The difference in the relative military effectiveness of the U.S. and the EU is almost mind-numbing. The American military machine has no match in history. American military spending alone is more than the next nine largest defense budgets combined. The U.S. now accounts for 80 percent of the world’s military R&D and 40 percent of the world’s total military spending.61 If the U.S. government continues to increase its military budget at the current rate, its military expenditures will shortly be equal to the combined military expenditures of the rest of the world.62
European defense spending, by contrast, is only €155 billion, or less than half that of the United States.63 Although far behind in technological preparedness, the European Union actually has more soldiers under arms than the U.S.—some 2 million troops.64 The U.S. has only 1.4 million troops in uniform.65
One would expect that with half of the military budget of the United States, the EU combined forces would enjoy at least half the military capability. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Europe’s strategic reconnaissance capability is a mere 10 percent of the U.S.’s, it’s airlift capacity is only 20 percent of America’s, and its precision-guided air-deliverance ordnance is approximately 10 percent of our own.66
According to public opinion surveys, more than 70 percent of Europeans support a common defense and security policy for the European Union.67 But, as already mentioned, when it comes to the question of paying for the increased military expenditures that would be required to modernize the EU’s military machine, the public is less enthusiastic. As of 2001, the amount spent by the EU and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe on conflict prevention was less than the cost of one fighter jet.68
A RAND study done in the 1990s estimated that the cost of training, arming, and deploying a fifty-thousand-soldier force with state-of-the-art military capabilities over the next twenty-five years would run the EU somewhere between $18 and $49 billion, with an additional cost of between $9 and $25 billion if it wanted to create satellite intelligence capability. 69 To even hope to approach American military readiness, the European Union would need to increase its overall military spending from its current level of approximately 2 percent of GDP to over 4 percent of GDP.70 No one, on either side of the Atlantic, expects that will happen.
Defense budgets have actually been shrinking in all of the EU countries, with the exception of Ireland and Greece.71 In a period of slow economic growth and tighter government budgets, it’s unlikely that member countries of the EU will choose to increase military spending at the same time they are being forced to cut social benefits. Karl Zinsmeister, of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative American think tank, sums up the feeling of many fellow conservatives in the United States. He writes,
Until Europe demonstrates an equivalent willingness to commit its sons and its treasure to national defense, all talk of building a formidable independent military force in Europe is merely hot air. Wishful thinking will not man and equip a carrier battle group, build a missile shield, or otherwise instill the necessary awe in the world’s tyrants.72
Many American government officials and military analysts, not to mention political observers, have run out of patience with what they regard as a silly EU foreign policy buttressed by a virtually nonexistent military presence. And they are not alone. British political observers have joined the rising chorus of disenchantment here in the U.S. over “fuzzy” foreign policy thinking among European elites. The British conservative Michael Gove’s acid comments on the subject are typical of the talk among the “realpolitik” crowd. In his opinion,
Europe’s leaders seek to manage conflict through the international therapy of peace processes, the buying off of aggression with the danegeld of aid or the erection of a paper palisade of global law, which the unscrupulous always punch through. Europeans may convince themselves that these developments are the innovations of a continent in the van of progress, but they are really the withered autumn fruits of a civilization in decline.73
Americans and Europeans, then, sport two very different ideas of the way foreign policy and security ought to be handled. The Europeans seek security in strengthening international laws, and especially laws governing universal human rights. The aim is to minimize hostilities among foes and to use military intervention selectively to separate warring factions. The EU puts a high premium on conflict resolution rather than military victory. It uses economic assistance as a means of empowering the poor, spreading democracy, and bringing potential trouble spots into the community of civilized people. The current Bush Administration and a vast number of Americans—whether a majority or not is difficult to ascertain—are of a different mind. Many would agree with President Bush’s national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who wrote, at the time of the 2000 presidential election campaign, that America would be best off by proceeding “from the firm ground of the national interests, not from the interest of an illusory international community.”74
A growing number of American critics of the European Union’s foreign and security policies argue that the only reason Europe can present itself to the world as a “good guy idealist” is because the U.S. has to play “big daddy realist” and lean on the “bad guys” to preserve peace and order in Europe and elsewhere. The oft-heard refrain is that America is carrying Europe’s water.
More tempered voices are likely to acknowledge that there is a role for both strategic approaches to foreign policy and security and that they might even complement each other—kind of like a foreign policy analogy of the bad cop, good cop model. The idea is that the United States, with its superior military capabilities, uses its unchallenged dominance to act as a sort of global disciplinarian, punishing wrongdoers for their transgressions and evil ways. The European Union, with its conflict-resolution and peacekeeping abilities, can serve as the rehabilitator, helping the wrongdoers, through a combination of peacekeeping and economic assistance, to see the error of their ways and reform their behavior. That dual scenario has played out in numerous occasions already in troubled regions of the world. America “does the hard war-fighting and Europe picks up the burden of peaceful reconstruction afterwards.”75 In political circles, the way they often put it is this: “America does the cooking, Europe does the washing up.”76 Not surprisingly, when Europeans and Americans were asked whether they would support such a dual formula, 52 percent of Europeans said they agreed with the division of labor, while only 39 percent of Americans concurred.77
From the European perspective, American taunts about Brussels’ childish idealism ring hollow. Europeans have shown that they can use the tools of dialogue, process, and consensus-building to create bridges among people and put an end to age-old rivalries. The EU’s twenty-five member nations are proof, on a large scale, of the wisdom of their approach. They reason that if 455 million Europeans of different persuasions and contending interests can transcend their ancient animosities and join together as an extended community in pursuit of peace and economic prosperity, why not beyond Europe?
Europeans are somewhat more circumspect when it comes to the second charge, of freeloading on the coattails of America’s military might. European leaders and the European public know, deep down, that there is truth to the charge. They also worry that a unipolar world dominated and controlled by the United States might ultimately prove to be a less safe place for everyone—not because America has evil intentions but, rather, because whenever a single power can act as a hegemon, however noble its intentions, it invites countermeasures and retaliatory responses. French president Jacques Chirac voices the concerns of many other world leaders when he warns that “any community with only one dominant power is always a dangerous one and provokes reactions.”78
Taking Responsibility for Its Own Defense
The European Union is beginning to realize that it has to create a credible military operation if it is to ensure the safety and security of its citizenry. There is a recognition that America is likely to be less willing to
commit American troops in or around Europe in the future, even under NATO’s umbrella, to fight battles that should be fought by Europe itself. However, it should be noted that the U.S. government appears to be of two minds on the matter. On the one hand, it continues to nudge the European Union to take more responsibility for the defense of Europe. On the other hand, it has repeatedly warned the European Union in recent years not to attempt to build its own military organization independent of NATO, fearing that if this were to happen, the U.S. might lose its ability to dictate the terms of any potential military engagement in the European theater. In other words, the U.S. would like the EU member countries to pony up greater military expenditures and to ratchet up their commitments to the defense of Europe, but within the NATO rubric, so as to maintain U.S. military dominance in that part of the world.
The idea for a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) was agreed upon as far back as 1993 in the Treaty on the European Union signed at Maastricht. But the plans to implement the CFSP languished for much of the remainder of the decade. The EU member countries had long been split on the question of whether or not to create a truly independent military force of their own. The French favored an EU fighting force accountable only to EU member nations. French president Chirac reiterated the French position in a speech to the European Parliament in the year 1999. He told the MPs that the European Command “cannot fully exist until it possesses autonomous capacity for action in the field of defense.”79
The British, however, worried that a bid for European military autonomy might undermine NATO and anger its American ally. Britain’s commitment to the EU has always been more tentative than that of other EU countries. Caught between a special relationship with the U.S. and its ancient ties to Europe, it has sought refuge in both camps and has often found itself torn between loyalties and not sure where its ultimate self-interests might lie.
The U.K. began to soften its stance on a European military force in the late 1990s, in part to assuage the feeling of other EU members for its refusal to adopt Europe’s single currency. The Balkan crisis also convinced the U.K. that the EU’s military weakness had to be addressed. Great Britain came to believe that a European military force could serve two masters, NATO and the European Union. It would address U.S. concerns that Europe was not doing enough to shoulder its weight in the defense of Europe. And, if the European forces were subsumed under NATO, it would strengthen the North Atlantic alliance rather than weaken it. The French saw the new British willingness as an opening wedge to its long sought-after goal of an independent military presence.
In December 1998, a Franco-British summit was convened in St. Malo, France. The two countries established the terms for what was to become the European Security and Defense Policy.80 France and the U.K. signed a declaration that would commit the European Union, for the first time, to becoming a military as well as civil power. The declaration stated that the EU needed the “capacity for autonomous action backed up by credible military forces, the means to decide to use them and a readiness to do so in order to respond to international crisis.”81 The declaration made clear that the new proposed EU military force would act only in those situations where the whole of NATO was not involved and that it would not duplicate NATO operations.82
As timing would have it, just months after the St. Malo declaration was signed, NATO began a three-month air-bombing campaign over Kosovo. As in the earlier military engagement in Bosnia, European forces proved to be inept, having to rely on American air power and command to win the day. Anxious to finally come to terms with the security deficit, the EU convened a summit in June 1999 in Cologne, Germany. At the meeting, it was decided to establish a European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP), whose mission would be to field military actions for humanitarian and rescue tasks, peacekeeping, and crisis management.83 The three mission objectives were called the Petersberg Tasks, named after a hotel in Bonn where Europeans had first laid them out back in 1992.84 The summit participants also agreed to establish a political and security committee to coordinate EU foreign and security policy, an EU military committee made up of national chiefs of staff of the member countries, and an EU military staff to help manage the deliberations and execute the decisions of the other two committees. In a follow-up summit in Helsinki in December 1999, the EU put teeth into its plan by agreeing to field a fully operational rapid-reaction force of sixty thousand soldiers capable of carrying out the three mission objectives by 2003.85
The Helsinki Agreement reiterated and formalized the earlier intentions set forth by the U.K. and France in St. Malo. It called for “the Union to have an autonomous capacity to take decisions, and where NATO as a whole is not engaged, to launch and then conduct EU-led military operations in response to international crises.”86 To reassure the United States, the signatories emphasized that “NATO remains the foundation of the collective defense of its members and will continue to have an important role in crisis management. . . . Further steps will be taken to ensure full mutual consultation, cooperation and transparency between the European Union and NATO.”87
The U.S. saw the EU initiative as a deliberate provocation designed to undermine the North Atlantic alliance and was particularly critical of the use of the term “autonomous” in referring to the new European rapid reaction force. U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen complained that if the EU were to create an independent defense structure outside the alliance’s control, NATO would become “a relic of the past.”88 U.S. senators Jesse Helms and Gordon Smith were less measured in their reaction. They cautioned European leaders to “reflect carefully on the true motivation behind ESDP, which many see as a means for Europe to check American power.”89 Then they took off the gloves and made a stern warning: “It is neither in Europe’s nor America’s interests to undermine our proven national relationship in favour of one with a European superstate whose creation is being driven, in part, by anti-American sentiment.”90
In November 2000, then secretary of state Madeline Albright voiced the official policy of the Clinton Administration on the matter, with the issuing of what were called the “3Ds.” The ESDP must not result in the decoupling of European defense from NATO; the new military organization must not duplicate NATO’s capabilities; and the European rapid reaction force must not discriminate against NATO member countries that do not belong to the EU.91
The reality is that for the American government, any European military operation is acceptable only on the condition that it be part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Then undersecretary of state Stuart Eizenstein made the U.S. position crystal clear to its European allies. He told them that the U.S. would “continue to celebrate the dream of a continent united through the European Union, but we must also hold before us another essential vision—that of the transatlantic partnership.”92 It’s important to note that these statements are coming out of a White House presided over by a liberal Democratic president. I say this because some critics of the Bush Administration hope that a regime change in the White House might invite a rethinking of America’s long-standing security policy vis-à-vis Europe and the world. They are mistaken. Even if a liberal Democrat were to become president again, it is unlikely that America would diverge much from its stated position of exercising hegemony in its foreign policy, which includes maintaining ultimate control over European security interests.
Despite vigorous U.S. objections, the European Union has forged ahead with its plans for a rapid-reaction force, but always with the caveat that NATO would remain the primary security organization for Europe. The sixty thousand troops are organized into five brigades of infantry, armor, and artillery, as well as combat engineers, with full command, control, and intelligence capabilities. When fully operational, the troops will be supported by fifteen warships and five hundred military aircraft. The EU member states have also agreed to purchase two hundred Airbus jet aircraft to be used as military transports.93 The rapid-reaction force is supposed to be capable of maintaining an expedi
tionary force in the field for at least a year. To accomplish this, 200,000 troops will have to be put on European command for standby to replace units in the field.94
With American troops stationed in Europe continuing to decline, from 335,000 in the late 1980s to less than 100,000 in 2000, Europeans are convinced that the defense of Europe and its immediate surroundings will increasingly fall to the EU in the coming century, regardless of what the U.S. says publicly about its continued commitment to defend Europe through the North Atlantic alliance.95
The idea of an EU armed forces enjoys widespread public support. Forty-two percent of EU citizens believe that European defense policy should be the responsibility of the EU, while only 24 percent believe the responsibility should be left to national governments, and a mere 20 percent believe that NATO should be in charge of European defense.96
On March 31, 2003, the EU launched its first military mission, committing peacekeeping troops to ethnic-torn Macedonia. The 400-member force replaced the NATO-led force that had been stationed in that Balkan nation since 2001.97 Just two months later, in June 2003, the EU committed its first troops outside Europe, dispatching 1,400 soldiers to the Congo, where tribal conflicts had led to more than 500 deaths.98
While there is likely to be continued wrangling between the U.S. and the EU over the prospects for a European armed forces, at least for the foreseeable future the reality is that the NATO alliance, which proved to be so important in protecting the vital security interests of the West during the forty years of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, is increasingly a military organization in search of a mission. Its relevance is difficult to fathom. The idea that a united Europe will continue to have to be dependent on NATO, and ultimately subject its security interests to U.S. conditions and permissions, is simply untenable. Europe, of course, will have to pay a price for its desire for military independence. It’s going to have to be willing to provide the necessary funds to secure its own defense. Many Americans welcome that prospect. Then again, if Europeans are going to pay their way, they ought to have their say. I suspect just as many of my countrymen are less sanguine about Europe making its own military decisions, independent of the long arm of American foreign policy interests.
The European Dream Page 39
