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.

But the promotion of positive regime change cannot be limited to adversaries. Washington should also take a close look at its relationship with countries that might be official allies but are ruled by regimes and ideologies that are actually part of the problem. This means candidly rethinking the U.S. relationship with countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Promoting positive transformation within countries that are U.S. allies is a different kind of policy problem, but one that must be taken just as seriously.

Last, but not least, comes the problem of building peace in Afghanistan, along with the need to rethink U.S. trade and development policies across the region to more effectively promote positive democratic change. Progress toward internal change in these countries must be buttressed from the outside by new regional security cooperation. The West must begin to create the foundation for a regional system of norms and rules that draws on the positive traditions of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the broader European experience to promote change and help lock in progress.

Military "hard power" will be critical in meeting these challenges, but the real key will be using "soft power" to help these countries transform themselves. Political preemption in the form of democracy building will be as critical as the capacity for military preemption. Positive change will potentially require decades of sustained engagement -- not only with the region but also between the United States and Europe. It is going to necessitate the same kind of close strategic cooperation that eventually won the Cold War.

CLOSING THE GAP

Can the United States and Europe develop a common strategy to address these challenges? Today Americans and Europeans increasingly recognize that these problems pose the biggest threats to their common interests, but they have differing instincts on how to solve them. But past U.S.-European strategic cooperation worked not because the parties always agreed in advance on what the solution should be, but rather because they managed to bring together different impulses in an overarching framework. In the late 1960s, for example, the alliance adopted a grand strategy based on the Harmel Report -- one critical to eventually winning the Cold War. That successful strategy combined elements of offense and defense. Nato used a strong military to deter the Soviet Union, along with detente and engagement to assist the political transformation of communist countries. Such a policy would now be called regime change by peaceful means.

A similar approach is needed today. In an age when the greatest threats come from terrorists or rogue states armed with WMD, the new front line of defense must be transatlantic homeland security. There are few areas in which the need for transatlantic cooperation is more self-evident or America's own interest in the EU's becoming a strong and coherent actor more obvious. In fact, it is precisely in this area that U.S.-European cooperation has continued largely undisturbed by the Iraq crisis. But much more needs to be done. The EU, for instance, needs to create its own Office of Homeland Security to expand cooperation in this area.

Military capability is the other indispensable component of defense. Afghanistan and Iraq have demonstrated that the United States and Europe need the capacity to intervene militarily beyond their borders both to deter new threats and to respond to them. They also need competence in long-term peacekeeping to aid in the democratic reconstruction of these countries. Tackling these jobs beyond Europe should be a core new mission of NATO. The Bush administration missed a historic opportunity to lead the alliance into this new era in Afghanistan. Belatedly, it is correcting its mistake by NATO-izing the International Security Assistance Force. Nato should also assume a lead role in providing security in Iraq. And it should look for ways to reach out to other Arab states in the region, drawing on the experience of the Partnership for Peace. Finally, if both parties agree and conditions warrant, NATO should be prepared to help enforce an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord.

The gap in military capabilities across the Atlantic must clearly be narrowed. But it need not be the showstopper some critics claim. Nato requires modest expeditionary capabilities, but Europe does not have to replicate America's military prowess. It requires the capacity to intervene, together with the United States, in future coalition operations; to sustain long-term peacekeeping missions; and to act on its own in smaller crises. But the Achilles' heel of the West is not military in nature. At a time when Washington spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined, the West as a whole does not suffer from a lack of military capacity. Instead, the weak link is the lack of an effective transformation strategy that can help create a democratic political alternative in the Arab world. Europe potentially has as much to offer as the United States when it comes to meeting this challenge. The alliance needs a modern-day equivalent of the Harmel Report for the greater Middle East that combines an effective defense against terrorism and WMD with a political strategy to help transform and democratize the Islamic and Arab world.