The last decade has not been good for the collective West. The list of setbacks is long: the resurgence of Russia along Europe’s periphery signaled by the 2008 Russian-Georgian war; the economic meltdown in the United States and Europe; the continued rise of China and the accelerated shift in economic power balances across the globe; the so-called “Arab Spring” in 2010–11 that heralded the final bloody unravelling of the Sykes-Picot system in the Middle East; the Russian seizure of Crimea in 2014, war in eastern Ukraine, and the attendant deep freeze in relations with Russia; war in Syria followed by Russia’s military intervention there; the onset of mega-migration from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) into Europe in 2015; and the growing threat of state-on-state conflict, not just on the Korean Peninsula but also in the Baltic Sea, along Europe’s eastern flank, and in the Pacific. Across the West there is also an increasing and justifiable concern about the metastasis of ISIS now that the jihadist homeland project is being reduced to naught in Syria and Iraq. Finally, a surge in cross-national threats from cyberspace, drug trafficking, transnational organized crime, and smuggling continues to force Western security agencies to play defense.
The sharp political polarization in the United States and Europe has only further undermined this deteriorating international security situation, striking at the institutional foundations of Western democracies, degrading states’ resilience, and potentially calling into question their governability and national cohesion. In Europe the key drivers of this societal decomposition are terrorism and MENA migration, both of which increasingly threaten the future of not just the European cooperative project but increasingly also the social and political fabric of individual European states. As the number of terror attacks on European soil continues to climb, states are finding it ever more difficult to manage both the continued influx of new arrivals and the deportation of those whose asylum claims have been rejected. Less than a third of those told to leave are actually removed, creating additional incentives for economic migrants to join the flow and further undermining public confidence in the governments’ ability to address the crisis.
In the United States, decades of group identity politics, in combination with the postmodern, neo-Marxian efforts at colleges and universities to redefine America’s cultural underpinning, have split the society apart, pushing increasing numbers toward the fringes of radical politics and violence. Deindustrialization and the decimation of the American middle and working classes have also brought about a deep decline in public confidence in the elites’ ability to govern, while social trust and the sense of the mutuality of obligations essential to the functioning of a consolidated democracy have dropped precipitously.
Taken together, both Europe and the United States find themselves burdened by challenges at home at a time when international security threats are on the rise. Mounting a strategy to defend the collective West against these threats requires a unity of purpose and cohesion that are at present sorely lacking. In contrast, China and Russia are experiencing national awakenings which, albeit for different reasons, have increased their central governments’ ability to mobilize their populations.
The deepening crisis in the West is also the product of a decline of strategic thought in the United States and Europe. The U.S. failure since the end of the Cold War to produce an overarching foreign policy and national security strategic framework that resonates on both sides of the Atlantic has bred a policymaking approach that is largely reactive and tactical in nature. This policy stasis has resulted in generalized and often ideologically charged declarations of intent, which cannot substitute for an honest accounting of goals and means. Though the roots of this drift can be traced back to the last years of the George H. W. Bush Administration, with the rhetorical excesses of a “new world order” bearing little relationship to the rapidly decomposing post-Soviet sphere and the politically-awakened Middle East, it was the Clinton Administration in the 1990s that set the tenor for how the United States would “do” foreign policy from then on, oscillating between the ideological excesses of the “indispensable nation” on the one hand and, on the other hand, the equally unwarranted conviction that NATO’s defeat of minor power Serbia heralded the arrival of a rules-based international system. Key decisions in the 1990s that would define U.S. policy choices going forward, such as NATO enlargement, morphed from a sound geostrategic response to German unification and the decomposition of the Soviet Union into a policy that resembled a batch approach in manufacturing more than it did nuanced statecraft driven by close analysis of costs and benefits. The strategic myopia on developments in post-Soviet Russia in particular, which in the 1990s was uniformly dismissed in Washington, DC policy circles as a spent force, resulted in arguably the greatest missed opportunity to outline a realistic strategy for engaging with Moscow with an eye to China’s rise as a peer competitor to the United States.
No other event has suppressed strategic thinking in the U.S. policy community more than the 9/11 terrorist attack against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In the heat of the moment, the wounded nation rightly demanded swift retribution against those who nurtured and supported the perpetrators. Too quickly and too easily, however, this brief moment of national unity of a people under attack became an ideologically infused project that was to bring democratic government not just to Afghanistan but also to the Middle East as an antidote to the spread of jihadist ideology. Instead of a measured response to what was an undisputed tragedy and shock to the nation’s sense of security, the so-called Global War on Terror became a vehicle for ideas that were breathtaking in their scope: “nation-building,” “state-building,” and “regime change” entered the policy lexicon with remarkable ease, facilitating a series of military campaigns from Iraq to Libya, the geostrategic consequences of which few seemed willing to entertain. Even the so-called “Arab Spring” did not serve as a wakeup call about the urgent need for at least a regional strategy. It was as though the people charged with charting the course of America’s foreign policy now truly believed that, having unlocked the mystery of how nations evolve (the “end of history”), state systemic breakdowns would yield not more violence but a crop of Jeffersons across the Middle East.
For the most part, Europe has been disconcertingly content to stay at a “sub-strategic” level since the Cold War. The one bright moment was Berlin’s ability to build up a consensus around EU enlargement—a policy that stabilized postcommunist Europe and, through structural and cohesion funds, restored markets across the region, with the free flow of labor launching a grand and successful reconstruction of the former Eastern Europe. The same cannot be said of the decision to pursue a quasi-federal project embodied in the Lisbon treaty, or of the virtual collapse of Europe’s military capabilities over the past decade and the waning of its strategic culture. Nor can it be said of the elite conviction that Europe was capable of generating a larger shared identity to eventually equal the national allegiances of its peoples.
Today the collective West is at a crossroads in part because tactics and policy have substituted for an implementable and shared Transatlantic strategic framework for foreign and security policy. The last successful grand strategy that harnessed the combined resources of the West, while generating a lasting commitment to mutuality across the Atlantic, was the Containment Strategy of the Cold War era. George Kennan’s initial vision would come to serve as an overarching concept for the multi-tiered and nuanced responses to Soviet efforts to delink the United States from Europe and expand Moscow’s geostrategic reach so as to ultimately dominate Eurasia and beyond. The U.S. success in the Cold War was in large part the result of the overall clarity of its grand strategy and the broad Transatlantic consensus behind it, regardless of the adjustments, policy adaptations, and occasional setbacks during the 45 years of the increasingly global competition between liberal democracy and communism.
Today, as in the Kennan era, the starting point for a coherent grand strategy has to be a clear elucidation by the United State and Europe of shared threats to their vital national interests, in defense of which we are prepared to harness our national political, military, economic, and diplomatic tools. In order to ensure that this attempt at a grand strategy debate doesn’t lapse into another academic contest to crown the best turn of phrase (whether “global engagement” or “global war on what-have-you”), the United States and its European allies need to start a new strategic dialogue with national rather than global security optics. This is necessary because, historically, any grand strategy that actually worked—containment included—always stipulated that national interests come first. A clear delineation between vital, important, and peripheral interests is the sine qua non of this effort to frame a new grand strategic dialogue for the collective West. Likewise, a clear understanding of the constraints we all currently face—whether budgetary, cultural, or institutional—needs to be on the bargaining table from the beginning.
A new Transatlantic grand strategy requires not only that the United States and Europe establish what their shared threats are but also that they speak clearly to issues where they differ in emphasis. Governments need to be direct and specific, rather than falling prey yet again to ideological flights of fancy and grandiose but unworkable pronouncements. Amidst the differences between the United States and Europe on a range of issues, one key principle to be kept in focus is this: globalization, as the intersection of international politics, markets, culture and technology, has to take a back seat to the nation-state and state action in the realm of security and foreign policy. While globalization has generated complex interdependence across the international economic system, it lags in importance behind action by unitary states and by the NATO alliance when it comes to Transatlantic security. If a new strategic dialogue among the West is to succeed, the current emphasis on globalization in policy debates needs to give way.
The United States and Europe both face a combination of internal political pressures and external threats of a magnitude not seen since the Cold War, raising questions about the security of the Transatlantic realm itself. The confluence of the deepening internal disorder in the United States and Europe and rising tensions across the globe demand a coherent and coordinated strategic response from the United States and Europe. What is urgently needed is a new strategic dialogue in the West, for in light of the impending tectonic shifts in the global power distribution, especially in Asia and Eurasia, the United States and Europe need each other more today than at any point since the Cold War.
