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.

GETTING BACK ON TRACK

If the Atlantic alliance is going to get back on track, the United States and Europe must not only heal the rift over Iraq but also forge a common purpose and a framework for tackling the challenges laid out above. As the stronger partner, Washington must take the initiative to set a new direction and establish a framework that could bring the two sides together. To do so, the Bush administration must change tracks on two key issues.

First, it must return to a policy of treating Europe as a partner of choice when building alliances and make finding transatlantic common ground on the challenges faced a top priority. This means abandoning the hard-line view of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who has sought to maximize American domination by treating Europe and NATO as a toolbox from which Washington can pick and choose in order to build ad hoc "coalitions of the willing" on its own terms. No European ally, including the United Kingdom, will accept this approach as a basis for long-term cooperation. Reversing the policy does not mean that Washington is somehow granting Europeans a veto or too much influence over U.S. policy. The old rule that stipulates one's influence depends on one's contribution -- political, economic, or military -- remains a good guide for the future. Washington must stop treating Europe with disdain and reach out to the "old" continent, recognizing that Europe remains the part of the world with which the United States has the most in common and that can provide the support that most amplifies Washington's ability to accomplish its objectives.

Second, Washington must reaffirm U.S. support for a strong, unified, and pro-Atlanticist Europe as a matter of self-interest and abandon any notion of pursuing a policy of disaggregation toward the "old" continent. The Bush administration's approach of increasingly relying on a "coalition of the willing," dependent on the United Kingdom and a small handful of pro-American allies, will fail as a model for the future. Not only will it divide Europe, but it is not sustainable over time -- as it threatens to lose Washington the support of those European allies that remain. If Washington wants Europe to assume real responsibility, it must recognize that only a unified Europe can do so in a meaningful way. The United States must therefore settle its differences with France and Germany, the two leading powers on the continent.

But if the United States needs to rethink its approach, so does Europe. Unilateralism is not a monopoly of les Americains. The flip side of the Bush administration's go-it-alone approach is French President Jacques Chirac's assertion that the EU, too, must go its own way and act as a counterweight to American power. Such talk is dangerous for the future of the U.S.-European relationship and for European unity and integration as well. If one thing should have become clear amid the transatlantic smog over Iraq, it is that any attempt to build Europe on an anti-American basis is doomed to divide the continent.

A European counterweight policy is also a recipe for strategic divorce from the United States. No American leader of any political persuasion will accept the proposition that the basis for a U.S.-European partnership should be the containment of U.S. ability to act. American power is an opportunity, not a problem. It needs to be harnessed and channeled for the right purposes, not countered. Americans will be among the staunchest promoters of European integration if they believe its purpose is to create a stronger, more unified, and more outward-looking partner, willing and able to join with the United States in tackling new strategic challenges. But Americans will increasingly question and eventually oppose European integration if its raison d'être comes to be defined in opposition to Washington.

Europe must also realistically appraise current multilateral institutions. If unilateralism and ad hoc coalitions are not the answer, then neither is Europe's insistence on using the UN when that institution, as currently structured, is obviously not up to the job. There is a real gap today between the scope of the problems and the capacity of existing international institutions to handle them. Pressuring Washington to rely on them anyway is not an adequate answer. Together, both sides of the Atlantic must find new solutions, either by building new institutions or by radically reforming existing ones and reevaluating the norms on which they are based. For the Bush administration, this means following in its predecessor's footsteps and putting its shoulder to the wheel by insisting on reforms that increase the UN's effectiveness at a time when Washington's responsibilities and burdens around the globe are growing.

Above all, both sides of the Atlantic need to reinstate the network of close consultations that has formed the bedrock of transatlantic cooperation for the past half-century under Republican and Democratic presidents alike. Most worrying in the U.S.-European relationship today is the lack of any systematic and close dialogue on these strategic issues comparable to what was created during the Cold War to deal with the Soviet Union. Rather than being expanded to include these new issues, consultations across the Atlantic have actually been cut back. In part, this is because the Bush administration is frequently so divided it is unable to conduct meaningful discussions on many strategic issues. Whereas in the past Americans would complain of or poke fun at Europe's inability to speak with a single voice, today it is the Europeans who ask whom in Washington they should call to find out what U.S. policy really is. But the diminished dialogue also reflects Washington's downgrading of the relationship and its misguided conviction that the assertion of American power is synonymous with leadership.