Of Paradise and Power

by Robert Kagan

  Indeed, despite the predictions of Huntington and many realist theorists, the Europeans have not sought to check the rising power of the American colossus by amassing a countervailing power of their own. Clearly they do not consider even a unilateralist United States a sufficient threat to make them increase defense spending to contain it. Nor are they willing to risk their vast trade with the United States by attempting to wield their economic power against the hegemon. Nor are they willing to ally themselves with China, which is willing to spend money on defense, in order to counterbalance the United States. Instead, Europeans hope to contain American power without wielding power themselves. In what may be the ultimate feat of subtlety and indirection, they want to control the behemoth by appealing to its conscience.

  It is a sound strategy, as far as it goes. The United States is a behemoth with a conscience. It is not Louis XIV’s France or George III’s England. Americans do not argue, even to themselves, that their actions may be justified by raison d’état. They do not claim the right of the stronger or insist to the rest of the world, as the Athenians did at Melos, that “the strong rule where they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Americans have never accepted the principles of Europe’s old order nor embraced the Machiavellian perspective. The United States is a liberal, progressive society through and through, and to the extent that Americans believe in power, they believe it must be a means of advancing the principles of a liberal civilization and a liberal world order. Americans even share Europe’s aspirations for a more orderly world system based not on power but on rules—after all, they were striving for such a world when Europeans were still extolling the laws of Machtpolitik. But while these common ideals and aspirations shape foreign policies on both sides of the Atlantic, they cannot completely negate the very different perspectives from which Europeans and Americans view the world and the role of power in international affairs.

  Hyperpuissance

  The present transatlantic tensions did not begin with the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 2001, nor did they begin after September 11. While the ham-handed diplomacy of the Bush administration in its early months certainly drew a sharper line under the differing European and American perspectives on the issues of international governance, and while the attacks of September 11 shone the brightest possible light on the transatlantic gulf in strategic perceptions, those divisions were already evident during the Clinton years and even during the first Bush administration. As early as 1992, mutual recriminations had been rife over Bosnia. The first Bush administration refused to act, believing it had more important strategic obligations elsewhere. Europeans declared they would act—it was, they insisted, “the hour of Europe”—but the declaration proved hollow when it became clear that Europe could not act even in Bosnia without the United States. When France and Germany took the first small steps to create something like an independent European defense force, the Bush administration scowled. From the European point of view, it was the worst of both worlds. The United States was losing interest in preserving European security, but at the same time it was hostile to European aspirations to take on the task themselves.[25] Europeans complained about American perfidy, and Americans complained about European weakness and ingratitude.

  Today many Europeans view the Clinton years as a time of transatlantic harmony, but it was during those years that Europeans began complaining about American power and arrogance in the post-Cold War world. It was during the Clinton years that then-French foreign minister Hubert Védrine coined the term hyperpuissance to describe an American behemoth too worryingly powerful to be designated merely a superpower. And it was during the 1990s that Europeans began to view the United States as a “hectoring hegemon.” Such complaints were directed especially at Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, whom one American critic described, a bit hyperbolically, as “the first Secretary of State in American history whose diplomatic specialty . . . is lecturing other governments, using threatening language and tastelessly bragging of the power and virtue of her country.”[26]

  Even in the 1990s the issue on which American and European policies began most notably to diverge was Iraq. Europeans were appalled when Albright and other administration officials in 1997 began suggesting that the economic sanctions placed on Iraq after the Gulf War could not be lifted while Saddam Hussein remained in power. They believed, in classically European fashion, that Iraq should be offered incentives for better behavior, not threatened, in classically American fashion, with more economic or military coercion. The growing split between the United States and its allies on the Iraq question came into the open at the end of 1997, when the Clinton administration tried to increase the pressure on Baghdad to cooperate with UN arms inspectors, and France joined Russia and China in blocking the American proposals in the UN Security Council. When the Clinton administration finally turned to the use of military force and bombed Iraq in December 1998, it did so without a UN Security Council authorization and with only Great Britain by its side. In its waning months, the Clinton administration continued to believe that “Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, remains dangerous, unreconstructed, defiant, and isolated.” It would “never be able to be rehabilitated or reintegrated into the community of nations” with Saddam in power.[27] This was not the view of France or most of the rest of Europe. The rehabilitation and reintegration of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq were precisely what they sought.

  It was during the 1990s, too, that some of the contentious issues that would produce transatlantic storms during the second Bush administration made their first appearance. Clinton took the first steps toward constructing a new missile defense system designed to protect the United States from nuclear-armed rogue states such as North Korea. Such a system threatened to undo the Antiballistic Missile Treaty and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction that Europeans had long valued as central to their own strategic security. It also threatened to protect American soil while leaving Europeans still vulnerable to nuclear attack, which Europeans understandably considered undesirable. The Clinton administration negotiated the Kyoto protocol to address global climate change but deliberately did not submit it to the Senate, where it was certain to be defeated. And it was the Clinton administration, prodded by Secretary of Defense William Cohen and senior military officials at the Pentagon, that first demanded that American troops be immune from prosecution by the new International Criminal Court—which had become the quintessential symbol of European aspirations to a world in which all nations were equal under the law. In taking this tack away from the European multilateralist consensus, President Clinton was to some extent bowing to pressures from a hostile Republican-dominated Congress. But the Clinton administration itself believed those treaties were flawed; even Clinton was not as “European” as he would later be depicted. In any case, the growing divergence between American and European policies during the Clinton years reflected a deeper reality. The United States in the post-Cold War era was becoming more unilateral in its approach to the rest of the world at a time when Europeans were embarking on a new and vigorous effort to build a more comprehensive international legal system precisely to restrain such unilateralism.

  The war in Kosovo in the spring of 1999 gave an interesting hint of the future. Although the allied military campaign against Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic was a success, and represented the first occasion in its fifty-year history that NATO had ever undertaken military action, the conflict also revealed subtle fissures in the post-Cold War alliance—fissures that survived Kosovo but might not withstand the greater pressures of a different kind of war under different international circumstances.

  The conduct of the war reflected the severe transatlantic military imbalance. The United States flew the majority of missions, almost all of the precision-guided munitions dropped in Serbia and Kosovo were made in America, and the unmatched superiority of American technical intelligence-gathering capabilities meant that 99 percent of the proposed targets came from American intelligence source
s. The American dominance of the war effort troubled Europeans in two ways. On the one hand, it was a rather shocking blow to European honor. As two British analysts observed after the war, even the United Kingdom, “which prides itself on being a serious military power, could contribute only 4 per cent of the aircraft and 4 per cent of the bombs dropped.”[28] To Europe’s most respected strategic thinkers in France, Germany, and Britain, the Kosovo war had only “highlighted the impotence of Europe’s armed forces.” It was embarrassing that even in a region as close as the Balkans, Europe’s “ability to deploy force” was but “a meager fraction” of America’s.[29]

  More troubling still was that European dependence on American military power gave the United States dominant influence not only over the way the war was fought but also over international diplomacy before, during, and after the war. Europeans had favored a pause in the bombing after a few days, for instance, to give Milosevic a chance to end the crisis. But the United States and the American NATO commander, General Wesley K. Clark, refused. Most Europeans, especially the French, wanted to escalate the bombing campaign gradually, to reduce the damage to Serbia and give Milosevic incentive to end the conflict before NATO destroyed everything he valued. But Clark disagreed. “In U.S. military thinking,” he explains, “we seek to be as decisive as possible once we begin to use force.”[30] Many Europeans wanted to focus the bombing on Serbian forces engaged in “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo. But as Clark recalls, “Most Americans believed that the best and most rapid way to change Milosevic’s views was to strike at him and his regime as hard as possible.”[31]

  Whether the Americans or the Europeans were right about the way that war or any war should be fought, for Europe the depressing fact remained that because the Kosovo war was fought with “American equipment,” it was fought largely according to “American doctrine.”[32] For all Europe’s great economic power and for all its success at achieving political union, Europe’s military weakness had produced diplomatic weakness and sharply diminished its political influence compared to that of the United States, even in a crisis in Europe.

  The Americans were unhappy, too. General Clark and his colleagues complained that the laborious effort to preserve consensus within the alliance hampered the fighting of the war and delayed its successful conclusion. Before the war, Clark later insisted, “we could not present an unambiguous and clear warning to Milosevic,” partly because many European countries would not threaten action without a mandate from the UN Security Council—what Clark, in typically American fashion, called Europe’s “legal issues.” For the Americans, these “legal issues” were “obstacles to properly planning and preparing” for the war.[33] During the fighting, Clark and his American colleagues were exasperated by the need constantly to find compromise between American military doctrine and what Clark called the “European approach.”[34] “It was always the Americans who pushed for the escalation to new, more sensitive targets . . . and always some of the Allies who expressed doubts and reservations.” In Clark’s view, “We paid a price in operational effectiveness by having to constrain the nature of the operation to fit within the political and legal concerns of NATO member nations.”[35] The result was a war that neither Europeans nor Americans liked. In a meeting of NATO defense ministers a few months after the war, one minister remarked that the biggest lesson of the allied war in Kosovo was that “we never want to do this again.”[36]

  Fortunately for the health of the alliance in 1999, Clark and his superiors in the Clinton administration believed the price for allied unity was worth paying. But American willingness to preserve transatlantic cohesion even at the cost of military effectiveness owed a great deal to the special, if not unique, circumstances of the Kosovo conflict. For the United States, preserving the cohesion and viability of the alliance was not just a means to an end in Kosovo; it was among the primary aims of the American intervention, just as saving the alliance had been a primary motive for America’s earlier intervention in Bosnia, and just as preserving the cohesion of the alliance had been a primary goal of American strategy during the Cold War.

  American abstention from the Balkan conflict during the first Bush administration and in Clinton’s first term had seemed to threaten NATO itself. When Secretary of State James Baker referred to the Balkan war as a strictly “European conflict” and declared that the United States did not have “a dog in that fight,” such sentiments, widely shared among his colleagues, including especially then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, had raised troubling questions about America’s role in Europe in the post-Cold War world. Was the United States still committed to European security and stability? Could NATO meet what were then considered to be the new challenges of the post-Cold War era, ethnic conflict and the collapse of states? Or had the American-led alliance outlived its usefulness to the point where it could not stop aggression and ethnic cleansing even on the European continent?

  American involvement in Kosovo or Bosnia was not based on calculations of a narrow American “national interest,” at least as most Americans understood the term. While Americans had a compelling moral interest in stopping genocide and ethnic cleansing, especially in Europe, American realist theorists insisted the United States had no “national interest” at stake in the Balkans. When Clinton officials and other supporters of American intervention defended American military action on the grounds of the national interest, it was as a means of preserving the alliance and repairing the frayed bonds of the transatlantic relationship. As in the Cold War, America fought in the Balkans ultimately to preserve “the West.” And that goal determined American military strategy. As General Clark puts it, “No single target or set of targets was more important than NATO cohesion.”[37]

  Such an approach to fighting the war may have been sound in Kosovo and Bosnia. But it raised questions about the future. Would Clark or any future American commander make the same calculation in different circumstances? Would he be willing to sacrifice operational effectiveness, rapid escalation, “American military doctrine,” and the use of decisive force in a war whose primary goal was not the cohesion and preservation of NATO and Europe? In fact, the Kosovo war showed how difficult it was going to be for the United States and its European allies to fight any war together. What if they had to fight a war not primarily “humanitarian” in nature? What if Americans believed their vital interests were directly threatened? What if Americans had suffered horrendous attacks on their own territory and feared more attacks were coming? Would Americans in such circumstances have the same tolerance for the clumsy and constrained NATO decision-making and war-fighting process? Would they want to compromise again with the “European approach” to warfare, or would they prefer to “go it alone”? The answer to those questions came after September 11. With almost three thousand dead in New York City, and Osama bin Laden on the loose in Afghanistan, the U.S. military and the Bush administration had little interest in working through NATO. This may have been unfortunate from the perspective of transatlantic relations, but it was hardly surprising.

  The fact is that by the end of the 1990s the disparity of power was subtly rending the fabric of the transatlantic relationship. The Americans were unhappy and impatient about constraints imposed by European allies who brought so little to a war but whose concern for “legal issues” prevented the war’s effective prosecution. The Europeans were unhappy about American dominance and their own dependence. The lesson for Americans, including the top officials in the Clinton administration, was that even with the best intentions, multilateral action could not succeed without a significant element of American unilateralism, an American willingness to use its overwhelming power to dominate both war and diplomacy when weaker allies hesitated. The Clinton administration had come into office talking about “assertive multilateralism”; it ended up talking about America as “the indispensable nation.”

  The lesson for many Europeans was that Europe needed to take steps to release itself at least partial
ly from a dependence on American power that, after the Cold War, seemed no longer necessary. This, in turn, required that Europe create some independent military capability. At the end of 1998, that judgment prompted no less a friend of the United States than Tony Blair to reach across the Channel to France with an unprecedented offer to add Britain’s weight to hitherto stalled efforts to create a common European Union defense capability independent of NATO. Together, Blair and Jacques Chirac won Europe-wide approval for building a force of 60,000 troops that could be deployed far from home and sustained for up to a year.

  Once again, had this Anglo-French initiative borne fruit, the United States and Europe might today be in the process of establishing a new relationship based on a greater European military capability and greater independence from American power. But this initiative is headed the way of all other proposals to enhance European military power and strategic self-reliance. In December 2001 the Belgian foreign minister suggested that the EU military force should simply “declare itself operational without such a declaration being based on any true capability.”[38] In fact, the effort to build a European force has so far been an embarrassment to Europeans. Today, the European Union is no closer to fielding an independent force, even a small one, than it was three years ago. And this latest failure raises the question that so many Europeans and so many “transatlanticists” in the United States have been unwilling even to ask, much less to answer: Why hasn’t Europe fulfilled the promise of the European Union in foreign and defense policy, or met the promptings of some of its most important leaders to build up even enough military power to tilt the balance, just a little, away from American dominance?