Europe is not in zero-sum game with NATO.

AuthorWitney, Nick
PositionDefense

It is intriguing how close Europe came, back in the early 1950s, to establishing a European Defense Community. Forget the sort of carefully-nuanced initiatives which proceed under the banner of European defense today: this would have been real, full-blooded common defense, with a standing European army under central command, sustained by a common budget. Even more intriguing, [in Washington] President Truman was all for it, and after the change of administration so was Eisenhower. But eventually it came to nothing, NATO got going, and defense rather disappeared from the specifically European agenda for the next half century.

It reappeared as the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP), as recently as 1999. And I think it fair to say that the welcome it got on this side of the Atlantic was less than wholehearted. Okay, so the Brits were in there from the beginning, determined to ensure that this new policy developed only in ways compatible with NATO. But would there not be others pursuing different agendas, dreaming of using the policy to separate Europe from America? And was there not more than a dash of pretentiousness about this new European enthusiasm--particularly in light of the then-recent Balkan campaigns? True, the Europeans had adopted the so-called Helsinki Headline Goal for improving their military capabilities, but there was a long history in NATO of trying, without conspicuous success, to get Europe to share more of the military burden.

And I guess it is at this last point--the bit where people point to the gap between the ambition and rhetoric on the one hand, and actual capability on the other--that the European Defense Agency comes in. I like to think of the EDA as European defense's "back office." The "front office" came first, at the beginning of the new policy. It is staffed by diplomats and generals. The diplomats worked their way through the creation of new institutions, and the negotiation of the "Berlin-Plus arrangements" with NATO. [Worked out in the late 1990s, they allow the alliance to support EU-led operations--with intelligence cooperation and the loan of equipment and facilities--in which NATO as a whole is not engaged.] Then, in 2003, EU leaders adopted the European Security Strategy--a remarkably clear, and blessedly short, document which tells you in effect what the ESDP is for.

It analyses the post-Cold War (and post-9/11) world in terms with which I think Americans should be comfortable--pointing out that the new threats and challenges are not the conventional adversaries of the past, but such less tractable yet equally menacing dangers as terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, state failure, regional conflict and organized crime. It acknowledges that Europe has a responsibility to take a greater share of the burden of sustaining global security. And it asserts without equivocation this position: "The Transatlantic relationship is irreplaceable. Acting together the European Union and the United States can be a formidable force for good in the world. Our aim should be an effective and balanced partnership with the USA."

The "front office," as I have noted, is staffed by generals as well as diplomats. They have run Europe's crisis...

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