Of Paradise and Power

by Robert Kagan

  It is obvious, moreover, that issues outside of Europe don’t attract nearly as much interest among Europeans as purely European issues do. This has surprised and frustrated Americans on all sides of the political and strategic debate: Recall the profound disappointment of American liberals when Europeans failed to mount an effective protest against Bush’s withdrawal from the ABM Treaty. Nor did most Europeans, either among the elites or among the common voters, give the slightest thought to Iraq before the Bush administration threatened to invade it.

  This European tendency to look inward is understandable, however, given the enormous and difficult agenda of integration. The enlargement of the European Union to more than two dozen member states, the revision of the common economic and agricultural policies, the question of national sovereignty versus supranational governance, the so-called democracy deficit, the jostling of the large European powers, the dissatisfaction of the smaller powers, the establishment of a new European constitution—all of these present serious and unavoidable challenges. The difficulties of moving forward might seem insuperable were it not for the progress the project of European integration has already demonstrated.

  American policies that have been unwelcome in substance—on a missile defense system and the ABM Treaty, belligerence toward Iraq, support for Israel—have been all the more unwelcome because for Europe they are a distraction from the questions that really concern them, namely, questions about Europe. Europeans often point to American insularity and parochialism, but Europeans themselves have turned intensely introspective. As Dominique Moisi has pointed out, last year’s French presidential campaign saw “no reference . . . to the events of September 11 and their far-reaching consequences.” No one asked, “What should be the role of France and Europe in the new configuration of forces created after September 11? How should France reappraise its military budget and doctrine to take account of the need to maintain some kind of parity between Europe and the United States, or at least between France and the UK?” The Middle East conflict became an issue in the campaign because of France’s large Arab and Muslim population, as the high vote for Jean-Marie Le Pen demonstrated. But Le Pen is not a foreign policy hawk. And as Moisi noted, “For most French voters . . . security has little to do with abstract and distant geopolitics. Rather, it is a question of which politician can best protect them from the crime and violence plaguing the streets and suburbs of their cities.”[52]

  Can Europe change course and assume a larger role on the world stage? There has been no shortage of European leaders urging it to do so. Nor is the weakness of EU foreign policy today necessarily proof that it must be weak tomorrow, given the EU’s record of overcoming weaknesses in other areas. And yet the political will to demand more power for Europe appears to be lacking, for the very good reason that Europe does not see a mission for itself that requires power. Its mission, if it has a mission beyond the confines of Europe, is to oppose power. It is revealing that the argument most often advanced by Europeans for augmenting their military strength is not that it will allow Europe to expand its strategic purview or even its global influence. It is merely to rein in and “multilateralize” the United States. “America,” writes the pro-American British scholar Timothy Garton Ash, “has too much power for anyone’s good, including its own.”[53] Therefore Europe must amass power, but for no other reason than to save the world and the United States from the dangers inherent in the present lopsided situation.

  Whether that particular mission is a worthy one or not, it seems unlikely to rouse European passions. Only France and Great Britain so far have responded even marginally to this challenge. But France’s proposed defense budget increase will prove, like the force de frappe, more symbolic than real. Former French foreign minister Hubert Védrine, who once complained about American hyperpuissance, has stopped talking about counterbalancing the United States. Instead, he shrugs and declares there “is no reason for the Europeans to match a country that can fight four wars at once.”[54] It was one thing for Europe in the 1990s to try to increase its annual collective expenditures on defense from $150 billion to $180 billion when the United States was spending $280 billion. But now that the United States is heading toward spending as much as $400 billion per year, or perhaps even more in coming years, Europe has not the slightest intention of keeping up. Thus France might increase its defense budget by 6 percent, prodded by the Gaullism of President Jacques Chirac. The United Kingdom might make an even greater commitment to strengthening and modernizing its military, guided by Tony Blair in an attempt to revive, if on a much smaller scale, an older British tradition of liberal imperialism. But what is “Europe” without Germany? And German defense budgets, today running at about the same percentage of gross domestic product as Luxembourg’s, are destined to drop even further in coming years as the German economy struggles under the weight of a stifling labor and social welfare system. European analysts may lament the Continent’s “strategic irrelevance.” NATO Secretary General George Robertson may call Europe a “military pygmy” in a noble effort to shame Europeans into spending more, and more wisely than they do now. But who honestly believes Europeans will fundamentally change their way of doing business? They have many reasons not to.

  The World America Made

  If Americans are unhappy about this state of affairs, they should recall that today’s Europe—both the integrated Europe and the weak Europe—is very much the product of American foreign policy stretching back over the better part of nine decades. The United States abandoned Europe after World War I, standing aside as the Continent slipped into a war even more horrible than the first. Even as World War II was ending, the initial American impulse was to walk away again. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s original wartime vision had been to make Europe strategically irrelevant.[55] In the late 1930s and even during the war, the common conviction of Americans was that “the European system was basically rotten, that war was endemic on that continent, and the Europeans had only themselves to blame for their plight.”[56] Europe appeared to be nothing more than the overheated incubator of world wars that cost America dearly.

  During World War II, Americans like Roosevelt, looking backward rather than forward, believed no greater service could be performed than to take Europe out of the global strategic picture once and for all. Roosevelt actually preferred doing business with Stalin’s Russia. “After Germany is disarmed,” FDR pointedly asked, “what is the reason for France having a big military establishment?” Charles de Gaulle found such questions “disquieting for Europe and for France,” as well he might have. Americans of Roosevelt’s era held an old American view of Europe as corrupt and decadent, now mingled with a certain contempt for European weakness and dependence. If the European powers were being stripped of their global reach by military and economic weakness following the destruction of World War II, many Americans were only too happy to hurry the process along. As FDR had put it, “When we’ve won the war, I will work with all my might and main to see to it that the United States is not wheedled into the position of accepting any plan that will further France’s imperialistic ambitions, or that will aid or abet the British Empire in its imperial ambitions.”[57]

  When the Cold War dawned, Americans such as Dean Acheson hoped to create in Europe a powerful partner against the Soviet Union, and most Americans who came of age during the Cold War have always thought of Europe almost exclusively in Achesonian terms—as the essential bulwark of freedom in the struggle against Soviet tyranny. But a suspicious hostility toward Europe always played around the edges of American foreign policy, even during the Cold War. When President Dwight Eisenhower undermined and humiliated Britain and France at Suez in 1956, it was only the most blatant of many American efforts to cut Europe down to size and reduce its already weakened global influence.

  Nevertheless, for the most part the emerging threat of the Soviet Union compelled Americans to recalculate their relationship with European security, and therefore with the Europeans. And
ultimately the more important American contribution to Europe’s current world-apart status stemmed not from anti-European but from essentially pro-European impulses. A commitment to Europe, not hostility to it, led the United States in the immediate postwar years to keep troops on the Continent and to create NATO. The presence of American forces as a security guarantee in Europe was, as it was intended to be, the critical ingredient for beginning the process of European integration so that a cohesive “West” would be strong enough materially and spiritually to withstand the daunting challenge of what promised to be a difficult Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union.

  Europe’s evolution into its present state occurred under the mantle of the U.S. security guarantee and could not have occurred without it. Not only did the United States for almost half a century supply a shield against such external threats as the Soviet Union and internal threats posed by ethnic conflict in places like the Balkans. More important, the United States was the key to the solution of the “German problem” and perhaps still is. Germany’s Fischer, in his Humboldt University speech, noted two “historic decisions” that made the new Europe possible: “the USA’s decision to stay in Europe” and “France’s and Germany’s commitment to the principle of integration, beginning with economic links.” But, of course, the latter could never have occurred without the former. France’s willingness to risk the reintegration of Germany into Europe—and France was, to say the least, highly dubious—depended on the promise of continued American involvement in Europe as a guarantee against any resurgence of German militarism. Nor were postwar Germans unaware that their own future in Europe depended on the calming presence of the American military.

  The current situation abounds in ironies. Europe’s rejection of power politics and its devaluing of military force as a tool of international relations have depended on the presence of American military forces on European soil. Europe’s new Kantian order could flourish only under the umbrella of American power exercised according to the rules of the old Hobbesian order. American power made it possible for Europeans to believe that power was no longer important. And now, in the final irony, the fact that U.S. military power has solved the European problem, especially the “German problem,” allows Europeans today, and Germans in particular, to believe that American military power, and the “strategic culture” that has created and sustained it, is outmoded and dangerous.

  Most Europeans do not see or do not wish to see the great paradox: that their passage into post-history has depended on the United States not making the same passage. Because Europe has neither the will nor the ability to guard its own paradise and keep it from being overrun, spiritually as well as physically, by a world that has yet to accept the rule of “moral consciousness,” it has become dependent on America’s willingness to use its military might to deter or defeat those around the world who still believe in power politics.

  Some Europeans do understand the conundrum. Britons, not surprisingly, understand it best. Robert Cooper writes of the need to address the hard truth that although “within the postmodern world [i.e., the Europe of today], there are no security threats in the traditional sense,” nevertheless, throughout the rest of the world—what Cooper calls the “modern and pre-modern zones”—threats abound. If the postmodern world does not protect itself, it can be destroyed. But how does Europe protect itself without discarding the very ideals and principles that undergird its pacific system?

  “The challenge to the postmodern world,” Cooper argues, “is to get used to the idea of double standards.” Among themselves, Europeans may “operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security.” But when dealing with the world outside Europe, “we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era—force, preemptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary.” This is Cooper’s principle for safeguarding society: “Among ourselves, we keep the law, but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle.” Cooper directs his argument at Europe, and he couples it with a call for Europeans to cease neglecting their defenses, “both physical and psychological.”[58]

  Cooper has also served as a close adviser to Tony Blair, and it is clear that Blair, perhaps a good deal more than his Labour Party followers, has endorsed the idea of an international double standard for power. He has tried to lead Britain into the rule-based Kantian world of the European Union. But as his solidarity with President Bush on the question of Iraq has shown, Blair has also tried to lead Europe back out into the Hobbesian world, where military power remains a key feature of international relations.

  But Blair’s attempt to bring Europe along with him has been largely unsuccessful. Schroeder has taken his nation “the German way,” and France, even under the more conservative Gaullism of Jacques Chirac, has been a most resistant partner of the United States, more intent on constraining American power than in supplementing it with French power.

  One suspects that what Cooper has really described, therefore, is not Europe’s future but America’s present. For it is the United States that has had the difficult task of navigating between these two worlds, trying to abide by, defend, and further the laws of advanced civilized society while simultaneously employing military force against those who refuse to abide by such rules. The United States is already operating according to Cooper’s double standard, for the very reasons he suggests. American leaders, too, believe that global security and a liberal order—as well as Europe’s “postmodern” paradise—cannot long survive unless the United States does use its power in the dangerous Hobbesian world that still flourishes outside Europe.

  What this means is that although the United States has played the critical role in bringing Europe into this Kantian paradise, and still plays a key role in making that paradise possible, it cannot enter the paradise itself. It mans the walls but cannot walk through the gate. The United States, with all its vast power, remains stuck in history, left to deal with the Saddams and the ayatollahs, the Kim Jong IIs and the Jiang Zemins, leaving most of the benefits to others.

  Is It Still “The West”?

  If this evolving international arrangement continues to produce a greater American tendency toward unilateralism in international affairs, this should not surprise any objective observer. In return for manning the walls of Europe’s postmodern order, the United States naturally seeks a certain freedom of action to deal with the strategic dangers that it alone has the means and sometimes the will to address. This is the great problem for relations between the United States and Europe, of course. For just at the moment when Europeans, freed of Cold War fears and constraints, have begun settling into their postmodern paradise and proselytizing for their doctrines of international law and international institutions, Americans have begun turning in the other direction, away from the common solidarity with Europe that had been the central theme of the Cold War and back toward a more traditional American policy of independence, toward that uniquely American form of universalistic nationalism.

  The end of the Cold War had an even more profound effect on the transatlantic relationship than is commonly understood, for the common Soviet enemy and the consequent need to act in concert for the common defense were not all that disappeared after 1989. So, too, did a grand strategy pursued on both sides of the Atlantic to preserve and strengthen the cohesion and unity of what was called “the West.” It was not just that the United States and Europe had had to work together to meet the Soviet challenge. More than that, the continued unity and success of the liberal Western order was for many years the very definition of victory in the Cold War.

  Partly for this reason, American strategy during the Cold War often consisted of providing more to friends and allies than was expected from them in return. To a remarkable degree, American governments measured the success of their foreign policy not by how well the United States was doing by any narrow reckoning of the national interest, but rather by how well America’s allies were faring against the many internal and external chal
lenges they faced. Thus it was American economic strategy to raise up from the ruins of World War II powerful economic competitors in Europe and Asia, even to the point where, by the last decades of the Cold War, the United States seemed to many to be in a state of relative decline compared to its increasingly prosperous allies. It was American military strategy to risk nuclear attack upon its otherwise unthreatened homeland in order to deter both nuclear and conventional attacks on European and Asian allies. When one considers the absence of similarly reliable guarantees among the various European powers in the past, between, say, Great Britain and France in the 1920s and 1930s, the willingness of the United States, standing in relative safety behind two oceans, to link its very survival to that of other nations was rather extraordinary.

  America’s strategic and economic “generosity,” if one can call it that, was, of course, closely related to American interests. As Acheson put it, “For the United States to take steps to strengthen countries threatened with Soviet aggression or Communist subversion . . . was to protect the security of the United States—it was to protect freedom itself.”[59] But this identification of the interests of others with its own interests was a striking quality of American foreign and defense policy after World War II. After Munich, after Pearl Harbor, and after the onset of the Cold War, Americans increasingly embraced the conviction that their own well-being depended fundamentally on the well-being of others, that American prosperity could not occur in the absence of global prosperity, that American national security was impossible without a broad measure of international security. This was a doctrine of self-interest, but it was the most enlightened kind of self-interest—to the point where it was at times almost indistinguishable from idealism.