by Robert Kagan
The purpose of appeasement was to buy time and hope that Hitler could be satisfied. But the strategy proved disastrous for Britain and France. Every passing year allowed Germany to exploit its latent economic and industrial superiority and to rearm, to the point where the democratic European powers were incapable of deterring or defeating Hitler when he finally struck. In 1940, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, looked back on the previous two decades of European diplomacy with some amazement.
In 1933 a French premier ought to have said (and if I had been the French premier I would have said it): “The new Reich Chancellor is the man who wrote Mein Kampf, which says this and that. This man cannot be tolerated in our vicinity. Either he disappears or we march!” But they didn’t do it. They left us alone and let us slip through the risky zone, and we were able to sail around all dangerous reefs. And when we were done, and well armed, better than they, then they started the war![13]
The sophisticated arguments of appeasement might conceivably have been more valid had they been applied to a different man and a different country under different circumstances—for instance, to the German leader of the 1920s, Gustav Stresemann. They had been misapplied to Hitler and the Germany of the 1930s. But then, in truth, the appeasement strategy had been a product not of analysis but of weakness.
If World War I severely weakened Europe, the Second World War that resulted from this failure of European strategy and diplomacy all but destroyed European nations as global powers. Their postwar inability to project sufficient force overseas to maintain colonial empires in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East forced them to retreat on a massive scale after more than five centuries of imperial dominance—perhaps the most significant retrenchment of global influence in human history. Less than a decade into the Cold War, Europeans ceded both colonial holdings and strategic responsibilities in Asia and the Middle East to the United States, sometimes willingly and sometimes under American pressure, as in the Suez crisis. At the end of World War II, many influential Americans had hoped that Europe could be reestablished as a “third force” in the world, strong enough to hold its own against the Soviet Union and allow the United States to pull back from Europe. Franklin Roosevelt, Dean Acheson, and other American observers believed Great Britain would shoulder the burden of defending much of the world against the Soviet Union. In those early postwar days, President Harry Truman could even imagine a world where London and Moscow competed for influence, with the United States serving as “an impartial umpire.”[14] But then the British government made clear that it could not continue the economic and military support to Greece and Turkey it had been providing since the end of the war. By 1947, British officials saw that the United States would soon be “plucking the torch of world leadership from our chilling hands.”[15] Europe was now dependent on the United States for its own security and for global security. France and Britain did not even like the idea of an independent European bloc, a “third force,” fearing it would provide the excuse for American withdrawal from Europe. Once again they would be left alone facing Germany, and now the Soviet Union as well. As one American official put it, “The one faint element of confidence which [the French] cling to is the fact that American troops, however strong in number, stand between them and the Red Army.”[16]
From the end of World War II and for the next fifty years, therefore, Europe fell into a state of strategic dependence on the United States. The once global reach of the European powers no longer extended beyond the Continent. Europe’s sole, if vital, strategic mission during the Cold War was to stand firm and defend its own territory against any Soviet offensive until the Americans arrived. And Europeans were hard pressed to do even that. European unwillingness to spend as much on their military as American administrations believed necessary was a constant source of transatlantic tension, from the establishment of NATO to the days of Kennedy, whose doctrine of “flexible response” depended on a significant increase in European conventional forces, to the Reagan years, when American congressmen clamored for Europe to do more to “share the burden” of the common defense.
But the circumstances of the Cold War created a perhaps unavoidable tension between American and European interests. Americans generally preferred an effective European military capability—under NATO control, of course—that could stop Soviet armies on European soil short of nuclear war and with the bulk of casualties suffered by Europeans, not Americans. Not surprisingly, many Europeans took a different view of the most desirable form of deterrence. They were content to rely on the protection offered by the U.S. nuclear umbrella, hoping that Europe’s safety could be preserved by the U.S.-Soviet balance of terror and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. In the early years of the Cold War, European economies were too weak to build up sufficient military capacity for self-defense anyway. But even when European economies recovered later in the Cold War, the Europeans were not especially interested in closing the military gap. The American nuclear guarantee deprived Europeans of the incentive to spend the kind of money that would have been necessary to restore them to military great-power status. This psychology of dependence was also an unavoidable reality of the Cold War and the nuclear age. A proud Gaullist France might try to escape it by leaving NATO and building its own small nuclear force. But the force de frappe was little more than symbolism; it relieved neither France nor Europe from strategic dependence on the United States.
If Europe’s relative weakness appeared less of a problem in transatlantic relations during the Cold War, it was partly because of the unique geopolitical circumstances of that conflict. Although dwarfed by the two superpowers on its flanks, a weakened Europe nevertheless served as the central strategic theater of the worldwide struggle between communism and democratic capitalism, and this, along with lingering habits of world leadership, allowed Europeans to retain international influence and international respect beyond what their sheer military capabilities might have afforded. America’s Cold War strategy was built around the transatlantic alliance. Maintaining the unity and cohesion of “the West” was essential. Naturally, this elevated the importance of European opinion on global matters, giving both Europeans and Americans a perhaps exaggerated estimation of European power.
The perception persisted into the 1990s. The Balkan conflicts of that decade forced the United States to continue attending to Europe as a strategic priority. The NATO alliance appeared to have found a new, post-Cold War mission in bringing peace to that part of the Continent still prone to violent ethnic conflict, which, though on a smaller scale, appeared not unlike the century’s earlier great conflicts. The enlargement of the NATO alliance to include former members of the Soviet bloc—the completion of the Cold War victory and the creation of a Europe “whole and free”—was another grand project of the West that kept Europe in the forefront of American political and strategic thinking.
And then there was the early promise of the “new” Europe. By bonding together into a single political and economic unit—the historic accomplishment of Maastricht in 1992—many hoped to recapture Europe’s old greatness in a new political form. “Europe” would be the next superpower, not only economically and politically but also militarily. It would handle crises on the European continent, such as the ethnic conflicts in the Balkans, and it would reemerge as a global player of the first rank. In the 1990s, Europeans could still confidently assert that the power of a unified Europe would restore, finally, the global “multipolarity” that had been destroyed by the Cold War and its aftermath. And most Americans, with mixed emotions, agreed that superpower Europe was the future. Harvard University’s Samuel P. Huntington predicted that the coalescing of the European Union would be “the single most important move” in a worldwide reaction against American hegemony and would produce a “truly multipolar” twenty-first century.[17]
Had Europe fulfilled this promise during the 1990s, the world would probably be a different place today. The United States and Europe might now be negotiat
ing the new terms of a relationship based on a rough equality of power, instead of struggling with their vast disparity. It is possible that the product of that mutual adjustment would have been beneficial to both sides, with Europe taking on some of the burdens of global security and the United States paying greater deference to European interests and aspirations as it formulated its own foreign policies.
But the “new” Europe did not fulfill this promise. In the economic and political realms, the European Union produced miracles. Despite the hopes and fears of skeptics on both sides of the Atlantic, Europe made good on the promise of unity. And the united Europe emerged as an economic power of the first rank, able to hold its own with the United States and the Asian economies and to negotiate matters of international trade and finance on equal terms. If the end of the Cold War had ushered in an era where economic power mattered more than military power, as many in both Europe and the United States had expected it would, then the European Union would indeed have been poised to shape the world order with as much influence as the United States. But the end of the Cold War did not reduce the salience of military power, and Europeans discovered that economic power did not necessarily translate into strategic and geopolitical power. The United States, which remained both an economic and a military giant, far outstripped Europe in the total power it could bring to bear on the international scene.
In fact, the 1990s witnessed not the rise of a European superpower but the further decline of Europe into relative military weakness compared to the United States. The Balkan conflict at the beginning of the decade revealed European military incapacity and political disarray; the Kosovo conflict at decade’s end exposed a transatlantic gap in military technology and the ability to wage modern warfare that would only widen in subsequent years. Outside of Europe, by the close of the 1990s, the disparity was even more starkly apparent as it became clear that the ability and will of European powers, individually or collectively, to project decisive force into regions of conflict beyond the Continent were negligible. Europeans could provide peacekeeping forces in the Balkans—indeed, they eventually did provide the vast bulk of those forces in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia—and even in Afghanistan and perhaps someday in Iraq. But they lacked the wherewithal to introduce and sustain a fighting force in potentially hostile territory, even in Europe. Under the best of circumstances, the European role was limited to filling out peacekeeping forces after the United States had, largely on its own, carried out the decisive phases of a military mission and stabilized the situation. As some Europeans put it, the real division of labor consisted of the United States “making the dinner” and the Europeans “doing the dishes.”
A greater American propensity to use military force did not always mean a greater willingness to risk casualties. The disparity in military capability had nothing to do with the relative courage of American and European soldiers. If anything, French and British and even German governments could sometimes be less troubled by the risks to their troops than were American presidents. During the Balkan crisis in the mid-1990s and later in Kosovo, British Prime Minister Tony Blair was more willing to put forces on the ground against Serbia than was President Bill Clinton. But in some ways this disparity, too, worked against the Europeans. The American desire to avoid casualties and the American willingness to spend heavily on new military technologies provided the United States with a formidable military capability that gave it deadly accuracy from great distances with lower risk to forces. European militaries, on the other hand, were less technologically advanced and more dependent on troops fighting in closer quarters. The effect of this technological gap, which opened wide over the course of the 1990s, when the U.S. military made remarkable advances in precision-guided munitions, joint-strike operations, and communications and intelligence gathering, only made Americans even more willing to go to war than Europeans, who lacked the ability to launch devastating attacks from safer distances and therefore had to pay a bigger price for launching any attack at all.
These European military inadequacies compared to the power of the United States should have come as no surprise, since these were characteristics of European forces during the Cold War. The strategic challenge of the Cold War and of a containment doctrine that required, in George Kennan’s famous words, “adroit and vigilant counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points” had compelled the United States to build a military force capable of projecting power into several distant regions at once.[18] Europe’s strategic role had been entirely different, to defend itself and withstand the onslaught of Soviet forces, not to project power.[19] For most European powers, this required maintaining large land forces ready to block Soviet invasion routes in their own territory, not mobile forces capable of being shipped to distant regions. Americans and Europeans who proposed after the Cold War that Europe should expand its strategic role beyond the Continent were asking for a revolutionary shift in European strategy and capability. It was unrealistic to expect Europeans to return to the international great-power status they had enjoyed prior to World War II, unless European peoples were willing to shift significant resources from social to military programs and to restructure and modernize their militaries to replace forces designed for passive territorial defense with forces capable of being delivered and sustained far from home.
Clearly, European voters were not willing to make such a revolutionary shift in priorities. Not only were they unwilling to pay to project force beyond Europe, but, after the Cold War, they would not pay for sufficient force to conduct even minor military actions on their own continent without American help. Nor did it seem to matter whether European publics were being asked to spend money to strengthen NATO or an independent European foreign and defense policy. Their answer was the same. Rather than viewing the collapse of the Soviet Union as an opportunity to expand Europe’s strategic purview, Europeans took it as an opportunity to cash in on a sizable peace dividend. For Europe, the fall of the Soviet Union did not just eliminate a strategic adversary; in a sense, it eliminated the need for geopolitics. Many Europeans took the end of the Cold War as a holiday from strategy. Despite talk of establishing Europe as a global superpower, therefore, average European defense budgets gradually fell below 2 percent of GDP, and throughout the 1990s, European military capabilities steadily fell behind those of the United States.
The end of the Cold War had a different effect on the other side of the Atlantic. For although Americans looked for a peace dividend, too, and defense budgets declined or remained flat during most of the 1990s, defense spending still remained above 3 percent of GDP. Fast on the heels of the Soviet empire’s demise came Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the largest American military action in a quarter century—the United States deployed more than a half million soldiers to the Persian Gulf region. Thereafter American administrations cut the Cold War force, but not as dramatically as might have been expected. In fact, successive American administrations did not view the end of the Cold War as providing a strategic holiday. From the first Bush administration through the Clinton years, American strategy and force planning continued to be based on the premise that the United States might have to fight and win two wars in different regions of the world almost simultaneously. This two-war standard, though often questioned, was never abandoned by military and civilian leaders who believed the United States did have to be prepared to fight wars on the Korean Peninsula and in the Persian Gulf. The fact that the United States could even consider maintaining such a capability set it far apart from its European allies, who on their own lacked the capacity to fight even one small war close to home, let alone two large wars thousands of miles away. By historical standards, America’s post-Cold War military power, particularly its ability to project that power to all corners of the globe, remained unprecedented.
Meanwhile, the very fact of the Soviet empire’s collapse vastly increased America’s strength relative to the rest of the world. The sizable American military arsenal
, once barely sufficient to balance Soviet power, was now deployed in a world without a single formidable adversary. This “unipolar moment” had an entirely natural and predictable consequence: It made the United States more willing to use force abroad. With the check of Soviet power removed, the United States was free to intervene practically wherever and whenever it chose—a fact reflected in the proliferation of overseas military interventions that began during the first Bush administration with the invasion of Panama in 1989, the Persian Gulf War in 1991, and the humanitarian intervention in Somalia in 1992, and continued during the Clinton years with interventions in Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. While many American politicians talked of pulling back from the world, the reality was an America intervening abroad more frequently than it had throughout most of the Cold War. Thanks to the new technologies, the United States was also freer to use force around the world in more limited ways through air and missile strikes, which it did with increasing frequency. The end of the Cold War thus expanded an already wide gulf between European and American power.
Psychologies Of Power And Weakness
How could this great and growing disparity of power fail to create a growing gap in strategic perceptions and strategic “culture”? Strong powers naturally view the world differently than weaker powers. They measure risks and threats differently, they define security differently, and they have different levels of tolerance for insecurity. Those with great military power are more likely to consider force a useful tool of international relations than those who have less military power. The stronger may, in fact, rely on force more than they should. One British critic of America’s propensity to military action recalls the old saw “When you have a hammer, all problems start to look like nails.” This is true. But nations without great military power face the opposite danger: When you don’t have a hammer, you don’t want anything to look like a nail. The perspectives and psychologies of power and weakness explain much, though certainly not all, of what divides the United States and Europe today.