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.

To be sure, consultations in and of themselves will not miraculously resolve deeper problems. But it is worth remembering that the consensus achieved during the Cold War did not simply materialize out of thin air. It was built from the ground up. When President Harry Truman and his European and Canadian counterparts created NATO, they did not necessarily have a common view on how to deal with the Soviet threat. But they were smart enough to know that they needed one to confront a common problem -- and to order their top aides to come up with it. Over the years, a web of formal and informal consultations was spun to pull together divergent viewpoints and to integrate them into a common strategy. Today, a similar system to generate consensus is needed to meet the toughest challenges of the twenty-first century. There is little doubt that the gap across the Atlantic can be narrowed if both sides make a political commitment to do so and throw their best and brightest together in order to stake out new common ground.

Meeting in Washington in the spring of 1999, NATO leaders pledged to recast the transatlantic relationship to make sure it is as good at dealing with the problems of the next 50 years as it was in dealing with those of the last. September 11 has opened eyes in both the United States and Europe to those problems and may have heralded the beginning of a dangerous century. It is clearly desirable for both sides of the Atlantic to coalesce in meeting the challenges of this new era. If major instability erupts in either the region lying between Europe and Russia or in the greater Middle East, both the United States and Europe are likely to be drawn in to deal with it. Their ability to do so successfully will be much greater if they find a way to rebuild their alliance around a common framework and strategy.

There is little doubt that if leaders of the caliber of Truman and his European counterparts existed today, they would be setting a new strategic direction and rebuilding the alliance to meet precisely these challenges. Whether President Bush, Jacques Chirac, and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder are up to the task remains to be seen. Progress may very well require regime change on one or both sides of the Atlantic. One thing, however, is clear: if today's leaders fail to achieve such progress, both the United States and Europe will be worse off. Transatlantic strategic cooperation is one reason why the second half of the twentieth century was so much better than the first. If the United States and Europe can agree on a common strategy to meet the challenges of the new era, the world will be much the better for it.