As long as the United States is still fighting in Afghanistan, it needs unfettered access to the nearby countries it relies on for logistical support. American oil companies also need access to Central Asian oil and gas deposits. In the long run, the United States is leaving Afghanistan, and in the long run, the United States can’t be a dominant force in the region. Geography simply precludes American dominance, and the Russians know that.
The United States made promises to Georgia that it now isn’t going to keep. But when we look at the broader picture, this betrayal increases America’s ability to keep other commitments. Georgia is of little importance to the United States, but it is of enormous importance to the Russians, guaranteeing the security of their southern frontier. The Russians would be prepared to pay a substantial price for Georgia, and U.S. willingness to exit voluntarily and soon should command a premium.
That price would be not to supply Iran with weapons and to join in an effective sanctions regime if the U.S. overture to Iran fails. If the overture succeeds, then the United States can demand that Russia halt weapons shipments into the region, particularly to Syria. If made simultaneously with the overture to Iran, an agreement like this would lend the overture greater weight. It would give the United States more credibility and expanded options. It could also buy time in Poland to build up American assets there.
As a U.S. foothold in the Caucasus, Georgia is much less viable than Azerbaijan, which not only borders Russia and Iran and maintains close relations with Turkey but is a major source of oil. Whereas Armenia is a Russian ally and Georgia lacks a strong economic foundation, Azerbaijan has economic resources and can be a platform for American operations. So in the next decade there will need to be a strategy of withdrawal and a strategy of realignment. Both will do. The current strategy will not.
If the United States convinces Russia that its withdrawal from Georgia is elective, phased, and above all reversible, it can extract concessions that have real meaning while rationalizing its strategic position. In a sense it is a bluff, but a good president needs to be able to bluff, as well as to rationalize a betrayal.
HOW TO MANAGE RUSSIA
Russia does not threaten America’s global position, but the mere possibility that it might collaborate with Europe and particularly Germany opens up the most significant threat in the decade, a long-term threat that needs to be nipped in the bud. The United States can’t expect Germany to serve the role it played in the Cold War as the frontier set against the Soviet empire. In the next decade, the United States must work to make Poland what Germany was in the 1950s, although the Russian threat will not be as significant, forceful, or monochromatic as it was then. At the same time that the geopolitical confrontation goes on, the United States and Russia will be engaged in economic and political collaboration elsewhere. This is not your daddy’s Cold War. The two countries might well collaborate in Central Asia or even the Caucasus while confronting each other in Poland and the Carpathians.
In the long run, the Russians are in trouble and can’t sustain a major role in international affairs. Their dependence on commodity exports fills their coffers but doesn’t build their economy. Their population is in severe decline. Their geographic structure is unchanged. But in geopolitics, a decade is not the long run. The mere collapse of the Soviet Union took a decade to run its course. For this decade, the threat of Russia and Europe will persist, and it will preoccupy the president as he attempts to restore balance to U.S. global strategy.
CHAPTER 9
EUROPE’S RETURN TO HISTORY
Contemporary Europe is a search for an exit from hell. The first half of the twentieth century was a slaughterhouse, from Verdun to Auschwitz. The second half was lived under threat of a possible U.S.-Soviet nuclear war fought out on European soil. Exhausted by blood and turmoil, Europe began to imagine a world in which all conflicts were economic and bureaucrats in Brussels managed them. They even began to talk of “the end of history,” in the sense that all Hegelian conflicts of ideology had been resolved. For the twenty years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it appeared to them that they had found their utopia, but now the future is much less certain. Looking ahead to the next ten years, I do not see a return to trenches and concentration camps, but I do see geopolitical tensions on the continent growing, and with them the roots of more serious conflict.
Two problems make up the European dilemma for the decade ahead. The first is defining the kind of relationship Europe will have with a resurgent Russia. The second is determining the role that Germany, Europe’s most dynamic economy, will play. The paradox of Russia—weak economy and substantial military force—will persist, as will the dynamism of Germany. The remainder of the European states must define their relationship with these two powers as a prerequisite for defining their relationships with one another. The strain of this process will lead to the emergence of a very different sort of Europe in the next decade, and it will present a significant challenge to the United States. To understand what needs to be done in terms of U.S. policy, we first have to consider the history that has brought us to this juncture.
Europe has always been a bloody place. After 1492, when new discoveries fueled the competition for far-flung empires, the continent hosted a struggle for world domination involving Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, and Britain, countries that bordered either the Atlantic Ocean or the North Sea. Austria-Hungary and Russia were left out of the contest for colonial empires, while Germany and Italy remained clusters of feudal principalities, fragmented and impotent.
Europe—1815
For the next two centuries Europe consisted of four regions—Atlantic Europe, Scandinavia, southeastern Europe, and Russia—with a buffer zone in the center running from Denmark to Sicily. This buffer was a region fragmented into tiny kingdoms and duchies, unable to defend itself but inadvertently providing Europe with a degree of stability.
Then Napoleon redefined Europe. When he pushed east into Germany and south into Italy, he wrecked the complex balance that had existed in those two inchoate nations. Worse, from his point of view, he energized Prussia, goading it into becoming a major European power. It was the Prussians, more than anyone, who engineered Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Waterloo. A half century later, after a brief and successful war with France in 1871, Prussia united the rest of Germany into a cohesive state. The unification of Italy was by and large completed at about the same time.
Suddenly there was a new geopolitical reality from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. Germany in particular was troublesome, because of its enormous productivity and rapid growth and also because its geography made it profoundly insecure. History had placed Germany on the north of the North European Plain, an area with a few rivers to serve as defenses, but some of the most productive parts of this new nation-state were on the opposite bank of the Rhine, completely unprotected. To the west was France. To the east was Russia. Both had enjoyed the centuries when Germany was fragmented and weak, but now there was a frightening new Germany, economically the most dynamic country in Europe, with a powerful military and with a deep sense of insecurity.
Germany in turn was frightened by its neighbors’ fears. Germany’s leaders knew their nation could not survive if it was attacked simultaneously by France and Russia. They also believed that at some point such an attack would come, because they understood how intimidating they appeared to their neighbors. Germany could not permit France and Russia to start a war at the time or place of their choosing, and thus Germany, driven by its own fear, devised a strategy of preemption coupled with alliances.
Europe in the twentieth century was defined by these fears, which, being imposed by geography, were both rational and unavoidable. To no one’s surprise, that same geography is in place today. The Europeans tried to abolish the consequences of geography by eliminating nationalism, but as we have already begun to see, nationalism is not easily suppressed, and geography must have its due. These issues remain particularly compellin
g in the case of Germany, which is once again, as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the economic engine of Europe, profoundly insecure and surrounded by nations with potentially divergent interests. The question going forward is whether the geopolitical logic that led to the wars of the past will have the same result or whether, in the years to come, Europe can pass the test of comity it failed so often before.
Both world wars were launched according to a single scenario: Germany, insecure because of its geographical position, swept across France in a lightning attack. The goal in both cases was to defeat France quickly, then deal with Russia. In 1914, the Germans failed to defeat France quickly, the troops dug in, and the conflict became a protracted war. The Germans found themselves fighting France, Britain, and Russia simultaneously in both the east and the west. At the same time that it appeared the Bolshevik revolution would save Germany by taking Russia out of the war, the United States sent troops to Europe, playing its first major role on the world stage and blocking German ambitions.
In 1940 Germany succeeded in overrunning France, only to discover that it still could not defeat the Soviet Union. One reason for that was the second act of America’s dramatic emergence. The United States provided aid to the Soviets that kept them in the war until the Anglo-American invasion of France three years later could help destroy Germany for the second time in a quarter century.
Germany emerged from World War II humiliated by defeat but also morally humiliated by its unprecedented barbarism, having committed atrocities that had nothing to do with the necessities of geopolitics. Germany was divided and occupied by the victors.
Germany was physically devastated, but its actions had resulted in the devastation of something far more important. For five hundred years, Europe had dominated the world. Before the wave of self-destruction that began in August 1914, Europe directly controlled vast areas of Asia and Africa and indirectly dominated much of the rest of the planet. Tiny countries like Belgium and the Netherlands controlled areas as vast as the Congo or today’s Indonesia.
The wars that followed the creation of Germany destroyed these empires. In addition, the slaughter of the two wars, the destruction of generations of workers and extraordinary amounts of capital, left Europe exhausted. Its empires dissolved into fragments to be fought over by the only two countries that emerged from the conflict with the power and interest to compete for what was left, the United States and the Soviet Union. However, both primarily pursued the fragments of empire as a system of alliances and commercial relations rather than formal imperial domination.
Europe went from being the center of a world empire to being the potential battleground for a third world war. At the heart of the Cold War was the fear that the Soviets, having marched into the center of Germany, would seize the rest of the continent. For Western Europe, the danger was obvious. For the United States, the greatest threat was that Soviet manpower and resources would be combined with European industrialism and technology to create a power potentially greater than the U.S. Fearing the threat to its interests, the United States focused on containing the Soviet Union around its periphery, including Europe.
Two issues converged, setting the stage for the events that will be played out over the next ten years. The first was the question of Germany’s role in Europe, which ever since its nineteenth-century unification had been to trigger wars. The second was the shrinking of European power. By the end of the 1960s, not a single European country save the Soviet Union was genuinely global. All the rest had been reduced to regional powers, in a region where their collective power was dwarfed by the power of the Soviet Union and the United States. If Germany had to find a new place in Europe, Europe had to find its new place in the world.
Empires—1900
The two World Wars and the dramatic reduction of status that followed had a profound psychological impact on Europe. Germany entered a period of deep self-loathing, and the rest of Europe seemed torn between nostalgia for its lost colonies and relief that the burdens of empire and even genuine sovereignty had been lifted from it. Along with European exhaustion came European weakness, but some of the trappings of great-power status remained, symbolized by permanent seats for Britain and France on the United Nations Security Council. But even the possession of nuclear weapons by some of these nations meant little. Europe was trapped in the force field created by the two superpowers.
The German response to its diminished position was in microcosm the European response: Germany recognized its fundamental problem as being that of an independent actor trapped between potentially hostile powers. The threat from the Soviet Union was fixed. However, if Germany could redefine its relationship with France, and through that with the rest of Europe, it would no longer be caught in the middle. For Germany, the solution was to become integrated with the rest of Europe, and particularly with France.
For Europe as a whole, integration was a foregone conclusion—in one sense imposed by the Soviet threat, in another by pressure from the United States. The American strategy for resisting the Soviets was to organize its European allies to defend themselves if necessary, all the while guaranteeing their security with troops already deployed to the continent. There was also the promise of more troops if war broke out, and ultimately the promise to use nuclear weapons if absolutely necessary. The nuclear weapons, however, would be kept under American control. Conventional forces would be organized into a joint command, within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. This organization created a multilateral, unified defense force for Europe that was, in effect, controlled by the United States.
The Americans also had a vested interest in European prosperity. Through the Marshall Plan and other mechanisms, the United States created a favorable environment in which to revive the European economy while also creating the foundations for a European military capability. The more prosperity was generated through association with the United States, the more attractive membership in NATO became. The greater the contrast was between living conditions in the Soviet bloc and in Western Europe, the more likely that contrast was to generate unrest in the east. The United States believed ideologically and practically in free trade, but more than that, it wanted to see greater integration among the European economies, both for its own sake and to bind the potentially fractious alliance together.
The Americans saw a European economic union as a buttress for NATO. The Europeans saw it as a way not only to recover from the war but to find a place for themselves in a world that had reduced them to the status of regional powers at best. Power, if there was any to be regained, was to be found in some sort of federation. This was the only way to create a balance between Europe and the two superpowers. Such a federation would also solve the German problem by integrating Germany with Europe, making the extraordinary German economic machine a part of the European system. One of the key issues for the next ten years is whether the United States will continue to view European integration in the same way.
In 1992 the Maastricht Treaty established the European Union, but the concept was in fact an old European dream. Its antecedents reach back to the early 1950s and the European Steel and Coal Community, a narrowly focused entity whose leaders spoke of it even then as the foundation for a European federation.
It is coincidental but extremely important that while the EU idea originated during the Cold War, it emerged as a response to the Cold War’s end. In the west, the overwhelming presence of NATO and its controls over defense and foreign policy loosened dramatically. In the east, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union found sovereign nations coming out of the shadows. It was at this point that Europe regained the sovereignty it had lost but that it is now struggling to define.
The EU was envisioned to serve two purposes. The first was the integration of western Europe into a limited federation, solving the problem of Germany by binding it together with France, thereby limiting the threat of war. The second was the creation of a vehicle for the reintegration o
f eastern Europe into the European community. The EU turned from a Cold War institution serving western Europe in the context of east-west tensions into a post–Cold War institution designed to bind together both parts of Europe. In addition, it was seen as a step toward returning Europe to its prior position as global power—if not as individual nations, then as a collective equal to the United States. And it is in this ambition that the EU has run into trouble.
THE CRISIS OF THE EU
In the late eighteenth century, when thirteen newly liberated British colonies formed a North American confederation, it was as a practical solution to economic and political issues. But the United States of America, as that confederation came to be known, was also seen as a moral mission dedicated to higher truths, including the idea “that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.” The United States was also rooted in the idea that with the benefits of liberal society came risks and obligations. As Benjamin Franklin put it, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” In the United States, with such sentiments at its core, the themes of material comfort and moral purpose went hand in hand.
The United States was also created as a federation of what might be called independent countries, sharing a common language but profoundly different in other ways. When those differences led to secession, most of the remaining states of the United States waged war to preserve the Union. That willingness to sacrifice would have been impossible unless the United States was seen as a moral as well as a practical project.
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