
For these reasons, Washington should support European integration and seek as close a relationship as possible with it. We need to make it possible for the European Union to welcome, not fear, a closer American embrace. Of course, NATO must remain the key framework for political-military consultations, as well as the institution of choice when the United States and Europe need to act together militarily. NATO also needs to adapt in order to act effectively on a range of new challenges that largely lie outside of Europe. A closer strategic American embrace of the European Union can actually help NATO as Europeans see that we are willing to work through both institutions in parallel. But we also need to recognize that NATO’s share of the Transatlantic strategic agenda today, though still vital, is smaller than it was during the Cold War, for a simple reason: Then the threat was the military power of a state actor, the Soviet Union; now the threat is one of global systemic disorder and the anomic but highly lethal violence it enables.
Working It Out in Practice
How would the installation of new Transatlantic plumbing work in practice, given the potential for turf battles, as well as ideological and doctrinal disputes? Put a little differently, how can we avoid getting nothing done just because we cannot get everything done?
One key principle, pragmatism, should guide us as we move toward a new model of U.S.-European cooperation. We should be humble, willing to experiment, and willing to correct course. Washington and Brussels should embrace the well-known lesson of past Transatlantic disputes: First work it out in practice; then rewrite the theory.
We can start by adopting several non-ideological rules of thumb. When do we turn to the U.S.-EU relationship, and when to NATO? The European Union should be the U.S. partner of choice when it comes to non-military but still strategic issues. When it comes to common military action, NATO will take the lead. There is a huge in-between area where we will need different combinations of soft and hard power, and thus different mixes of U.S.-EU and NATO engagement. In the Balkans, the European Union is now in the lead, although NATO still plays a critical supporting role. In Afghanistan there is not enough of an EU role to match NATO’s. When it comes to a new eastern policy toward countries like Ukraine and Georgia on the one hand, or Russia on the other, the U.S.-EU framework will be key, but NATO’s reinforcing role should not be underestimated. In the Middle East, Washington’s partner on Iran and many other issues is largely the European Union, at least for the time being, because NATO currently plays almost no role. That could change if we ever get into the business of jointly providing security in the form of extended deterrence, but it is not yet the case.
How will the United States know which issues the European Union can handle strategically and which it cannot? This is a question that European chancelleries and foreign ministers wrestle with on a daily basis. It requires the kind of high quality diplomacy at which Americans used to be skilled. Is it possible to build a Transatlantic consensus in both the European Union and NATO in parallel? Of course. The big difference is that the United States has not just a seat at the NATO table, but the place of honor. It does not have such a seat at the EU table, but it is not without influence. In spite of all their differences, both institutions have some similarities when it comes to developing policies.
In the European Union, for example, a small number of member states might get together to develop a policy initiative involving the major players plus a handful of member states with special interests and expertise. Once they have sorted out the broad contours of these ideas, they bring in the Commission and other EU members via the Council until they achieve full consensus. Appearances are important, so these smaller group consultations remain informal, invisible and rarely codified. If the United States is diplomatically astute, it will find a way to become a quiet part of that informal consensus-building process early on. After all, it is basically the same process that the United States uses to build consensus in NATO, albeit from a stronger and more formal position. And it is not that different from how the interagency process works in Washington (a process which can at times rival the European Union’s in decision-making complexity). The best European embassies in Washington know how to work this process to get their views included in internal American deliberations. There is no reason why U.S. embassies in Europe and in Brussels cannot do the same.
Both sides can also take a page out of the EU playbook and NATO’s own history. The history of the European Union is about leaders deciding that they need a more common policy on an issue and then creating a process and structure that compels them to overcome internal differences and eventually find common ground. Bureaucrats have all sorts of clever names for it, but it is actually quite simple: Use political pressure from above to overcome differences and facilitate a common policy. It is not rocket science—merely classic strategy and diplomacy.
Americans should be able to do what Europeans already do as a matter of standard practice. We used to know how: After all, this is part of the story behind NATO’s successes. When NATO was established, there was no common strategy on how to deal with Stalin. Yet U.S. leaders knew they needed one fast. It took years to develop, and in many areas we never fully agreed, but it worked well enough. The same approach can work again. As before, it will require top-down political guidance and leadership. We should therefore elevate the annual U.S.-EU summit to strategic consultations and hold them back-to-back with NATO summits on an annual basis. What have been largely technical occasions thus far could become occasions to drive deeper Transatlantic cooperation at a strategic level. The U.S. president should come to the table accompanied by cabinet members who hold the key portfolios—not only the secretary of state, but cabinet members responsible for economics and trade, homeland security, energy and climate change, intelligence and other related issues. Working groups and task forces should be established as needed to drive cooperation in specific areas and report back to leaders on a regular basis. Having the NATO summit back-to-back would encourage all Transatlantic leaders to better integrate soft and hard security agendas into a more comprehensive approach. It would help break down the barriers between NATO and the European Union. It would both raise the stakes and focus the attention of our leaders on these issues and make these events into key meetings where agendas are set and implemented.
Eventually, a more robust U.S.-EU relationship should be codified in some sort of treaty or agreement in order to provide a second legal anchor for U.S.-European cooperation. This should not be the first step, for the European Union is not yet ready to be an equal strategic partner on that level, but a new formal relationship ought to be part of our collective long-term vision. Politically, it is much wiser first to engineer a rapprochement across the Atlantic, including with France, as it will be hard enough to fix the U.S.-EU relationship and to develop parallel cooperation between the European Union and NATO. Better to gather practical experience and construct a foundation to build upon before trying to resolve formally the architectural issues.
Some commentators have suggested that the next president should move carefully and incrementally, not launching any major changes in policy toward Europe.5 That would be a mistake. We have a unique political and psychological window of opportunity before us to rebuild this critical relationship, and posterity will not easily forgive the next administration for blowing this chance. Let’s hope the next president has the vision and the will to make the right kind of difference.
1.
See, for example, the polling data compiled by GMF’s annual Transatlantic Trends survey exploring American and European attitudes towards Transatlantic relations and global challenges at http://trends.gmfus.org/.
2.
See my “Eastern Promise: Rethinking NATO and EU Enlargement”, Foreign Affairs (January/February 2008).
3.
For further details see Ronald D. Asmus and Tod Lindberg (with comment by Robert Cooper), “Rue de la Loi: The Global Ambition of the European Project”, Stanley Foundation paper and forthcoming in International Leadership in a Shrinking World: Powers and Principles (Lexington Books).
4.
See, for example, “European Elite Survey: Survey of Members of the European Parliament and Top European Commission and European Council Officials, Key Findings 2008” (A Project of the Centre for the Study of Political Change of the University of Sienna supported by the Compagnia di San Paolo, 2008).
5.
See Kori Shake, Transatlantic Relations After Bush (Center for European Reform, 2007).