America, A European Power

Richard Holbrooke

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 1995

Article preview: first 500 of 4,861 words total.

Summary:  The Congress of Vienna, the Treaty of Versailles, and the NATO-based containment strategy were three pivotal decisions in European diplomacy. Now there is a fourth opportunity to construct a lasting European peace through institutions, new and old. Foremost, NATO must expand, discussing openly which new countries to admit. The Partnership for Peace and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe should coordinate human rights and civilian control of armies. Respect for human rights must extend to Russia, which is why the Chechen campaign has been so disturbing. To turn away from the challenge of this moment and freeze NATO would exact a higher price later.

Richard Holbrooke is Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs.

THE NEW SECURITY ARCHITECTURE

President Clinton made four trips to Europe last year. This commitment of presidential time and attention underlines an inescapable but little?realized fact: the United States has become a European power in a sense that goes beyond traditional assertions of America's "commitment" to Europe. In the 21st century, Europe will still need the active American involvement that has been a necessary component of the continental balance for half a century. Conversely, an unstable Europe would still threaten essential national security interests of the United States. This is as true after as it was during the Cold War.

I do not intend, of course, to suggest that nothing has changed. The end of the Cold War, which can best be dated to that symbolic moment at midnight on December 25, 1991, when the Soviet flag came down over the Kremlin for the last time, began an era of change of historic proportions. Local conflicts, internal political and economic instability, and the return of historical grievances have now replaced Soviet expansionism as the greatest threat to peace in Europe. Western Europe and America must jointly ensure that tolerant democracies become rooted throughout all of Europe and that the seething, angry, unresolved legacies of the past are contained and solved.

THE FOURTH ARCHITECTURAL MOMENT

Only three times since the French Revolution has Europe peacefully reshaped its basic security architecture. Today, the continent is in the middle of nothing less than the fourth such moment in the last two centuries. The first post?Napoleonic security architecture for Europe, designed in 1815 at the Congress of Vienna, helped prevent all?out continental war for 99 years. The young United States, having fought two wars with England in only 40 years, successfully kept its distance, but for the last time.

In the second period of redesign, at Versailles in 1919, President Woodrow Wilson played a central role, but the United States withdrew almost immediately from the very structures it had helped create, thereby weakening them and thus virtually guaranteeing the tragic resumption of total war 20 years later. When the third opportunity arose in 1945, the great powers initially built a system based on Yalta, Potsdam, and the United Nations. But starting in 1947, when the leaders of the West realized that this system would not suffice to stem Soviet expansion, they created the most successful peacetime collective security system in history, centered around the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO, Atlantic partnership -- and American leadership.

This creative architecture reflected the underlying goals of America's postwar engagement in Europe. Its post?Cold War engagement must focus again on structures, old and new. This time, the United States must lead in the creation of a security architecture that includes and thereby stabilizes all of Europe -- the West, the former Soviet satellites of central Europe, and, most critically, Russia and the former republics of the Soviet Union.

All the key participants in the new security equation in Europe -- the United States, the West ...

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