Rebuilding the Atlantic Alliance

Ronald D. Asmus

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2003

Summary:  Despite the myriad setbacks of recent months, the U.S.-European alliance is not doomed. But repairing it will require a strategic overhaul no less bold than that which followed the end of the Cold War. The key to today's transatlantic divide is not power but purpose. To revive and revamp the alliance, therefore, the United States and the European Union must forge a new grand strategy capable of meeting the great challenges of the era: expanding the Euro-Atlantic community and stabilizing the greater Middle East.

Ronald D. Asmus is a Senior Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and a Senior Adjunct Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of Opening NATO's Door: How the Alliance Remade Itself for a New Era and served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs from 1997 to 2000.

Many a good book will no doubt be written on the reasons for the U.S-European clash over Iraq. Already one detects two competing explanations, each with very different policy implications. The first attributes the split to a growing asymmetry in power that has been pushing the United States and Europe further apart on a host of issues and has made strategic cooperation across the Atlantic increasingly tenuous. This thesis has been seized on by many in the Bush administration to justify its go-it-alone or, failing that, ad hoc coalition approach. After all, if Americans and Europeans no longer reside on the same planet in terms of strategic outlook, who in their right mind would attempt to sustain a strategic alliance between them? According to this view, Washington should welcome Europe's remarkable success in healing itself but not expect it to be a major strategic partner in the future.

The alternative view is that although some real differences do exist, this crisis is largely the result of diplomatic ineptness on one or both sides of the Atlantic. It could have been avoided or, at a minimum, managed much better with different leaders pursuing other policies. Rather than perceiving the United States and Europe as strategically incompatible, this view contends that no two parts of the world have more in common or are more integrated. The power gap across the Atlantic is neither new nor unprecedented. For example, it was just as great during the 1950s -- a heyday of transatlantic cooperation. The crux of the matter is not power but purpose. History has shown that if the United States and Europe share common goals, European allies welcome American strength and the differences between them can be managed.

It is precisely in this realm that the Bush administration has failed -- through its inability to define Washington's purpose in ways that its closest allies could support. Instead, it relied on the mistaken assumption that might makes right and that its allies would fall in line behind a simple assertion of U.S. power. Rather than try to accommodate European concerns as part of building a broader coalition, the administration decided simply to override them. Even those allies who supported the United States complained privately about the paucity of consultation and the ineffectiveness of the administration's diplomacy.

If the alliance is to be rebuilt, the United States and Europe must again define a common strategic purpose centered on meeting the major strategic challenges of the day. Even leaving aside the problems of Asia as largely beyond the horizon of future transatlantic cooperation, there are at least two major strategic challenges much closer to home that cry out for closer transatlantic cooperation. The first is what might be called the new "eastern" agenda and the further consolidation of the Euro-Atlantic community. The historic accomplishment of the 1990s was the inclusion of central and eastern Europe -- from the Baltic to the Black Sea -- in the West. Western countries must now make a comparable commitment to help transform and to embrace the next set of states lying east of the new borders of NATO and the European Union. The most pressing task is to anchor a democratizing Ukraine to the West. Also urgent is the need to abolish Europe's remaining totalitarian dictatorship in Belarus. And finally, the West must help Russia continue its transformation into a democratic, modern, and pro-Western strategic partner, a project that remains very much a work in progress.

Also needed is a new strategy vis-à-vis countries in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The West's success in integrating central and eastern Europe has awakened hopes in some of these countries that they too can move closer to NATO and the EU. These aspirations should be encouraged, not rejected. The West needs a more coherent strategy toward the Black Sea region and those countries lying further eastward around the Caspian. These countries vary widely and have a very long way to go; many may only ever achieve a loose link to the West, rather than full membership in the key Euro-Atlantic institutions. But in a post-September 11 world, the United States can no longer afford to treat these countries as a strategic backwater on Europe's periphery and must instead recognize their growing and critical role in the war on terrorism. As the West becomes more involved on the ground in rebuilding Iraq, the importance of stabilizing and transforming these regions becomes increasingly self-evident. Policies and mechanisms developed over the last decade should be enhanced and implemented through steady cooperation with the EU and NATO. Locking in reform and a pro-Western orientation in these countries is the logical next phase in the Euro-Atlantic integration process.

Extending stability into this part of the world becomes even more crucial when the second fundamental challenge is considered: dealing with the greater Middle East, a region that stretches from northern Africa to the Levant, from the Persian Gulf to Afghanistan. If during the twentieth century, Europe was the region from which some of the greatest threats to international security emanated, today that distinction belongs to the greater Middle East. It is here that one finds the nexus of rising anti-Western ideologies, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction (WMD). It is from this region that the greatest danger to American and European lives is likely to originate -- for years, if not decades to come. By almost any measurement, the regimes of this region are failing, as was eloquently described in the recent UN development report compiled by a leading group of Arab scholars. Whereas most of the world is now proceeding into the twenty-first century, too many countries in the greater Middle East are moving backward. And their failures are helping to breed extremist ideologies, movements, and regimes that now potentially pose a major threat to the West.

To meet this challenge, however, the West needs more than a military campaign plan. It needs an approach that addresses the root causes of these problems by changing the dynamics that produced such monstrous regimes and groups in the first place. Otherwise, the names of the terrorist groups and rogue states might change, but the long-term threat will not. Thus, the West must move beyond a strategy of simply trying to manage a crumbling status quo. Instead, it must actively try to help the region transform itself into a set of societies that can live in peace with one another and that no longer produce ideologies and terrorists who desire to kill in large numbers and who increasingly have access to the technology needed to do so.

What would the building blocks of such a strategy look like in practice? The first would be a common effort to win the peace in Iraq, utilizing Western power and influence to build a more modern, democratic, and just society there. Victory in Iraq must be followed by a renewed effort to reach an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord. In spite of the considerable obstacles, such an accord remains critical not only in its own right, but also as a way of opening the door for broader democratic change in the region by removing an issue that clearly inhibits badly needed domestic changes. It is also critical in terms of Washington's credibility. If the United States is to be seen as a promoter of democracy in the Arab world, it must show that it is committed to peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Such steps need to be matched by a strategy for promoting positive regime change in Iran. Unlike the case of Saddam's Iraq, there is a real chance that such change could come from within. Unfortunately, that could take longer than Tehran's quest for nuclear weapons. The West therefore needs a strategy that prevents Iran from going nuclear and encourages democratic change.