For forty-five years, Europeans dreamed of a time when the ugly wall that divided Europe would be torn down and when, relieved of the threat of war from the East, they could turn their attention homeward. In retrospect, the Cold War was the longest period of peace and economic progress Europe has ever enjoyed. Now Europeans have found that the peace of war has been replaced by the wars of peace. Bitter, long-suppressed ethnic hatreds have exploded in the Balkans. The journey toward a new Europe with a new, common economic and foreign policy has been derailed.
The hopes for European economic unity have been dimmed in part because of the absence of history’s greatest unifying force—a common enemy. World War II and the Cold War produced strong popular leaders such as Churchill, de Gaulle, Adenauer, and De Gasperi. Europe’s peacetime leaders, able men plagued by nagging domestic problems, find that their popularity is lower than that of Boris Yeltsin, whose economic and political problems are infinitely greater than theirs. A deep recession, during which unemployment has increased to over 10 percent, has created a new wave of pessimism, with the ghosts of racism and protectionism haunting the continent.
The elation over the liberation of one hundred million people in Eastern Europe in 1989 from communist repression has turned to disillusionment as Europe’s leaders tally up the cost of repairing the damage of a brutal communist economic system that promised progress and produced poverty.
At the beginning of the Cold War, Europe faced the twin threats of the military aggression by Stalin’s armies and the ideological appeal of communist propaganda in Europe’s war-devastated economies. The United States played a decisive role in meeting those threats. We joined our allies in deterring the military threat through NATO and the ideological threat through the Marshall Plan. With the end of the Cold War, communism has been discredited and Russia is a friend, not an enemy. But we are finding that the challenges beyond peace are greater than those we faced during the Cold War.
Logically, the Atlantic alliance, created to deter the Soviet threat, could have been expected to disappear once the threat was gone. Yet there are no serious discussions about dissolving NATO. Uncertainties in Central and Eastern Europe, war in the Balkans, and instability in Russia make NATO’s existence a source of comfort in Western Europe.
Key elements of a potential Russian threat are still present—large conventional forces, strategic nuclear capability, and a tradition of using force. While no one now feels threatened by the democratic government of Russia, the situation there is still unpredictable. We need NATO as insurance against a renewed threat from the East in the event that extreme Russian nationalists come to power.
The large-scale dispersal of arms to eager buyers in the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, and elsewhere creates a time bomb with direct implications for Europe and America. Europeans are deeply concerned about refugees from Eastern Europe and economic migration from North Africa. Both have triggered xenophobic reactions in Europe. Violence in the Balkans is a threat to Western interests.
Advocates of a Europe free of U.S. forces have argued that organizations such as the Western European Union and the Conference on Security and Cooperation should replace NATO as a security arrangement in Europe, and that NATO should be buried alongside other relics of the Cold War. Events have totally discredited this concept. Belgian Foreign Minister Mark Eyshen had it right during the Persian Gulf War: “The European Community was an economic giant, a political dwarf, and a military worm.” America took the lead then, and individual European countries, notably Britain and France, responded by committing their armed forces. But traditional rivalries, parochial interests, and the collective indecisiveness of the major European powers have frustrated an effective response to the violent and tragic breakup of the the former Yugoslavia. Europe can unite behind a common purpose only if the United States continues to play a leading role.
The key is an expanded NATO rather than a weakened one, with a strong U.S. presence and a new mission. For the United States, NATO is our principal institutional link to Europe, and one we must not break.
Secretary General Manfred Worner has observed that more than any other international institution, NATO has already changed significantly to meet new challenges. It has a new strategy and force posture, it has started to strengthen its European pillar, and it has established relations with its former adversaries through the North Atlantic Cooperation Council. Its member nations have started to participate in crisis management well beyond NATO borders. We are indeed witnessing the birth of a new NATO, but the birth pains are excruciating. The NATO summit in Brussels in early 1994 demonstrated that the Europeans want American leadership, but it also showed that there is no clarity on either side of the Atlantic about the strategic role of post–Cold War NATO. The alliance is still deeply uncertain about what threatens Europe, about the Europeans’ wider interests, and about how to organize itself for the future. These paramount issues must be addressed before the alliance can undertake highly ambitious new initiatives outside its traditional area.
The alliance’s response to the resurgence of the nationalisms that repeatedly bloodied Europe over the past century has been dangerously inadequate. The Soviet nuclear legacy and associated risks of proliferation have yet to be brought under effective control. Conflicts among the new states of the old USSR—some with nuclear weapons—are possible. A call for the rapid use of NATO forces could prove a political and logistical nightmare. Diplomacy, U.N. resolutions, and economic sanctions would simply give a rogue state the time it needed to succeed in the deployment of a credible threat.
The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe agreed that the frontiers of Eastern Europe and the successor states of the USSR should be changed only by peaceful means. During the Cold War this well-intentioned provision had about as much credibility as a U.N. General Assembly resolution condemning aggression. Today, an opportunity exists to replace that unenforceable agreement with something more solid. The NATO allies, including the United States, are reluctant to offer security guarantees that they would have difficulty honoring, however, so nothing has come of the good intentions.
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None of these strategic challenges will be met unless the French and the Americans can overcome thirty years of proud and sometimes bitter rivalry over primacy in Europe. The “French question” involves the deeper issue of whether France can achieve its current goal of security and independence through closer European union while at the same time the United States is retained as a full participant in guaranteeing European and international security. This will require political imagination and leadership in Washington as well as in Paris. The bureaucracies in Foggy Bottom and the Quay d’Orsay, deeply suspicious of each other, will have to be firmly guided to new attitudes and a new strategy.
All Europeans, including the French, understand that neither conflicts to the east nor instabilities in the south can be addressed by the alliance unless the United States is an active member. Europe fears the United States may drift away. It is troubled by the Clinton administration’s decision to give much greater weight to Asia as the most likely source of growth in the international economy in the coming years. Over half the growth in the world economy between 1990 and 2000 will occur in Asia and only about one sixth in Europe, but to pull the rug out from under NATO for this reason, or allow it to be pulled out, would be a strategic blunder of historic proportions.
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Great Britain’s Lord Ismay, NATO’s first Secretary General, reportedly said that NATO had been created to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down. But NATO turned out to be precisely the vehicle by which Germany rose—because others needed a German role in the defense of Europe as much as the Germans needed their support. The immense American NATO military deployment in turn permitted Germany to return to power without threatening other states. For the first time in its history, Germany had a powerful and positive role in a global alliance system.
We must
strengthen the U.S.-German partnership. Today the top three economic powers—the United States, Japan, and Germany—account for over 40 percent of the world’s GNP. Once Germany overcomes the economic problems caused by reunification, it should be ready to use its massive economic muscle in Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union to serve the interests of the West as a whole. To quell fears of German power, we should make sure that Berlin enters the game as an integral member of the Western team, not a passive player kept on the sidelines.
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With U.S. political leadership, NATO should agree quickly on a new strategic agenda. We should support the democratic government in Russia economically and politically. We should support economic development in the other former Soviet states and in the nations of Eastern Europe. We should create better controls on the transfer of lethal technology, develop defensive systems against theater ballistic missiles, and draft contingency plans for nonnuclear surgical excision of potential nuclear threats.
We should cooperate in addressing urgent international problems that were overshadowed by the Cold War. Common global and regional problems that transcend national boundaries, and outstrip national capabilities, now occupy center stage. One example is the explosion of international refugees, from 2.5 million in 1970 to 19.7 million today, not counting the 24 million who have been forced from their homes in their own countries.
So far, foot-dragging on the new international challenges is the rule. As has been the case in the Bosnia tragedy, multilateralism has often functioned as an escape hatch from individual responsibility.
NATO needs a much smaller conventional and nuclear force than we had in the Cold War, but it must be enough to deter any aggressor and reassure European countries that it can handle any challenge. This requires a minimum of one corps of U.S. ground troops to demonstrate our commitment to the stability of the continent. The level of U.S. military forces in Europe is likely to be less than a third of the former 325,000, and they will be configured for rapid deployment to areas well outside NATO boundaries—even well outside Europe. There should be no further cuts in our NATO forces below this level. Our commitment to Europe must be based on solid military capabilities, not empty political rhetoric.
NATO should also take full advantage of the military-technical revolution by deploying global, space-based command; high-tech control and communications; stealth technology; rapid mobility; and precision-guided munitions. It must not weaken or dismantle its existing infrastructure, command and communications capabilities, and other assets. They are indispensable for operations outside of the European theater. It should attempt to coordinate changes in members’ force structures so that our remaining forces are complementary and so that they can operate as a unified rapid-response force. This would not only lead to greater cooperation but also enable our forces to respond to crises more effectively.
Historically, American leadership within the Atlantic alliance was as important for transatlantic cohesion as was the Soviet threat. In the future, American leadership will continue to be important, but its form and style will be completely different. In the past, the American role in NATO was more dominant than it is now or will be in the future. During the Cold War we built up positions of strength against the central threat and reacted to outbreaks on the periphery. Our allies—those to whom we provided security against the Soviet threat—had to go along with us. That will not work now. Neither will isolation. What will work today is a new strategy of patient, long-term confidence-building, supported by regional coalitions such as NATO.
It is clearly in the U.S. interest to support the emergence of a real European pillar in the alliance in the form of the Western European Union. The United States should accept European influence over—though not a veto of—the use of U.S. forces based in Europe, including deployments from Europe to other regions. We should also be ready to support European initiatives when shared interests are at stake. At the same time, we should not block European action if we do not believe our interests are at risk.
American leadership is indispensable. No other nation has our power or strategic position. Above all, we have the ability to rally others to a good cause—the most eloquent proof of leadership. As the past two years and three acute crises have shown—the Persian Gulf War, Yugoslavia, and Somalia—things happen only when America leads, and things don’t happen when America fails to lead. We must use this power and prestige to head off future crises and to build regional security structures for the long haul.
In his speech before a joint session of Congress after he was dismissed from his command in Korea by President Truman, General MacArthur profoundly moved his audience when he concluded with these words: “Old soldiers never die. They just fade away.” Although NATO will not die, its central role in world events will fade away unless it rethinks its mission, strategy, and tactics from the bottom up. Conceived to counter a threat from across the Elbe River, in its post–Cold War maturity NATO must ring the world. “NATO must go out of area,” Senator Richard Lugar has warned, “or out of business.” Those who yearn for an international body to serve as a framework for key elements of American strategic planning need look no further than NATO, whose credibility, dependability, and formidability far outstrip the United Nations’. No nation acting alone, the United States included, has the resources or even the credibility to act as the world’s policeman. Acting together, with the prestige that comes from being history’s most successful peacetime alliance, the NATO nations can be a force for stability and security without peer in the world.
In adopting such a global mission, each NATO member must recognize that in the absence of the Soviet threat it must be more internationalist, not less. The Persian Gulf is a prime example of a region where the NATO nations have a common interest. Except for Britain, Europe is far more dependent on Gulf oil than is the United States. Threats loom on other fronts as well. To Europe’s south, the African population is estimated to triple by 2020, which will further strain the continent’s tenuous stability. The Middle East, the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent all have volatile mixes of poverty, explosive demographics, and political instability. Incomes in Western Europe are forty times what they are to the south. The regions on Europe’s periphery also contain all the major nuclear proliferators, except North Korea and South Asia.
None of these new threats is easy to define. Nor are they susceptible to the deterrence strategies NATO pursued during the Cold War. Deterring aggression by old Bolsheviks was one thing; Saddam Hussein in Iraq, radical fundamentalists in Iran, or passionate ethnic warlords in the Caucasus pose new threats requiring new thinking, especially when such rogue forces are armed with nuclear weapons. These threats may not be deterrable, but U.S.-European cooperation in nonproliferation, antimissile defense, and contingency plans for conventional preemption should be at the top of the agenda for both Europeans and Americans.
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In out-of-area operations, NATO should capitalize on the vast experience and expertise of its major European members. France has an unparalleled understanding of how to operate in Africa, where it played a critical role in managing regional conflicts and blunting the thrusts of Soviet clients. Cuban forces in Angola would have conquered mineral-rich areas of Zaire, and Libya would have created a significant new sphere of influence, had it not been for French intervention. If ethnic and tribal conflicts spread across Africa in the future, only France will have the political instruments and skill to try to control the violence.
Britain also has capabilities and expertise that NATO would be foolish not to employ in out-of-area problems. Though smaller than during its imperial era, Britain’s armed forces still have a significant global reach. Its counterterrorist forces are the best in the world and a key asset for the new kinds of challenges the West will face. As we seek to stabilize the Persian Gulf region, Britain’s intimate knowledge of the intricacies of its politics will be vitally important.
It woul
d be politically impossible in many circumstances for the United States to act unilaterally. In the Persian Gulf War, the fact that not only the United States but also Britain and France were sending major combat forces to Saudi Arabia was essential to building the worldwide coalition that defeated Iraq’s war machine. The forces of our allies were important militarily. They were indispensable politically.
The capabilities of the United States, France, Britain, Italy, and other European allies are complementary. The United States has unique capabilities in intelligence, space communications, logistics, and high technology that can tremendously enhance the abilities of its allies to project military power and political influence to deal with out-of-area issues. But the United States alone would be significantly limited if it could not use forward bases in Europe or bases controlled by our European allies outside of Europe. NATO’s capabilities as an alliance can be vastly greater than the sum of its parts.
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With the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe has become an orphan—no longer supported by Russia to the east and not yet accepted by the West. President Lech Walesa expressed his disillusionment in highly emotional terms when I met with him in Warsaw in February 1993. “Poland gave the West a great gift—military and political victory in the Cold War,” he said. “The West will not take this gift, and you can’t force anyone to take a present they don’t want.”
The idea among some foreign policy observers that Eastern Europe should serve as a buffer between East and West has no support whatever among the leaders of either Eastern or Western Europe. When I mentioned the concept to President François Mitterrand last year, he was incredulous. “Where did such an odd idea come from?” he said. “Eastern Europe has always been part of Europe, except for the period Europe was divided by the Cold War.”
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