The New York Review of Books: America and the World

maintenance,...and extension."

Mandelbaum's thesis connects two separate claims. The first is that democracy and free markets have become the condition of modern life in the sense that nations that do not subscribe to both are outside the international consensus. The second is that democracies conduct peaceful foreign policies and don't make war on one another. There has been much recent scholarly discussion of the latter assertion, but the general thesis is actually quite venerable: its eighteenth-century version can be found in both Montesquieu and Adam Smith, who argued that just government and limited taxation were good in themselves and likely to favor friendly relations among states. The idea that flourishing commerce (i.e., free markets) inhibits armed conflict can also be found in John Stuart Mill and a number of other nineteenth-century political economists.

Mandelbaum's distinctive contribution is to suggest that this process was heavily foreordained. His history of the ultimate vindication of Wilsonian principles is unashamedly "Whiggish." It isn't just good fortune that brought us to this happy pass, he suggests. Progress happens, and we are its beneficiaries. The *ancien régime*, agrarian societies, Leninism, fascism, and socialism all fell by the wayside because they were inefficient, or dysfunctional, or unpopular, or all three. Like Karl Marx, Michael Mandelbaum is attracted to the idea that capitalism wreaks creative destruction, bringing with it the ineluctable triumph of new economic and political forms—in this case, political democracy and the free market in goods and ideas. And these good things go together.[1]

This isn't entirely convincing: I'm not sure we were ever "bound" to end up where we happen to be and, in part for that reason, I'm pessimistic about our chances of staying there. The twentieth century could easily have gone in another direction: the triumph of democracy in particular looked quite unlikely as recently as 1941. As for free markets: they are inherently capricious (which is why earlier theorists thought they required firm political oversight). From an egalitarian point of view, market economies consistently misallocate goods, both within countries and between them. There is therefore always the likelihood, especially in a democracy, that the redistributive appeal of economic controls will trump the wealth-generating case for unregulated exchange, as indeed it did for much of the past century—and not only in "socialist" Europe. Democracy and the free market have proven enduringly compatible only under historically unusual conditions of prosperity, or else in protected domestic settings and typically at the expense of third parties somewhere else.[2]

Professor Mandelbaum knows this, of course. As he concedes, the relations that he posits are "a predisposition, not an inevitable law of politics." But he is an optimist. No one today, he writes, doubts that "peace, liberty, and prosperity" are the supreme ends of life. The twentieth century shows the price of thinking otherwise. Accordingly, the overriding question in international affairs is how to secure and preserve these hard-won lessons. It is one of the strengths of this book—in addition to the clarity of its prose—that the author's particular brand of idealism leads him to emphasize the role of the modern state.

Mandelbaum has little tolerance for the clichés of "globalization." We don't live in a post-foreign age, he insists. On the contrary: "The three components of Woodrow Wilson's vision—democracy, free markets, and peace—may be understood as public goods in that an effective state is needed to establish each of them." The world of the post-cold war era, like the world of the cold war, is a world of sovereign states, and only the traditional state can effectively act as the agent of its own and its citizens' interests. The greatest of all sovereign

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16176

4/24/2003

LCS

Page 5 of 10

ates—the US—happens also to be the country that has done most to promote and benefit from democracy and free markets. The interests and responsibilities of American foreign policy thus remain intimately bound up with those of other similarly disposed states.

Unlike Kagan, therefore, Mandelbaum appreciates the significance of Europeans' "invention of peace," as he puts it, and emphasizes the shared interest of America and Europe in the common security arrangements so carefully put in place in recent decades. Cooperation brings strength, not weakness. Present tiffs across the Atlantic should not distract us from the benefits that Europeans, Americans, and everyone else glean from the joint pursuit of shared interests. Peace, markets, and democracy, Mandelbaum concludes, are about as good as it gets. In any case, the alternatives are not merely worse; after our recent experience they are surely unthinkable.

But that is just the problem. Influential people in Washington are indeed, once again, thinking "the unthinkable." The Bush administration is breaking away from the very system of international relations that Mandelbaum posits as the shape of the coming century; and in influential circles around President George W. Bush peace is becoming, as we have seen in Robert Kagan's writing, a term of near abuse. Why is this happening?

According to Charles Kupchan, the paradoxical explanation is that the American imperium so enthusiastically announced by Kagan and his colleagues is a dangerous mirage. Despite appearances, the post-cold war American monopoly is already on the wane. The unipolar" window is fast closing, and in its place we shall see a return to unstable, multiple poles of power, in which the US will need—as in the past—to compromise and negotiate with allies and competitors. The most important of these competing poles will be an expanded and united Europe, whose rise will coincide with an American retreat from expensive international engagements. "Getting right this devolution of responsibility from America to Europe should be a central objective of US grand strategy."

Mr. Kupchan, who teaches international relations at Georgetown and served on the National Security Council under Clinton, is a realist with ideals. Mandelbaum's Wilsonian apotheosis doesn't impress him: there is, in his account, no "permanent peace" under benevolent American supervision, merely an illusory lull in international great power confrontation. Furthermore, there is a tension in American policy between the urge to remake the world and the old instinct for quick forays followed by withdrawal and disengagement. The US has neither the means nor the appetite for sustained international involvement. Knowing this, US strategists should be working to strengthen the sorts of transnational restraints and institutions that will serve America best when it has to live once again in a world it cannot dominate.

Kupchan's account of the domestic roots and strategic contradictions of American foreign engagement is convincing and well supported. He is thoughtful, too, on a related matter: the unraveling fabric of America's domestic institutions, though he rather mechanistically attributes this to "a shift in the mode of production." He does, though, suffer from the occupational deformation of international relations specialists: an enthusiasm for ransacking the past in search of precedents, analogies, patterns, and cycles that might explain the present and forecast the future. "History" is scanned into the text, but contributes little to our understanding. In Kupchan's book there are lengthy, sweeping, and redundant historical summaries, covering everything from late Imperial Rome to the 1815 Congress of Vienna,

4/24/2003

Page 6 of 10

tended to illustrate how empires rise and fall, unipolar moments come and go, and so forth. These musings add little to the argument, and they distract attention from the main point.

The crux of Kupchan's thesis is that an integrated and prosperous Europe "could well emerge as a formidable entity on a new geopolitical map of the world." This united Europe, in Kupchan's account, didn't just happen: it was a deliberate project, the achievement and objective of Europe's "founding fathers" in the wake of Hitler's defeat. "In the aftermath of World War II, Europeans saw the challenge before them, designed their geopolitical map of the future, and set out to make that map a reality." It wasn't like that at all, of course—in the aftermath of World War II most European leaders were too busy digging out of the rubble to plan the geopolitical future.[3] But however that may be, Europe today does pose an economic and geostrategic alternative to American power. Kupchan would agree with David Calleo, a Washington-based expert on European affairs, who sees in Europe's "hybrid confederacy" a "genuinely new political form," a standing challenge to the American model. If other analysts look "right past" the significance of a united Europe, it is because they simply don't recognize this new creature.

In one sense Kupchan's timing is unfortunate. His book has appeared just as the present and future member states of this united Europe have fallen to internecine squabbling, unable to agree on a common response to America's martial activism. Some, like Britain, Spain, and Italy, have chosen to line up with their longstanding American protector. Others, like France, Germany, and Belgium, have asserted a "European" difference that certainly reflects public opinion across the continent, but leads them into a strategic cul-de-sac. The East Europeans have buckled under unprecedented American diplomatic pressure and bribery; for those in Brussels, Paris, and elsewhere who didn't want them in the Union anyway, that will not soon be forgotten.[2] If this is the geostrategic challenger America now faces, why should Washington lose sleep?

Yet Kupchan may be right. The EU, as Calleo reminds us (in the afterword to a new edition of *Rethinking Europe's Future*), has still to think seriously about "power": how to acquire it, how to use it. It wasn't constructed with that objective in mind, and it hasn't resolved the problem of large nation-states in its midst that won't relinquish control over their foreign policies. But Europe, especially "old Europe," is much more in tune than the US with the thinking of the rest of the world on everything from environmental threats to international law, and its social legislation and economic practices are more congenial to foreigners and more readily exportable than the American variants. US policy and politics, in Kupchan's view, are poorly adapted to the complexity of today's world. And it is the US, not Europe, that is increasingly dependent on foreign investment to feed its deficit-laden economy and sustain its vulnerable currency.

Thus when American leaders throw fits of pique at European dissent, and provoke and encourage internal European divisions, these are signs of incipient weakness, not strength. Real power is influence and example, backed up by understated reminders of military force. When a great power has to buy its allies, bribe its friends, and blackmail its critics, something amiss. The energetic American response to September 11 is thus misleading, in Kupchan's view. Like Mandelbaum, but for opposite reasons, he treats the "war on terror" as a "surface feature" that does not affect "underlying tectonic forces and the location of fault lines." The bedrock reality is a world from which the US will either retreat in frustration or with which it will have to engage on cooperative terms. Either way, the "American era" is passing.

4/24/2003

LIC

Page 7 of 10

There is another sort of explanation for the turbulence of the coming age, and it concerns the third leg of the Wilsonian triad: "democracy." In most accounts of the coming of mass society and, more recently, "globalization," the spread of democracy is taken for granted. "Democracy" is the name we now give to any political arrangement that purports to include all adult citizens on equal terms into its system of governance, and that is regarded by those same citizens as the legitimate vehicle for the expression of their interests. We are all democrats today. The defense and extension of democracy are the commonplace justifications for America's overseas presence.

But, as Fareed Zakaria argues in a new book, the protean qualities of democracy can be misleading.¹⁹ In much of the world, democracy is often the direct heir to authoritarian dictatorship and a substitute for good government. We are all familiar with the late, unlamented "people's democracies," but even in more genuine democracies the spurious legitimacy of public elections frequently obscures infirm and corrupt institutions. The source of Western success and the basis for both free markets and international peace, Zakaria suggests, had been the distinctive tradition of representative government, protected civil freedoms, and public law that originated in northwest Europe (specifically Britain), before migrating across the Atlantic. Democratic voting rights and free elections flow from these blessings; they do not necessarily bring them in their wake. "The 'Western model of government' is best symbolized not by the mass plebiscite but the impartial judge."

That "democracy" can be inimical to liberty is hardly a novel thought; it has led many to prefer rule by an uncorrupted civic elite over demagogic manipulation of volatile, uninformed multitudes. The imperfections of modern democracy are troublingly obvious, and Zakaria summarizes them well. States, in his view, don't need to be made more democratic, they need to be sheltered from the perverse pressures generated by unconstrained mass rule. Most democratic theorists would respond that competent administrative elites cannot be conjured up at will; and while minority rights clauses and other constraints are important, it is only the ballot box that can confer public legitimacy. It may be, as Zakaria suggests, that we set too much store by elections and their outcomes. But they are all we have.

Zakaria's skepticism is a nice antidote to Mandelbaum's Wilsonian picture. It also suggests that if we have lived in a peaceful world these past fifty years, this has little to do with democracy. It is liberal states—states that have enshrined the constitutional protection of liberties—that don't go to war with one another. Democracies may or may not be warlike— they haven't actually been around long enough to draw conclusions (though Alexander Hamilton thought "popular assemblies" were unlikely to prove peace-loving, and nothing in the past two centuries has proven him obviously wrong). In any case, the world itself is not a democracy, so there is nothing even in Mandelbaum's thesis to preclude international war, particularly between liberal and illiberal democracies. And, for liberal and illiberal democracies alike, it is nuclear weapons rather than public opinion that have most effectively inhibited aggression.

Self-generating liberal democracies are historically unusual, even in the West. Like Capitalism, they require, in order to succeed, indigenous antecedent qualities that cannot be retroactively supplied. Democratic institutions grafted from abroad onto culturally distinctive and impoverished nations have a mixed track record. America's rediscovered mission, to make the world "safe for democracy," thus risks proving self-defeating, even in

4/24/2003

Page 8 of 10

Its more plausible guise as a mis-sion to make the world safe for Americans. And in the absence of any accompanying ambition to make the rest of the world richer, safer, healthier, or better educated, this mission stands a good chance of constructing and defending some quite unwholesome "democracies."

We are living in an unusually uncertain moment. There are no secure conclusions about the future of peace, free markets, or anything else to be derived from the monopoly enjoyed today by the Anglo-American model. People forget quickly. Should liberal democracy fail to deliver on its promises, or be undermined by geopolitical overreach, then arguments for regulation, protection, and control (of markets and people alike) will be heard once again. And it will be democrats of a certain kind who will be the first to present them.

The best way to prevent this is by judiciously applied restrictions on the "natural" workings of the international system. Just as the much-maligned European welfare states stabilized capitalist economies after 1945, by mitigating the impact of the market and thus demobilizing political criticism from both extremes, so the trans-national institutions and agencies, treaties and laws of our time have facilitated international order by reducing the risks for smaller countries of unprotected exposure to the economic and political pressures from larger neighbors and competitors. The United States has benefited greatly from the stability these arrangements have facilitated. To threaten to leave the World Trade Organization, or to dismantle years of work on an International Criminal Court, is perverse.

What is missing in recent American commentary is not so much an appreciation of history—there has been too much of that, with "Munich" invoked at every turn. What is lacking is a sense of the tragic. If the US has had such a long run of foreign policy successes in the modern age, it is in large measure because, as Dean Acheson once put it, "we were fortunate in our opponents." This may not last. We were also fortunate in our leaders. This has certainly not lasted. There is much confident talk of the coming American century; but one hundred years ago many thought it was Germany that held the keys to the new era—and they had good reasons for thinking it. As Raymond Aron once remarked, the twentieth century could have been the German century.

Things can go wrong very fast, even and perhaps especially for an over-reaching great power. Like the German planners of 1914, today's Washington strategists are obsessed with challenges, timetables, windows of opportunity—and the eschatological urge to tear down a frustrating international order and remake it in their image. They, too, have exaggerated the threats and underestimated the risks. That is as far as the analogy goes—Imperial Germany and Republican America have little else in common. But hubris is not a shortcoming peculiar to any one constitutional form; and the inability to envisage nemesis is modern America's distinctive failing.

To be sure, things can go right, too, and the twenty-first century may yet belong to America. But just now, as Zhou Enlai is reported to have replied when asked what he thought were the consequences of the French Revolution, it's too soon to tell. In the meantime, as they are about to go to war, our leaders are betting the farm on the dream of a world that will for the foreseeable future perform America's bidding on nonnegotiable American terms. When, at the dawn of the American age, George Kennan urged that the US contain the Soviet challenge, he added: "It is important to note, however, that such a policy has nothing to do with outward histrionics: with threats or blustering or superfluous gestures of outward

4/24/2003

Page 9 of 10

(LC)

roughness."" Fifty-six years on, his advice goes unheeded. It is a bad sign

—March 12, 2003;
this is the second of three articles.

Notes

[1] Fluent in Russian and German, Kennan had by 1946 already served in Berlin, Riga, Prague, and Moscow.

[2] See e.g. Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History?" *The National Interest*, No. 16 (Summer 1989); *The End of History and the Last Man* (Free Press, 1992). See also Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?" *Foreign Affairs*, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Summer 1993); *The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order* (Simon and Schuster, 1996).

[3] See Craig Kennedy and Marshall M. Bouton, "The Real Transatlantic Gap," *Foreign Policy*, November–December 2002, based on a recent survey by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations and the German Marshall Fund. For American views, see www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr030228.asp. In late February 2003, 59 percent of Americans opposed a war on Iraq without UN support.

[4] See W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman, *1066 and All That* (London: Penguin, 1960), p. 10. Caesar Invades Britain. The original "Veni, vidi, vici" ("I came, I saw, I conquered") was reportedly recorded by Julius Caesar following his successful Pontic campaign in 47 BC.

[5] See notably Michael W. Doyle, "Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs," *Philosophy & Public Affairs*, Vol. 12, Nos. 3 and 4 (1983).

[6] "The political and economic his-tory of Western Europe after World War II was the most powerful evidence in favor of the liberal theory of history: There all good things—democracy, prosperity, and peace—did go together."

[7] For a subtle discussion of this point and its implications, see John Dunn, *The Cunning of Unreason: Making Sense of Politics* (Basic Books, 2000), especially pp. 30–48, 218–235. This sophisticated, disabused treatise on the nature and limits of political understanding should be required reading for every student of modern politics.

[8] For a less romanticized account of Europe's fitful unification, see Alan S. Milward, *The European Rescue of the Nation-State* (University of California Press, 1992) and Andrew Moravcsik, *The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht* (Cornell University Press, 1998).

[9] Students of the link between markets, democracy, and peace will note the alacrity with which the US has recently declared both Bulgaria and Romania—its new-found East European allies in the struggle against Iraq, the International Criminal Court, and other states—to be "fully functioning market economies," with all the attendant rewards that will now follow.

[10] See also Fareed Zakaria, "The Rise of Illiberal Democracy," *Foreign Affairs*, Vol. 76, No. 6 (1997).

4/24/2003

children and bores, yet he is neither, which lends to the rush of ideas and notions and observations a surprising poignancy. Emmett doesn't need a rocket or a bicycle to reach the edge of the world. He is there already, bumbling around in the dark, watching a

fire consume itself. In his bathrobe, cosily sipping his coffee, Emmett is a funny kind of an existential hero, but an existential hero nevertheless.

One morning, Henry comes in and and says, “Dad, in only two years I’m going to be ten.” A moment later, Em-

mett tells us, “And now I can hear the crows, the birds that announce the end of my secret morning.” Rising before dawn to add hours onto your life because you realize you will someday die is something the wise men of Chelm might have thought of. But if Emmett

cannot cheat death, he does cheat the dawn, every morning for a month or so, capturing “pieces of mental life” like fireflies, creating consciousness while the rest of us sleep. In *A Box of Matches*, Emmett faces the inevitability of death by noticing life. ☐

# Anti-Americans Abroad

## Tony Judt

1.

If you want to understand how America appears to the world today, consider the sport-utility vehicle. Oversized and overweight, the SUV disains negotiated agreements to restrict atmospheric pollution. It consumes indeterminate quantities of scarce resources to furnish its privileged inhabitants with supercrogatory services. It exposes outsiders to deadly risk in order to provide for the illusory security of its occupants. In a crowded world, the SUV appears as a dangerous anachronism. Like US foreign policy, the sport-utility vehicle comes packaged in sonorous mission statements; but underneath it is just an oversized pickup truck with too much power.

The simile may be modern, but the idea behind it is not. “America” has been an object of foreign suspicion for even longer than it has been a beacon and haven for the world’s poor and downtrodden. Eighteenth-century commentators—on the basis of very little direct observation—believed America’s flora and fauna to be stunted, and of limited interest or use. The country could never be civilized, they insisted, and much the same was true of its unso-phisticated new citizens. As the French diplomat (and bishop) Talleyrand observed, anticipating two centuries of European commentary: “Trente-deux réligions et un seul plan” (“thirty-two religions and just one dish”—which Americans typically and understand-ably tended to eat in a hurry). From the perspective of a cosmopolitan European conservative like Joseph de Maistre, writing in the early years of the nine-teenth century, the US was a regret-able aberration—and too crude to en-dure for long.

Charles Dickens, like Alexis de Tocqueville, was struck by the conformism of American public life. Stendhal commented upon the country's "egoism": Baudelaire sniffily compared it to Belgium (!) in its bourgeois mediocrity; everyone remarked upon the jejune patriotic pomp of the US. But in the course of the next century, European commentary shifted perceptibly from the dismissive to the resentful. By the 1930s, the United States' economic power was giving a threatening twist to its crude immaturity. For a new generation of anti-democratic critics, the destabilizing symptoms of modern life—mass production, mass society, and mass politics—could all be traced to America.

Jacques Chirac

## BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY

**L'Ennemi américain: Généalogie de l'antiaméricanisme français**

by Philippe Roger.

Paris: Seuil, 602 pp., 26¢ (paper)

11 septembre 2001:

**L'Effroyable Imposture**

by Thierry Meyssan.

Chatou: Carnot, 253 pp., 18¢ (paper);

911: The Big Lie

USA Books, 240 pp., $15.95 (paper)

**Pourquoi le monde déteste-t-il l'Amérique?**

by Ziauddin Sardar

and Merryl Wyn Davies.

Paris: Fayard, 285 pp., 19¢ (paper);

**Why Do People Hate America?**

Disinformation Company, 240 pp., $12.95 (paper)

convenient shorthand for expressing cultural insecurity. In the words of the Frenchman Robert Aron, writing in 1935, Henry Ford, F.W. Taylor (the prophet of work rhythms and manufacturing efficiency), and Adolf Hitler were, like it or not, the “guides of our

**Le Livre noir des États-Unis**

by Peter Scowen.

Paris: Mango, 294 pp., 17¢ (paper)

**Dangereuse Amérique:**

Chronique d'une guerre annoncée

by Noël Mamère and Patrick Farbiacz.

Paris: Ramsay, 301 pp., 17¢ (paper)

**Après l'empire:**

Essai sur la décomposition du système américain

by Emmanuel Todd.

Paris: Gallimard,

233 pp., 18.50¢ (paper)

**L'Obsession anti-américaine:**

Son fonctionnement, ses causes, ses inconéquences

by Jean-François Revel.

Paris: Plon, 300 pp., 20¢ (paper)

age.” America was “industrialism.” It threatened the survival of individuality, quality, and national specificity. “America is multiplying its territory, where the values of the West risk finding their grave,” wrote Emmanuel Berl in 1929. Europeans owed it to

their heritage to resist their own Americanization at every turn, urged George Duhamel in 1930: “We Westerners must each firmly denounce whatever is American in his house, his clothes, his soul.”

World War II did not alleviate this irritation. Radical anti-Americanism in the early cold war years echoed the sentiments of conservative anti-Americanism twenty years earlier. When Simone de Beauvoir charged that America was “becoming Fascist,” Jean-Paul Sartre claimed that McCarthyite America “had gone mad,” the novelist Roger Vailland asserted that the fridge was an American plot to destroy French domestic culture, and *Le Monde* declared that “Coca-Cola is the Danzig of European Culture,” they were denouncing the same American “enemy” that had so alarmed their political opponents a generation before.² American behavior at home and abroad fed this prejudice but did not create it. In their anger at the US, European intellectuals had for many decades been expressing their anxieties about changes closer to home.

The examples I have quoted are from France, but English ambivalence toward America is also an old story; the German generation of the 1960s blamed America above all for the crass consumerism and political amnesia of their parents' postwar Federal Republican; and even in Donald Rumsfeld's “new” Europe the US, representing “Western” technology and progress, has on occasion been blamed for the ethical

²Emmanuel Berl, *Mort de la pensée bourgeoise* (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1929, reprinted 1970), pp. 76-77; André Siegfried, *Les États-Unis d'aujourd'hui* (Paris: Colin, 1930), quoted in Michel Winock, *Nationalisme, antisémitisme et fascisme en France* (Paris: Seuil, 1982), p. 56. See also Georges Duhamel, *Sènes de la Vie future* (Paris: Mercure de France, 1930); Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu, *Le Cancer américain* (Paris: Rieder, 1931); and my own *Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956* (University of California Press, 1992), Chapter 10: “America Has Gone Mad: Anti-Americanism in Historical Perspective,” pp. 187-204.

³For Simone de Beauvoir, see her *L'Amérique au jour le jour* (Paris: Morihien, 1948), pp. 99-100. Sartre was commenting on the trial and execution of the Rosenberga. Vailland's thoughts on refrigeration, from his article "Le Ménage n'est pas un art de salon" (*La Tribune des nations*, March 14, 1952), are discussed by Philippe Roger in *L'Ennemi américain*, pp. 483-484. And see the editorial "Mourir pour le Coca-Cola." *Le Monde*, March 29, 1950.

[LC]

vacuum and cultural impoverishment
that global capitalism brings in its train.¹
Nevertheless, anti-Americanism in Europe
at least has always had a distinctly
French tinge. It is in Paris that
European ambivalence about America
takes polemical form.

Philippe Roger has written a superb history of French anti-Americanism, elegant, learned, witty. This enjoyable exercise, in the very best traditions of French scholarship, richly deserves to be published in English translation, unabridged. The book's aim is far too subtle and intricate to summarize briefly, but the word "genealogy" in the title should be taken seriously. This is not strictly a history, since Roger treats his material as a "semiotic bloc"; and he doesn't pay much attention to the record of French "pro-Americanism" that would need to be discussed to present a balanced account.

Instead, in nearly six hundred pages of close textual exegesis, Roger demonstrates not only that the core of French anti-Americanism is very old indeed, but also that it was always fanciful, only loosely attached to American reality. Anti-Americanism is a *récit*, a tale (or fable), with certain recurring themes, fears, and hopes. Starting out as an aesthetic distaste for the New World, French anti-Americanism has since moved through the cultural to the political but the sedimentary evidence of earlier versions is never quite lost to sight.

Roger's book is strongest on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its coverage of the twentieth century is with the generation of Sartre—the moment, as he reminds us, when it became conventional for French anti-American texts to begin by denying that they were. That seems reasonable — there are a number of satisfactory accounts of the anti-Americanism of our own times and Roger is interested in tracing origins, not outcomes.¹ And by ending short of the present he can permit himself a sardonic, upbeat conclusion:

> What if anti-Americanism today
> were no more than a mental slavery
> that the French impose on
> themselves, a masochist lethargy,
> a humdrum resentment, a passionless Pavlovian reaction? That
> would offer grounds for hope.
> There are few vices, even intellectual
> ones, that can long withstand the boredom they elicit.

'For German representations of the price of Americanization see Rainer Werner Fassbinder's *Marriage of Maria Braun* (1979); or Edgar Reitz's *Heimat: Eine deutsche Chronik* (1984), where the American impact on "deep German Nazism" is depicted as far more corrosive of values than the passage through Nazism. And it was Václav Havel, no less, who reminded his fellow dissidents back in 1984 that rationalism, scientism, our fascination with technology and change, were all the "ambitious exports" of the West, the perquisites of the dream of modernity. Václav Havel, "Svědomí a politika," Svědectví, Vol. 18, No. 72 (1984), pp. 621–635 (quote from page 627).

'See Philippe Mathy, *Extrême Occident: French Intellectuals and American (University of Chicago Press, 1993). and L'Amérique dans les têtes: Un Siecle de fascinations et d'aversions*, edited by Denis Lacorne, Jacques Rupnik, and Marie-France Toinet (Paris: Hachette, 1986).

Unfortunately, there is a fresh twist in the story. Anti-Americanism today is fueled by a new consideration, and it is no longer confined to intellectuals. Most Europeans and other foreigners today are untroubled by American products, many of which are in any case manufactured and marketed overseas. They are familiar with the American "way of life," which they often envy and dislike in equal parts. Most of them don't despise America, and they certainly don't hate Americans. What upsets them is US foreign policy; and they don't trust America's current president. This is new. Even during the cold war, many of America's political foes actually quite liked, and trusted its leaders. Today, even America's friends don't like President Bush: in part for the policy he pursues, in part for the manner in which he pursues it.

This is the background to a recent burst of anti-American publications from Paris. The most bizarre of these was a book by one Thierry Meyssan, purporting to show that the September 11 attack on the Pentagon never happened. No airliner ever crashed into the building, he writes: the whole thing is a hoax perpetrated by the American defense establishment to advance its own interests. Meyssan's approach echoes that of Holocaust deniers. He begins by assuming the non-existence of a well-accredited event, then reminds us that no amount of evidence—especially from firsthand witnesses—can prove the contrary. The method is well summarized in his dismissal of the substantial body of eyewitness testimony running counter to his claim: "Far from warranting their evidence, the quality of these witnesses just shows how far the US Army will go to distort the truth."

The most depressing thing about Meyssan's book is that it was a best seller. There is an audience in France for the farther reaches of paranoid suspicion of America, and September 11 seems to have aroused it. More typical, though, is the shopping list of complaints in books with titles like *Pourquoi le monde détesté-t-il l'Amérique?*, *Le Livre noir des États-Unis*, and *Dangereuse Amérique*. The first two are by British and Canadian authors respectively, though they have sold best in their French editions: the third is coauthored by a prominent French Green politician and former presidential candidate.

Characteristically presented with real or feigned regret ("We are not anti-American, but..."), these works are an inventory of commonly cited American shortcomings. The US is a selfish, individualistic society devoted to commerce, profit, and the desolation of the planet. It is as uncaring of its own poor and sick as it is indifferent to the rest of humankind. The US rides roughshod over international laws and treaties and threatens the moral, environmental, and physical future of humanity. It is inconsistent and hypocritical in its foreign dealings and it wields unparalleled military clout. It is, in

⁵⁴ *Loin de créer leurs dépositions, la qualité de ces témoins ne fait que soulagner l'importance des moyens déployés par l'armée des États-Unis pour traverson la vérité*; see 11 septembre 2001, p. 23.

short, a bull in the global china shop,
wreaking havoc.⁶

Much of this is recycled from earlier criticisms of America. Peter Scowen's complaints (his chapter headings include "Les atrocités de Hiroshima et de Nagasaki" and "Une culture vide"), like those of Sardar and Davies ("American Hamburgers and Other Viruses") or Mamère and Farbiaz ("L'américanisation du monde," "Une croisade qui sent le pétrole" [A crusade smelling of oil]), blend traditional themes with new accusations. They are a mixture of conservative cultural distaste (America is ugly, rootless, and crass), anti-globalization rhetoric (America is poluting the world), and neo-Marxist reductionism (America is run by and for the oil companies). Domestic American critics add race into the mix—not content with trampling over everyone else, the US rides roughshod across its own history.¹

Some of the criticisms of American policy and practice are well founded. Others are drivel. In their catalog of claims against America. Sardar and Davies blame the US for the cold war, imposed on a reluctant Western Europe: "Both France and Italy had major Communist Parties—and still do [sic]—but with their own very specific histories that owed little to Russia." "International communism," in other words, was an American invention. This revisionist myth died many years ago. Its posthumous revival suggests that an older, political anti-Americanism is gaining new traction from the Bush administration's foreign ambitions.⁸ Once a rogue state, always a rogue state.

According to Emmanuel Todd, however, there is no need to worry. In his recent book, *Après l'empire* (also a best seller), he argues that the sun is setting on imperial America. We are entering a post-American age. America will continue to jeopardize international stability. But Europeans (and Asians) can take some comfort from the knowledge that the future is theirs. American military power is real, but redundant: meanwhile its tottering economy is vulnerably dependent upon the rest of the world, and its social model holds no appeal. Between 1950 and 1990 the US was a benevolent and necessary presence in the world, but not anymore. The

⁶See also Clyde V. Prestowitz, *Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions* (Basic Books, April 2003).

⁷According to Mark Hartsgaard, in *The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World* (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), Americans have long been in denial about their constitution's origins in the practices of the Iroquois League, to which we apparently owe an unacknowledged debt for the concepts of states' rights and the separation of powers. So much for Locke, Montesquieu, English Common Law, and the Continental Enlightenment.

⁸We are back in May 1944, when Hubert Beuve-Méry, future founder and editor of *Le Monde*, could write that "the Americans constitute a real threat to France.... [They] can prevent us accomplishing the necessary revolution, and their materialism lacks even the tragic grandeur of the materialism of the totalitarians." Quoted by Jean-François Revel in *L'Obsession anti-américaine*, p. 98.

Three tales of love
and betrayal from

Steven
Millhauser

On the front cover of
*The Washington Post Book World*,
Michael Dirda says

"No one alive
writes better about
yearning
and heartbreak

...So enchanting is his prose that one surrenders [as] one does to the wistful piano pieces of Ravel and Chopin."

The New Yorker calls him

"An ingenious
geometer of
love triangles"

On the front cover of
*The N.Y. Times Book Review*

"This writer knows

that the imagination can be
as terrible as it is exhilarating.
This writer is in love with a
large, very beautiful tiger,
and at its best [his] fiction
is an exquisite negotiation
with the beast." Laura Miller

• THE NOVELLAS •

REVENGE

"A gothic masterpiece"

*N.Y. Times Book Review*

AN ADVENTURE

OF DON JUAN

"A joy to read"

*Minneapolis Star-Tribune*

THE KING IN THE TREE

"A flawless retelling of the
story of Tristan and Ysolt...
[t] will live with the older
versions, and Wagner's,
as part of the myth"

Boston Globe

By the author of
*Edwin Mullhouse*
and the Pulitzer Prize novel
*Martin Dressler*

Knopf

www.aaknopf.com

NOW IN
PAPERBACK

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
GLOBALIZATION
AND ITS
DISCONTENTS

JOSEPH E.
STIGLITZ
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE
IN ECONOMICS

WINNER OF THE
NATIONAL GO
AWAY FROM A
NEW AFTERNOON

The hugely acclaimed
National Bestseller from
**JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ**
Nobel Prize winner,
World Bank chief
economist, and Clinton
Cabinet member

"Accessible,
provocative and
highly readable....

Brings an insider's insights
into the crises of the
1990s and beyond, from
East Asia to Russia and
on to Argentina."
—New York Times

"Penetrating,
insightful...."

A seminal work."
—George Soros

"Urgently
important."

—Boston Globe

"Entertaining,
insightful, and
well-written."

—Foreign Affairs

"Will surely claim a
large place on the
public stage."

—New York Review of Books

Wherever books are sold

NORTON

Independent publishers since 1923
www.wwnorton.com

challenge today is to manage America's
growing irrelevance.

Todd is not at all a conventional "anti-American" and some of what he has to say is of interest—though English-readers seeking to understand the case for American decline would do better to read Charles Kupchan.⁹ Todd is right to say that asymmetric globalization—in which the US consumes what others produce, and economic inequalities grow apace—is bringing about a world unsympathetic to American ambition. Post-Communist Russia, post-Saddam Iraq, and other modernizing societies may adopt capitalism ("the only reasonable economic organization") and even become democratic, but they won't mimic American "hyperindividualism" and they will share European preferences on many things. The US, in Todd's view, will cling desperately to the vestiges of its ambition and power: to maintain its waning influence it will seek to sustain "a certain level of international tension, a condition of limited but endemic war." This process has already begun, and September 11 was its trigger.

The problem with Emmanuel Todd, and it will be immediately familiar to anyone who has read any of his previous books, is less his conclusions than his reasoning. There is something of the Ancient Mariner about this writer. He has a maniacal tale to tell and he recounts it in book after book, gripping the reader relentlessly as though to say "Don't you get it? It's all about fertility!" Todd is an anthropological demographer by training. In 1976 he published *La Chute finale: Essai sur la décomposition de la sphère soviétique*, in which he prophesied the end of the USSR: "A slight increase in Russian infant mortality between 1970 and 1974 made me understand the rotting away of the Soviet Union back in 1976 and allowed me to predict the system's collapse." On his account, the decline in the Soviet birthrate revealed to him "the likely emergence of normal Russians, perfectly capable of overthrowing communism."

Emmanuel Todd was not the only person back in the 1970s predicting an unhealthy future for communism. Nevertheless, the link he claims to have uncovered between fertility and regime collapse has gone to his head. In his new book, world history is reduced to a series of unidirectional, monocausal correlations linking birthrates, literacy rates, timeless family structures, and global politics. The Yugoslav wars were the result of "fertility gaps" between Slavs and Muslims. The American Civil War can be traced to the low birthrates of the Anglo-Saxon settler class. And if "individualistic" America faces grim prospects today, this is because the "family structures" of the rest of the world favor very different political systems.

In Emmanuel Todd's parallel universe, politics—like economic behavior—is inscribed in a society's "genetic code." The egalitarian family systems of Central Asia reveal an "anthropology of community" that made communism more acceptable there (elsewhere he has attributed regional variations in French, Italian, and Finnish voting patterns to similar differences in family

⁹Charles Kupchan. *The End of the American Era* (Knopf, 2002). See my discussion of Kupchan in *The New York Review*, April 10, 2003.

life¹⁰). Today, the "universalist Russian temperament" based on the extended Russian family offers a nonindividualistic socioeconomic model that may be the democracy of the future. "A priori, there is no reason not to imagine a liberal and democratic Russia protecting the planet against American efforts to shore up their global imperial posture." Hence the unchained fury of the "differentialist" tendencies—American, Israeli, and others.

Todd goes further. He absurdly exaggerates America's current woes, real as they are. Extrapolating from the Enron example, he concludes that all American economic data are as unreliable as that of the Soviets: the truly parlous state of the US economy has been kept hidden. And he offers his own variant on the "clash of civilizations." The coming conflict between Islam and the US brings into opposition the "effectively feminist," women-based civilization of America and the masculinized ethic of Central Asian and Arab warrior societies. Here, too, America will be isolated, for Europeans will feel just as threatened by the US as their Arab neighbors do. Once again, it all comes down to family life, with a distinctive modern twist: "The status of the American woman, threatening and castrating [castratrice et menaçante], [is] as disturbing for European men as the all-powerful Arab male is for European women." The Atlantic gap begins in the bedroom. You couldn't invent it.

To leave Emmanuel Todd for Jean-François Revel is to abandon the mad scientist for the self-confident patrician. Revel is an august Immortal of the Académie Française. He is the author of many books (thirty-one to date), as the reader of his latest essay is firmly reminded. Revel's style suggests a man unfamiliar with self-doubt and unused to contradiction. He tends to sweeping, unsupported generalizations—by his account, most of Europe's political and cultural elite "never understood anything about communism"—and his version of French anti-Americanism at times approaches caricature. This is a pity, because some of what he writes makes good sense.

Thus Revel is right to draw attention to the contradiction at the heart of much French criticism of America. If the US is such a social disaster, a cultural pygmy, a political innocent, and an economic meltdown waiting to happen, why worry? Why devote so much resentful attention to it? Alternatively, if it is as powerful and successful as many fear, might it not be doing something right? Revel is correct for the most part to charge certain French intellectuals with bad faith when they assert that they had nothing against America's anti-Communist policies in earlier decades and object only to the excesses of the present. The record suggests otherwise.

As a Frenchman, Revel is well placed to remind his fellow citizens that France, too, has social problems—the much-

¹⁰Emmanuel Todd. *La Troisième Planète: Structures familiales et systèmes idéologiques* (Paris: Seuil, 1983). "Communism's success is principally explained by the existence... of egalitarian and authoritarian family structures predisposing people to see Communist ideology as natural and good": See *Après l'empire*, p. 178.

vaunted French education system neither assimilates cultural and religious minorities nor does it support and nourish cultural difference. France, too, has slums, violence, and delinquency. And Jean-Marie Le Pen's success in last year's presidential elections is a standing rebuke to all of France's political class for its failure to address the problems of immigration and race.¹¹ Revel makes legitimate fun of France's cultural administrators, who can vandalize their own national heritage at least as recklessly as the barbaric Americans. No American booster could ever match Culture Minister Jack Lang's 1984 "Projet Culturel Extérieur de la France," in which France's cultural ambitions are described by Lang himself as "probably unequaled in any other country." And what does it say about the sophistication of the French press and television that they devoted so much credulous space to the elucubrations of M. Meyssan?

One could go on. Mocking the French for their pretensions (and their memory holes) is almost as easy as picking apart the hypocrisies of US foreign policy. And Revel is right to describe modern anti-globalization activists with their anti-market rhetoric as a "divine surprise" for the European left, a heaven SENT cause at a post-ideological moment when Europe's radicals were adrift. But Revel's astute observations of what is wrong in France risk being discredited by his inability to find anything wrong with America. His entire book is a pean of blinkered praise for a country that, regrettably, does not exist. Like the anti-Americans he disdains, he has conjured up his American subject out of thin air.

In Revel's America the melting pot works "fort bien" and there is no mention of ghettos. According to him, Europeans misread and exaggerate US crime statistics, whereas in reality crime in America is not a problem. Health coverage in America works well: most Americans are insured at work, the rest benefit from publicly funded Medicare and Medicaid. Anyway, the system's shortcomings are no worse those of France's own provisions for health care. The American poor have the same per capita income as the average citizen of Portugal, so they can't be called poor (Revel has apparently never heard of cost-of-living indices). There is no "underclass." Meanwhile the US has had social democracy longer than Europe, and American television and news coverage is much better than you think.

As for American foreign policy: in Revel-land the US has stayed fully engaged in the Israel-Palestine conflict, is resolutionally nonpartisan, and its policy has been a success. The American missile defense program worries M. Revel a lot less than it does some American generals. Unlike 50 percent of the US electorate, Académicien Revel saw nothing amiss in the conduct of the 2000 presidential election. As for evidence of growing American anti-French sentiment, stuff and nonsense: "pour ma part, je ne l'ai jamais constaté" ("as for me, I've never seen it"). In short, whatever French critics

(continued on page 27)

¹¹On this see also Philippe Manière. *La Vengence du people: Les Élites, Le Pen et les français* (Paris: Plon, 2002).

26

1

(continued from page 26)

and others say about the US. Jean-François Revel maintains the opposite. Voltaire could not have done a better job sanitizing traditional French prejudices. Pangloss in Wonderland.

## 2.

Somewhere between Emmanuel Todd and Jean-François Revel there is an interesting European perspective on George Bush's America. The two sides of the Atlantic really are different today. First, America is a credulous and religious society: since the mid-Fifties Europeans have abandoned their churches in droves; but in the United States there has been virtually no decline in churchgoing and synagogue attendance. In 1998 a Harris poll found that 66 percent even of non-Christian Americans believed in miracles and 47 percent of them accredited the Virgin Birth; the

figures for all Americans are 86 percent and 83 percent respectively. Some 45 percent of Americans believe there is a Devil. In a recent *Newsweek* poll 79 percent of American respondents accepted that biblical miracles really happened. According to a 1999 *Newsweek* poll, 40 percent of all Americans (71 percent of Evangelical Protestants) believe that the world will end in a battle at Armageddon between Jesus and the

antichrist. An American president who conducts Bible study in the White House and begins cabinet sessions with a prayer may seem a curious anachronism to his European allies, but he is in tune with his constituents.¹²

Second, the inequalities and insecurities of American life are still unthinkable across the Atlantic. Europeans remain wary of excessive disparities of income, and their institutions and political choices reflect this sentiment. Moreover it is prudence, rather than the residue of “socialism,” that explains European hesitation over unregulated markets and the dismantling of the public sector and local resistance to the American “model.” This makes sense—for most people in Europe, as elsewhere in the world, unrestricted competition is at least as much a threat as an opportunity.

Europeans want a more interventionist state at home than Americans do, and they expect to pay for it. Even in post-Thatcher Britain, 62 percent of adults polled in December 2002 would favor higher taxes in return for improved public services. The figure for the US was under 1 percent. This is less surprising when one considers that in America (where the disparities between rich and poor are greater than anywhere else in the developed world) fully 19 percent of the adult population claims to be in the richest percent of the nation—and a further percent believe they will enter the richest in their lifetime.¹³

What Europeans find perturbing

about America, then, is precisely what most Americans believe to be their nation's strongest suit: its unique mix of globalistic religiosity, minimal provision for public welfare, and maximal market freedom—the “American way of life”—coupled with a missionary foreign policy ostensibly directed at exporting that same cluster of values and practices. Here the US is ill served by globalization, which highlights for the world's poorer countries the costs of exposure to economic competition and reminds West Europeans, after the long sleep of the cold war, of the true fault lines bisecting the hitherto undifferentiated “West.”

These transatlantic distinctions will matter more, not less, in years to come: longstanding social and cultural contrasts are being highlighted and reinforced by irresolvable policy disagreements. Already the schism over the US war on Iraq has revealed something

new. In the early years of the cold war anti-American demonstrations in Europe took their cue from Soviet-financed “peace movements,” but the political and economic elites were firmly in the American camp. Today, no one is manipulating mass anti-war protests and West European leaders are breaking with America on a major international issue. The US has been forced to bribe and threaten in unprecedented public ways, with embarassingly limited success (even in Turkey as I write, thanks to the unpredictable workings of democracy).

The Iraq crisis has exposed three kinds of weakness in the modern international system. We have been reminded once again of how fragile the United Nations is, how seemingly inadequate to the hopes vested in it. Yet the recent American attitude toward the UN—give us what we want or we shall take it anyway—has paradoxically strengthened practically everyone else's appreciation of the institution's importance. The UN may lack an army, but it has acquired, over the past fifty years, a distinctive legitimacy; and legitimacy is a kind of power. In any case, the UN is all we have. Those who abuse it for their own ends do so at serious risk to their credibility as international citizens.

The second ostensible victim of the crisis has been the European Union. On the face of things Europe is now bitterly divided, thanks in equal measure to American mischief and European leaders' own incompetence. But crises can be salutary. Once the Iraq war is over the British are going to be asking hard questions about the American commitment they made in the wake of a previous Middle Eastern miscalculation, at Suez in 1956. The

East Europeans will pray for short memories in Brussels, Berlin, and Paris when it comes to preparing the Union's budget. Turkish politicians are already questioning their country's once sacrosanct relationship with America. And Jacques Chirac may have his country's last, best chance to shape a Europe independent of America and its equal in international affairs. The “hour of Europe” may not have struck, but Washington's utter indifference to European opinion has rung a fire bell in the night.

The third kind of weakness concerns the US itself: not in spite of its overwhelming military might, but because of it. Unbelievably, President Bush and his advisers have managed to make America seem the greatest threat to international stability; a mere eighteen months after September 11, the United States may have gambled away the confidence of the world. By staking

a monopoly claim on Western values and their defense, the US has prompted other Westerners to reflect on what divides them from America. By enthusiastically asserting its right to reconfigure the Muslim world, Washington has reminded Europeans in particular of the growing Muslim presence in their own cultures and its political implications.¹⁴ In short, the United States has given a lot of people occasion to rethink their relationship with it.

You don't have to be a French intellectual to believe that an overmusled America, in a hostile international environment, is weaker, not stronger, than it was before. It is also more likely to be belligerent. What it won't be, however, is irrelevant. International politics is sometimes about good and evil, but it is always about power. The US has considerable power and the nations of the world need the US on their side. A United States that oscillated unpredictably between unilateral preemptive wars and narcissistic indifference would be a global disaster, which is why so many countries at the UN tried desperately to accommodate Washington's wishes, whatever their leaders' private misgivings.

Meanwhile, “moderates” in Washington insist that all these concerns will be laid to rest if the war against Saddam turns out to have been quick, victorious, and relatively “clean.” But a military campaign is not retroactively justified by its success alone, and anyway much collateral harm is already done. The precedent of preemptive and preventive war against a hypothetical threat: the incantious, intermittent acknowledgement that this war has objectives far beyond disarming Baghdad; the alienation of foreign sentiment: these constitute war damage however successfully America handles the peace. Has the world's “indispensable nation” (Madeleine Albright) miscalculated and overreached? Almost certainly. When the earthquake abates, the tectonic plates of international politics will have shifted forever. ☐

—April 3, 2003;

this is the third of three articles.

“One French resident in twelve is now a Muslim. In Russia the figure is nearly one in six.

“The Other Face of America”; cartoon by Serguei, from Le Monde, October 27, 2002

NEW IN PAPERBACK
FROM HARVARD

# AMERICAN HISTORY

## FACING EAST FROM
INDIAN COUNTRY

A Native History of Early America

DANIEL K. RICHTER

2004 LOUIS GOTTCHAIRN PRIZE IN EIGHTIENTH CENTURY HISTORY SPONSORED BY THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY

> "An excellent, ambitious attempt to restore to history long-overlooked Indians who 'neither uncompromisingly resisted... nor who/heartedly assimilated in the face of white encroachment... A hallmark in recent Native American historiography that merits wide attention."

—KIRKUS REVIEWS

## THE DEATH PENALTY
AN AMERICAN HISTORY

STUART BANNER

> "Stuart Banner's book is fine and balanced and important. His lucid history of this grim subject is scrupulously accurate... It is a refreshingly free of the tenderness and the sensationalism that this subject invites."

—Richard A. Posner, NEW REPUBLIC

## HUNGERING FOR AMERICA

Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways
in the Age of Migration

HASIA R. DINER

> "Diner's research—into historical accounts, novels, plays, economic studies, personal narratives and vintage demographic surveys—has produced a book jampacketed with fascinating bits of Italian, Irish and Jewish food lore... Diner's bighearted attitude toward immigrants and their struggles... along with the rich anecdotal material, may inspire a pang of regret when you're finished."

—Robert Siessma,

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

## BY ORDER OF
THE PRESIDENT

FDR and the Intermittent of
Japanese Americans

GREG ROBINSON

> "An outstanding new book by historian Greg Robinson... It revisits this disturbing period and the President's role in it. Robinson sees a complex intersection of economic and social forces behind the President's decision to intern Japanese-Americans... The author avoids the trap of branding FDR as an out-and-out racist. Instead, his portrait of Roosevelt is carefully nuanced... This is an extremely valuable book. It is well written, balanced and disturbing."

—S. Scott Rohrer, NATIONAL JOURNAL

## SUBJECT MATTER

Technology, the Body, and Science
on the Anglo-American Frontier,
1500-1676

JOYCE E. CHAPLIN

> "Subject Matter is an impressively thought-provoking achievement destined to serve as a touchstone of debate for some time to come. The author's style is measured, her concerns moral, and her scholarship daring."

—Evan Haeffel, WASHINGTON TIMES

¹⁴See www.pollingreport.com/religion.htm and www.pollingreport.com/religion2.htm.

¹⁵“A Tale of Two Legacies,” The Economist, December 21, 2002; Financial Times, January 25–26, 2003.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

800 405 1619 www.hup.edu/press

Power and Weakness - Policy Review, No. 113

Page 1 of 21

Printer Friendly Version

(Original Version)

# Power and Weakness

By Robert Kagan

IT IS TIME to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world. On the all-important question of power — the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power — American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Kant's "Perpetual Peace." The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might. That is why on major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus: They agree on little and understand one another less and less. And this state of affairs is not transitory — the product of one American election or one catastrophic event. The reasons for the transatlantic divide are deep, long in development, and likely to endure. When it comes to setting national priorities, determining threats, defining challenges, and fashioning and implementing foreign and defense policies, the United States and Europe have parted ways.

It is easier to see the contrast as an American living in Europe. Europeans are more conscious of the growing differences, perhaps because they fear them more. European intellectuals are nearly unanimous in the conviction that Americans and Europeans no longer share a common "strategic culture." The European caricature at its most extreme depicts an America dominated by a "culture of death," its warlike temperament the natural product of a violent society where every man has a gun and the death penalty reigns. But even those who do not make this crude link agree there are profound differences in the way the United States and Europe conduct foreign policy.

The United States, they argue, resorts to force more quickly and, compared with Europe, is less patient with diplomacy. Americans generally see the world divided between good and evil, between friends and enemies, while Europeans see a more complex picture. When confronting real or potential adversaries, Americans generally favor policies of coercion rather than persuasion, emphasizing punitive sanctions over inducements to better behavior, the stick over the carrot. Americans tend to seek finality in international affairs: They want problems solved, threats eliminated. And, of course, Americans increasingly tend toward unilateralism in international affairs. They are less inclined to act through international institutions such as the United Nations, less inclined to work cooperatively with other nations to pursue common goals, more skeptical about international law, and more willing to operate outside its strictures when they deem it necessary, or even merely useful.¹

http://www.policyreview.org/JUN02/kagan_print.html

4/24/2003

Page 2 of 21

Europeans insist they approach problems with greater nuance and sophistication. They try to influence others through subtlety and indirection. They are more tolerant of failure, more patient when solutions don't come quickly. They generally favor peaceful responses to problems, preferring negotiation, diplomacy, and persuasion to coercion. They are quicker to appeal to international law, international conventions, and international opinion to adjudicate disputes. They try to use commercial and economic ties to bind nations together. They often emphasize process over result, believing that ultimately process can become substance.

This European dual portrait is a caricature, of course, with its share of exaggerations and oversimplifications. One cannot generalize about Europeans: Britons may have a more "American" view of power than many of their fellow Europeans on the continent. And there are differing perspectives within nations on both sides of the Atlantic. In the U.S., Democrats often seem more "European" than Republicans; Secretary of State Colin Powell may appear more "European" than Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Many Americans, especially among the intellectual elite, are as uncomfortable with the "hard" quality of American foreign policy as any European; and some Europeans value power as much as any American.

Nevertheless, the caricatures do capture an essential truth: The United States and Europe are fundamentally different today. Powell and Rumsfeld have more in common than do Powell and Hubert Védrine or even Jack Straw. When it comes to the use of force, mainstream American Democrats have more in common with Republicans than they do with most European Socialists and Social Democrats. During the 1990s even American liberals were more willing to resort to force and were more Manichean in their perception of the world than most of their European counterparts. The Clinton administration bombed Iraq, as well as Afghanistan and Sudan. European governments, it is safe to say, would not have done so. Whether they would have bombed even Belgrade in 1999, had the U.S. not forced their hand, is an interesting question.²

What is the source of these differing strategic perspectives? The question has received too little attention in recent years, either because foreign policy intellectuals and policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic have denied the existence of a genuine difference or because those who have pointed to the difference, especially in Europe, have been more interested in assailing the United States than in understanding why the United States acts as it does—or, for that matter, why Europe acts as it does. It is past time to move beyond the denial and the insults and to face the problem head-on.

Despite what many Europeans and some Americans believe, these differences in strategic culture do not spring naturally from the national characters of Americans and Europeans. After all, what Europeans now consider their more peaceful strategic culture is, historically speaking, quite new. It represents an evolution away from the very different strategic culture that dominated Europe for hundreds of years and at least until World War I. The European governments — and peoples — who enthusiastically launched themselves into that continental war believed in *machtpolitik*. While the roots of the present European worldview, like the roots of the European Union itself, can be traced back to the Enlightenment, Europe's great-power politics for the past 300 years did not follow the visionary designs of the philosophes and the physiocrats.

As for the United States, there is nothing timeless about the present heavy reliance on force

4/24/2003

Page 3 of 21

as a tool of international relations, nor about the tilt toward unilateralism and away from a
devotion to international law. Americans are children of the Enlightenment, too, and in the
early years of the republic were more faithful apostles of its creed. America's eighteenth-
and early nineteenth-century statesmen sounded much like the European statesmen of today,
extolling the virtues of commerce as the soothing balm of international strife and appealing
to international law and international opinion over brute force. The young United States
wielded power against weaker peoples on the North American continent, but when it came
to dealing with the European giants, it claimed to abjure power and assailed as atavistic the
power politics of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European empires.

Two centuries later, Americans and Europeans have traded places — and perspectives. Partly this is because in those 200 years, but especially in recent decades, the power equation has shifted dramatically: When the United States was weak, it practiced the strategies of indirection, the strategies of weakness; now that the United States is powerful, it behaves as powerful nations do. When the European great powers were strong, they believed in strength and martial glory. Now, they see the world through the eyes of weaker powers. These very different points of view, weak versus strong, have naturally produced differing strategic judgments, differing assessments of threats and of the proper means of addressing threats, and even differing calculations of interest.

But this is only part of the answer. For along with these natural consequences of the
transatlantic power gap, there has also opened a broad ideological gap. Europe, because of
its unique historical experience of the past half-century — culminating in the past decade
with the creation of the European Union — has developed a set of ideals and principles
regarding the utility and morality of power different from the ideals and principles of
Americans, who have not shared that experience. If the strategic chasm between the United
States and Europe appears greater than ever today, and grows still wider at a worrying pace,
it is because these material and ideological differences reinforce one another. The divisive
trend they together produce may be impossible to reverse.

The power gap: perception and reality

EUROPE HAS BEEN militarily weak for a long time, but until fairly recently its weakness had been obscured. World War II all but destroyed European nations as global powers, and 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. For a half-century after World War II, however, this weakness was masked by the unique geopolitical circumstances of the Cold War. 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. Its sole but vital strategic mission was to defend its own territory against any Soviet offensive, at least until the Americans arrived. Although shorn of most traditional measures of great-power status, Europe remained the geopolitical pivot, and this, along with lingering habits of world leadership, allowed Europeans to retain international influence well beyond what their sheer military capabilities might have afforded.

Europe lost this strategic centrality after the Cold War ended, but it took a few more years
for the lingering mirage of European global power to fade. During the 1990s, war in the

4/24/2003

Page 4 of 21

Balkans kept both Europeans and Americans focused on the strategic importance of the continent and on the continuing relevance of NATO. The enlargement of NATO to include former Warsaw Pact nations and the consolidation of the Cold War victory kept Europe in the forefront of the strategic discussion.

Then there was the early promise of the “new Europe.” By bonding together into a single political and economic unit — the historic accomplishment of the Maastricht treaty in 1992 — many hoped to recapture Europe’s old greatness but 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 re-emerge as a global player. In the 1990s Europeans could 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.³

But European pretensions and American apprehensions proved unfounded. The 1990s witnessed not the rise of a European superpower but the decline of Europe into relative weakness. 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, the disparity by the close of the 1990s was even more starkly apparent as it became clear that the ability of European powers, individually or collectively, to project decisive force into regions of conflict beyond the continent was negligible. Europeans could provide peacekeeping forces in the Balkans — indeed, they could and eventually did provide the vast bulk of those forces in Bosnia and Kosovo. 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.”

This inadequacy should have come as no surprise, since these were the limitations that had forced Europe to retract its global influence in the first place. Those Americans and Europeans who proposed that Europe expand its strategic role beyond the continent set an unreasonable goal. During the Cold War, Europe's strategic role had been to defend itself. It was unrealistic to expect a return to international great-power status, unless European peoples were willing to shift significant resources from social programs to military programs.

Clearly they were not. Not only were Europeans unwilling to pay to project force beyond Europe. After the Cold War, they would not pay for sufficient force to conduct even minor military actions on the 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 flex global muscles, Europeans took it as an opportunity to cash in on a sizable peace dividend. Average European defense budgets

4/24/2003

[L](LL)C[J] Page 5 of 21

gradually fell below 2 percent of GDP. Despite talk of establishing Europe as a global superpower, therefore, European military capabilities steadily fell behind those of the United States throughout the 1990s.

The end of the Cold War had a very 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. Thereafter American administrations cut the Cold War force, but not as dramatically as might have been expected. By historical standards, America's military power and 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, continuing during the Clinton years with interventions in Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. While 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 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.

How could this growing transatlantic power gap fail to create a difference in strategic perceptions? Even during the Cold War, American military predominance and Europe's relative weakness had produced important and sometimes serious disagreements. Gaullism, *Ostpolitik*, and the various movements for European independence and unity were manifestations not only of a European desire for honor and freedom of action. They also reflected a European conviction that America's approach to the Cold War was too confrontational, too militaristic, and too dangerous. Europeans believed they knew better how to deal with the Soviets: through engagement and seduction, through commercial and political ties, through patience and forbearance. It was a legitimate view, shared by many Americans. But it also reflected Europe's weakness relative to the United States, the fewer military options at Europe's disposal, and its greater vulnerability to a powerful Soviet Union. It may have reflected, too, Europe's memory of continental war. Americans, when they were not themselves engaged in the subtleties of détente, viewed the European approach as a form of appeasement, a return to the fearful mentality of the 1930s. But appeasement is never a dirty word to those whose genuine weakness offers few appealing alternatives. For them, it is a policy of sophistication.

The end of the Cold War, by widening the power gap, exacerbated the disagreements. Although transatlantic tensions are now widely assumed to have begun with the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 2001, they were already evident during the Clinton administration and may even be traced back to the administration of George H.W. Bush. By 1992, mutual recriminations were rife over Bosnia, where the United States

4/24/2003

Page 6 of 21

refused to act and Europe could not act. It was during the Clinton years that Europeans began complaining about being lectured by the “hectoring hegemon.” This was also the period in which Védrine coined the term *hyperpuissance* to describe an American behemoth too worryingly powerful to be designated merely a superpower. (Perhaps he was responding to then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s insistence that the United States was the world’s “indispensable nation.”) It was also during the 1990s that the transatlantic disagreement over American plans for missile defense emerged and many Europeans began grumbling about the American propensity to choose force and punishment over diplomacy and persuasion.

The Clinton administration, meanwhile, though relatively timid and restrained itself, grew angry and impatient with European timidity, especially the unwillingness to confront Saddam Hussein. The split in the alliance over Iraq didn’t begin with the 2000 election but in 1997, when the Clinton administration tried to increase the pressure on Baghdad and found itself at odds with France and (to a lesser extent) Great Britain in the United Nations Security Council. Even the war in Kosovo was marked by nervousness among some allies — especially Italy, Greece, and Germany — that the United States was too uncompromisingly militaristic in its approach. And while Europeans and Americans ultimately stood together in the confrontation with Belgrade, the Kosovo war produced in Europe less satisfaction at the successful prosecution of the war than unease at America’s apparent omnipotence. That apprehension would only increase in the wake of American military action after September 11, 2001.

## The psychology of power and weakness

TODAY’S TRANSATLANTIC problem, in short, is not a George Bush problem. It is a power problem. American military strength has produced a propensity to use that strength. Europe’s military weakness has produced a perfectly understandable aversion to the exercise of military power. Indeed, it has produced a powerful European interest in inhabiting a world where strength doesn’t matter, where international law and international institutions predominate, where unilateral action by powerful nations is forbidden, where all nations regardless of their strength have equal rights and are equally protected by commonly agreed-upon international rules of behavior. Europeans have a deep interest in devaluing and eventually eradicating the brutal laws of an anarchic, Hobbesian world where power is the ultimate determinant of national security and success.

This is no reproach. It is what weaker powers have wanted from time immemorial. It was what Americans wanted in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the brutality of a European system of power politics run by the global giants of France, Britain, and Russia left Americans constantly vulnerable to imperial thrashing. It was what the other small powers of Europe wanted in those years, too, only to be sneered at by Bourbon kings and other powerful monarchs, who spoke instead of *raison d’état*. The great proponent of international law on the high seas in the eighteenth century was the United States; the great opponent was Britain’s navy, the “Mistress of the Seas.” In an anarchic world, small powers always fear they will be victims. Great powers, on the other hand, often fear rules that may constrain them more than they fear the anarchy in which their power brings security and prosperity.

This natural and historic disagreement between the stronger and the weaker manifests itself

4/24/2003

Page 7 of 21

in today's transatlantic dispute over the question of unilateralism. Europeans generally believe their objection to American unilateralism is proof of their greater commitment to certain ideals concerning world order. They are less willing to acknowledge that their hostility to unilateralism is also self-interested. Europeans fear American unilateralism. They fear it perpetuates a Hobbesian world in which they may become increasingly vulnerable. The United States may be a relatively benign hegemon, but insofar as its actions delay the arrival of a world order more conducive to the safety of weaker powers, it is objectively dangerous.

This is one reason why in recent years a principal objective of European foreign policy has become, as one European observer puts it, the “multilateralising” of the United States.⁴ It is not that Europeans are teaming up against the American hegemon, as Huntington and many realist theorists would have it, by creating a countervailing power. After all, Europeans are not increasing their power. Their tactics, like their goal, are the tactics of the weak. They hope to constrain 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*. Americans have never accepted the principles of Europe's old order, never 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. Europeans oppose unilateralism in part because they have no capacity for unilateralism. Polls consistently show that Americans support multilateral action in principle — they even support acting under the rubric of the United Nations — but the fact remains that the United States can act unilaterally, and has done so many times with reasonable success. For Europeans, the appeal to multilateralism and international law has a real practical payoff and little cost. For Americans, who stand to lose at least some freedom of action, support for universal rules of behavior really is a matter of idealism.

Even when Americans and Europeans can agree on the kind of world order they would strive to build, however, they increasingly disagree about what constitutes a threat to that international endeavor. Indeed, Europeans and Americans differ most these days in their evaluation of what constitutes a tolerable versus an intolerable threat. This, too, is consistent with the disparity of power.

Europeans often argue that Americans have an unreasonable demand for “perfect” security, the product of living for centuries shielded behind two oceans.⁵ Europeans claim they know what it is like to live with danger, to exist side-by-side with evil, since they've done it for centuries. Hence their greater tolerance for such threats as may be posed by Saddam

4/24/2003

Page 8 of 21

Hussein's Iraq or the ayatollahs' Iran. Americans, they claim, make far too much of the dangers these regimes pose.

Even before September 11, this argument rang a bit hollow. The United States in its formative decades lived in a state of substantial insecurity, surrounded by hostile European empires, at constant risk of being torn apart by centrifugal forces that were encouraged by threats from without: National insecurity formed the core of Washington's Farewell Address. As for the Europeans' supposed tolerance for insecurity and evil, it can be overstated. For the better part of three centuries, European Catholics and Protestants more often preferred to kill than to tolerate each other; nor have the past two centuries shown all that much mutual tolerance between Frenchmen and Germans.

Some Europeans argue that precisely because Europe has suffered so much, it has a higher tolerance for suffering than America and therefore a higher tolerance for threats. More likely the opposite is true. The memory of their horrendous suffering in World War I made the British and French publics more fearful of Nazi Germany, not more tolerant, and this attitude contributed significantly to the appeasement of the 1930s.

A better explanation of Europe's greater tolerance for threats is, once again, Europe's relative weakness. Tolerance is also very much a realistic response in that Europe, precisely because it is weak, actually faces fewer threats than the far more powerful United States.

The psychology of weakness is easy enough to understand. A man armed only with a knife may decide that a bear prowling the forest is a tolerable danger, inasmuch as the alternative — hunting the bear armed only with a knife — is actually riskier than lying low and hoping the bear never attacks. The same man armed with a rifle, however, will likely make a different calculation of what constitutes a tolerable risk. Why should he risk being mauled to death if he doesn't need to?

This perfectly normal human psychology is helping to drive a wedge between the United States and Europe today. Europeans have concluded, reasonably enough, that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein is more tolerable for them than the risk of removing him. But Americans, being stronger, have reasonably enough developed a lower threshold of tolerance for Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction, especially after September 11. Europeans like to say that Americans are obsessed with fixing problems, but it is generally true that those with a greater capacity to fix problems are more likely to try to fix them than those who have no such capability. Americans can imagine successfully invading Iraq and toppling Saddam, and therefore more than 70 percent of Americans apparently favor such action. Europeans, not surprisingly, find the prospect both unimaginable and frightening.

The incapacity to respond to threats leads not only to tolerance but sometimes to denial. It's normal to try to put out of one's mind that which one can do nothing about. According to one student of European opinion, even the very focus on "threats" differentiates American policymakers from their European counterparts. Americans, writes Steven Everts, talk about foreign "threats" such as "the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and 'rogue states.'" But Europeans look at "challenges," such as "ethnic conflict, migration, organized crime, poverty and environmental degradation." As Everts notes, however, the key difference is less a matter of culture and philosophy than of capability. Europeans "are most worried about issues . . . that have a greater chance of being solved by political engagement and huge sums of money." In other words, Europeans focus on issues —

4/24/2003

Page 9 of 21

"challenges" — where European strengths come into play but not on those "threats" where European weakness makes solutions elusive. If Europe's strategic culture today places less value on power and military strength and more value on such soft-power tools as economics and trade, isn't it partly because Europe is militarily weak and economically strong? Americans are quicker to acknowledge the existence of threats, even to perceive them where others may not see any, because they can conceive of doing something to meet those threats.

The differing threat perceptions in the United States and Europe are not just matters of psychology, however. They are also grounded in a practical reality that is another product of the disparity of power. For Iraq and other "rogue" states objectively do *not* pose the same level of threat to Europeans as they do to the United States. There is, first of all, the American security guarantee that Europeans enjoy and have enjoyed for six decades, ever since the United States took upon itself the burden of maintaining order in far-flung regions of the world — from the Korean Peninsula to the Persian Gulf — from which European power had largely withdrawn. Europeans generally believe, whether or not they admit it to themselves, that were Iraq ever to emerge as a real and present danger, as opposed to merely a potential danger, then the United States would do something about it — as it did in 1991. If during the Cold War Europe by necessity made a major contribution to its own defense, today Europeans enjoy an unparalleled measure of "free security" because most of the likely threats are in regions outside Europe, where only the United States can project effective force. In a very practical sense — that is, when it comes to actual strategic planning — neither Iraq nor Iran nor North Korea nor any other "rogue" state in the world is primarily a European problem. Nor, certainly, is China. Both Europeans and Americans agree that these are primarily American problems.

This is why Saddam Hussein is not as great a threat to Europe as he is to the United States. He would be a greater threat to the United States even were the Americans and Europeans in complete agreement on Iraq policy, because it is the logical consequence of the transatlantic disparity of power. The task of containing Saddam Hussein belongs primarily to the United States, not to Europe, and everyone agrees on this⁶ — including Saddam, which is why he considers the United States, not Europe, his principal adversary. In the Persian Gulf, in the Middle East, and in most other regions of the world (including Europe), the United States plays the role of ultimate enforcer. "You are so powerful," Europeans often say to Americans. "So why do you feel so threatened?" But it is precisely America's great power that makes it the primary target, and often the only target. Europeans are understandably content that it should remain so.

Americans are "cowboys," Europeans love to say. And there is truth in this. The United States does act as an international sheriff, self-appointed perhaps but widely welcomed nevertheless, trying to enforce some peace and justice in what Americans see as a lawless world where outlaws need to be deterred or destroyed, and often through the muzzle of a gun. Europe, by this old West analogy, is more like a saloonkeeper. Outlaws shoot sheriffs, not saloonkeepers. In fact, from the saloonkeeper's point of view, the sheriff trying to impose order by force can sometimes be more threatening than the outlaws who, at least for the time being, may just want a drink.

When Europeans took to the streets by the millions after September 11, most Americans believed it was out of a sense of shared danger and common interest: The Europeans knew they could be next. But Europeans by and large did not feel that way and still don't. Europeans do not really believe they are next. They may be secondary targets — because

4/24/2003

[LC] Page 10 of 21

they are allied with the U.S. — but they are not the primary target, because they no longer play the imperial role in the Middle East that might have engendered the same antagonism against them as is aimed at the United States. When Europeans wept and waved American flags after September 11, it was out of genuine human sympathy, sorrow, and affection for Americans. For better or for worse, European displays of solidarity were a product more of fellow-feeling than self-interest.

## The origins of modern European foreign policy

IMPORTANT AS THE power gap may be in shaping the respective strategic cultures of the United States and Europe, it is only one part of the story. Europe in the past half-century has developed a genuinely different perspective on the role of power in international relations, a perspective that springs directly from its unique historical experience since the end of World War II. It is a perspective that Americans do not share and cannot share, inasmuch as the formative historical experiences on their side of the Atlantic have not been the same.

Consider again the qualities that make up the European strategic culture: the emphasis on negotiation, diplomacy, and commercial ties, on international law over the use of force, on seduction over coercion, on multilateralism over unilateralism. It is true that these are not traditionally European approaches to international relations when viewed from a long historical perspective. But they are a product of more recent European history. The modern European strategic culture represents a conscious rejection of the European past, a rejection of the evils of European *machtpolitik*. It is a reflection of Europeans' ardent and understandable desire never to return to that past. Who knows better than Europeans the dangers that arise from unbridled power politics, from an excessive reliance on military force, from policies produced by national egoism and ambition, even from balance of power and *raison d'état*? As German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer put it in a speech outlining his vision of the European future at Humboldt University in Berlin (May 12, 2000), "The core of the concept of Europe after 1945 was and still is a rejection of the European balance-of-power principle and the hegemonic ambitions of individual states that had emerged following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648." The European Union is itself the product of an awful century of European warfare.

Of course, it was the “hegemonic ambitions” of one nation in particular that European integration was meant to contain. And it is the integration and taming of Germany that is the great accomplishment of Europe — viewed historically, perhaps the greatest feat of international politics ever achieved. Some Europeans recall, as Fischer does, the central role played by the United States in solving the “German problem.” Fewer like to recall that the military destruction of Nazi Germany was the prerequisite for the European peace that followed. Most Europeans believe that it was the transformation of European politics, the deliberate abandonment and rejection of centuries of *machtpolitik*, that in the end made possible the “new order.” The Europeans, who invented power politics, turned themselves into born-again idealists by an act of will, leaving behind them what Fischer called “the old system of balance with its continued national orientation, constraints of coalition, traditional interest-led politics and the permanent danger of nationalist ideologies and confrontations.”

Fischer stands near one end of the spectrum of European idealism. But this is not really a right-left issue in Europe. Fischer's principal contention — that Europe has moved beyond the old system of power politics and discovered a new system for preserving peace in

4/24/2003

Page 11 of 21

international relations — is widely shared across Europe. As senior British diplomat Robert Cooper recently wrote in the *Observer* (April 7, 2002), Europe today lives in a “postmodern system” that does not rest on a balance of power but on “the rejection of force” and on “self-enforced rules of behavior.” In the “postmodern world,” writes Cooper, “*raison d’état* and the amorality of Machiavelli’s theories of statecraft . . . have been replaced by a moral consciousness” in international affairs.

American realists might scoff at this idealism. George F. Kennan assumed only his naïve fellow Americans succumbed to such “Wilsonian” legalistic and moralistic fancies, not those war-tested, historically minded European Machiavels. But, really, why shouldn’t Europeans be idealistic about international affairs, at least as they are conducted in Europe’s “postmodern system”? Within the confines of Europe, the age-old laws of international relations have been repealed. Europeans have stepped out of the Hobbesian world of anarchy into the Kantian world of perpetual peace. European life during the more than five decades since the end of World War II has been shaped not by the brutal laws of power politics but by the unfolding of a geopolitical fantasy, a miracle of world-historical importance: The German lion has laid down with the French lamb. The conflict that ravaged Europe ever since the violent birth of Germany in the nineteenth century has been put to rest.

The means by which this miracle has been achieved have understandably acquired something of a sacred mystique for Europeans, especially since the end of the Cold War. Diplomacy, negotiations, patience, the forging of economic ties, political engagement, the use of inducements rather than sanctions, the taking of small steps and tempering ambitions for success — these were the tools of Franco-German rapprochement and hence the tools that made European integration possible. Integration was not to be based on military deterrence or the balance of power. Quite the contrary. The miracle came from the rejection of military power and of its utility as an instrument of international affairs — at least within the confines of Europe. During the Cold War, few Europeans doubted the need for military power to deter the Soviet Union. But within Europe the rules were different.

Collective security was provided from without, meanwhile, by the *deus ex machina* of the United States operating through the military structures of NATO. Within this wall of security, Europeans pursued their new order, freed from the brutal laws and even the mentality of power politics. This evolution from the old to the new began in Europe during the Cold War. But the end of the Cold War, by removing even the external danger of the Soviet Union, allowed Europe's new order, and its new idealism, to blossom fully. Freed from the requirements of any military deterrence, internal or external, Europeans became still more confident that their way of settling international problems now had universal application.

"The genius of the founding fathers," European Commission President Romano Prodi commented in a speech at the Institute d'Etudes Politiques in Paris (May 29, 2001), "lay in translating extremely high political ambitions . . . into a series of more specific, almost technical decisions. This indirect approach made further action possible. Rapprochement took place gradually. From confrontation we moved to willingness to cooperate in the economic sphere and then on to integration." This is what many Europeans believe they have to offer the world: not power, but the transcendence of power. The "essence" of the European Union, writes Everts, is "all about subjecting inter-state relations to the rule of law," and Europe's experience of successful multilateral governance has in turn produced an

4/24/2003

Page 12 of 21

ambition to convert the world. Europe "has a role to play in world 'governance,'" says Prodi, a role based on replicating the European experience on a global scale. In Europe "the rule of law has replaced the crude interplay of power . . . power politics have lost their influence." And by "making a success of integration we are demonstrating to the world that it is possible to create a method for peace."

No doubt there are Britons, Germans, French, and others who would frown on such exuberant idealism. But many Europeans, including many in positions of power, routinely apply Europe's experience to the rest of the world. For is not the general European critique of the American approach to "rogue" regimes based on this special European insight? Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya — these states may be dangerous and unpleasant, even evil. But might not an "indirect approach" work again, as it did in Europe? Might it not be possible once more to move from confrontation to rapprochement, beginning with cooperation in the economic sphere and then moving on to peaceful integration? Could not the formula that worked in Europe work again with Iran or even Iraq? A great many Europeans insist that it can.

The transmission of the European miracle to the rest of the world has become Europe's new *mission civilisatrice*. Just as Americans have always believed that they had discovered the secret to human happiness and wished to export it to the rest of the world, so the Europeans have a new mission born of their own discovery of perpetual peace.

Thus we arrive at what may be the most important reason for the divergence in views between Europe and the United States. America's power, and its willingness to exercise that power — unilaterally if necessary — represents a threat to Europe's new sense of mission. Perhaps the greatest threat. American policymakers find it hard to believe, but leading officials and politicians in Europe worry more about how the United States might handle or mishandle the problem of Iraq — by undertaking unilateral and extralegal military action — than they worry about Iraq itself and Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. And while it is true that they fear such action might destabilize the Middle East and lead to the unnecessary loss of life, there is a deeper concern.⁷ Such American action represents an assault on the essence of "postmodern" Europe. It is an assault on Europe's new ideals, a denial of their universal validity, much as the monarchies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe were an assault on American republican ideals. Americans ought to be the first to understand that a threat to one's beliefs can be as frightening as a threat to one's physical security.

As Americans have for two centuries, Europeans speak with great confidence of the superiority of their global understanding, the wisdom they have to offer other nations about conflict resolution, and their way of addressing international problems. But just as in the first decade of the American republic, there is a hint of insecurity in the European claim to "success," an evident need to have their success affirmed and their views accepted by other nations, particularly by the mighty United States. After all, to deny the validity of the new European idealism is to raise profound doubts about the viability of the European project. If international problems cannot, in fact, be settled the European way, wouldn't that suggest that Europe itself may eventually fall short of a solution, with all the horrors this implies?

And, of course, it is precisely this fear that still hangs over Europeans, even as Europe moves forward. Europeans, and particularly the French and Germans, are not entirely sure that the problem once known as the "German problem" really has been solved. As their

4/24/2003

Page 13 of 21

various and often very different proposals for the future constitution of Europe suggest, the French are still not confident they can trust the Germans, and the Germans are still not sure they can trust themselves. This fear can at times hinder progress toward deeper integration, but it also propels the European project forward despite innumerable obstacles. The European project must succeed, for how else to overcome what Fischer, in his Humboldt University speech, called "the risks and temptations objectively inherent in Germany's dimensions and central situation"? Those historic German "temptations" play at the back of many a European mind. And every time Europe contemplates the use of military force, or is forced to do so by the United States, there is no avoiding at least momentary consideration of what effect such a military action might have on the "German question."

Perhaps it is not just coincidence that the amazing progress toward European integration in recent years has been accompanied not by the emergence of a European superpower but, on the contrary, by a diminishing of European military capabilities relative to the United States. Turning Europe into a global superpower capable of balancing the power of the United States may have been one of the original selling points of the European Union — an independent European foreign and defense policy was supposed to be one of the most important byproducts of European integration. But, in truth, the ambition for European “power” is something of an anachronism. It is an atavistic impulse, inconsistent with the ideals of postmodern Europe, whose very existence depends on the rejection of power politics. Whatever its architects may have intended, European integration has proved to be the enemy of European military power and, indeed, of an important European global role.

This phenomenon has manifested itself not only in flat or declining European defense budgets, but in other ways, too, even in the realm of “soft” power. European leaders talk of Europe’s essential role in the world. Prodi yearns “to make our voice heard, to make our actions count.” And it is true that Europeans spend a great deal of money on foreign aid — more per capita, they like to point out, than does the United States. Europeans engage in overseas military missions, so long as the missions are mostly limited to peacekeeping. But while the EU periodically dips its fingers into troubled international waters in the Middle East or the Korean Peninsula, the truth is that EU foreign policy is probably the most anemic of all the products of European integration. As Charles Grant, a sympathetic observer of the EU, recently noted, few European leaders “are giving it much time or energy.”⁸ EU foreign policy initiatives tend to be short-lived and are rarely backed by sustained agreement on the part of the various European powers. That is one reason they are so easily rebuffed, as was the case in late March when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon blocked EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana from meeting with Yasser Arafat (only to turn around the next day and allow a much lower-ranking American negotiator to meet with the Palestinian leader).

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. But given the enormous and difficult agenda of integration, this European tendency to look inward is understandable. EU enlargement, 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

4/24/2003

Page 14 of 21

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 are unwelcome on substance — on a missile defense system and the ABM treaty, belligerence toward Iraq, support for Israel — are all the more unwelcome because for Europe, they are a distraction. Europeans often point to American insularity and parochialism. But Europeans themselves have turned intensely introspective. As Dominique Moisi noted in the *Financial Times* (March 11, 2002), the recent 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 Le Pen demonstrated. But Le Pen is not a foreign policy hawk. And as Moisi noted, “for most French voters in 2002, 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.”

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, and for the very good reason that Europe does not see a mission for itself that requires power. Its mission is to oppose power. It is revealing that the argument most often advanced by Europeans for augmenting their military strength these days is not that it will allow Europe to expand its strategic purview. It is merely to rein in and “multilateralize” the United States. “America,” writes the pro-American British scholar Timothy Garton Ash in the *New York Times* (April 9, 2002), “has too much power for anyone’s good, including its own.” 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. Even Védrine has stopped talking about counterbalancing the United States. Now he shrugs and declares there “is no reason for the Europeans to match a country that can fight four wars at once.” It was one thing for Europe in the 1990s to increase its collective expenditures on defense from $150 billion per year to $180 billion when the United States was spending $280 billion per year. But now the United States is heading toward spending as much as $500 billion per year, and Europe has not the slightest intention of keeping up. European analysts lament the continent’s “strategic irrelevance.” NATO Secretary General George Robertson has taken to calling Europe a “military pygmy” in an effort to shame Europeans into spending more and doing so more wisely. But who honestly believes Europeans will fundamentally change their way of doing business? They have many reasons not to.

## The U.S. response

IN THINKING ABOUT the divergence of their own views and Europeans', Americans must not lose sight of the main point: The new Europe is indeed a

4/24/2003

Page 15 of 21

blessed miracle and a reason for enormous celebration — on both sides of the Atlantic. For Europeans, it is the realization of a long and improbable dream: a continent free from nationalist strife and blood feuds, from military competition and arms races. War between the major European powers is almost unimaginable. After centuries of misery, not only for Europeans but also for those pulled into their conflicts — as Americans were twice in the past century — the new Europe really has emerged as a paradise. It is something to be cherished and guarded, not least by Americans, who have shed blood on Europe's soil and would shed more should the new Europe ever fail.

Nor should we forget that the Europe of today is very much the product of American foreign policy stretching back over six decades. European integration was an American project, too, after World War II. And so, recall, was European weakness. When the Cold War dawned, Americans such as Dean Acheson hoped to create in Europe a powerful partner against the Soviet Union. But that was not the only American vision of Europe underlying U.S. policies during the twentieth century. Predating it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt's vision of a Europe that had been rendered, in effect, strategically irrelevant. As the historian John Lamberton Harper has put it, he wanted "to bring about a radical reduction in the weight of Europe" and thereby make possible "the retirement of Europe from world politics."⁹

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 Americans of Roosevelt's era had a different view. In the late 1930s 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."¹⁰ By the early 1940s 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. "After Germany is disarmed," FDR pointedly asked, "what is the reason for France having a big military establishment?" Charles DeGaulle found such questions "disquieting for Europe and for France." Even though the United States pursued Acheson's vision during the Cold War, there was always a part of American policy that reflected Roosevelt's vision, too. Eisenhower undermining Britain and France at Suez was only the most blatant of many American efforts to cut Europe down to size and reduce its already weakened global influence.

But the more important American contribution to Europe's current world-apart status stemmed not from anti-European but from pro-European impulses. It was a commitment to Europe, not hostility to Europe, that 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 to begin the process of European integration.

Europe's evolution to 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 such internal threats as may have been 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 the Humboldt University speech, noted two "historic decisions" that made the new Europe possible: "the USA's decision to stay in Europe" and

4/24/2003

Page 16 of 21

"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 United States, in short, solved the Kantian paradox for the Europeans. Kant had argued that the only solution to the immoral horrors of the Hobbesian world was the creation of a world government. But he also feared that the "state of universal peace" made possible by world government would be an even greater threat to human freedom than the Hobbesian international order, inasmuch as such a government, with its monopoly of power, would become "the most horrible despotism."11 How nations could achieve perpetual peace without destroying human freedom was a problem Kant could not solve. But for Europe the problem was solved by the United States. By providing security from outside, the United States has rendered it unnecessary for Europe's supranational government to provide it. Europeans did not need power to achieve peace and they do not need power to preserve it.

The current situation abounds in ironies. Europe's rejection of power politics, 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 United States military power has solved the European problem, especially the "German problem," allows Europeans today to believe that American military power, and the "strategic culture" that has created and sustained it, are outmoded and dangerous.

Most Europeans do not 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. Some Britons, not surprisingly, understand it best. Thus 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

4/24/2003

[LC]

Page 17 of 21

laws of the jungle.”

Cooper's argument is directed at Europe, and it is appropriately coupled with a call for Europeans to cease neglecting their defenses, “both physical and psychological.” But what Cooper really describes 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 those rules. The United States is already operating according to Cooper's double standard, and 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 this 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 Il and the Jiang Zemins, leaving the happy benefits to others.

## An acceptable division?

IS THIS SITUATION tolerable for the United States? In many ways, it is. Contrary to what many believe, the United States can shoulder the burden of maintaining global security without much help from Europe. The United States spends a little over 3 percent of its GDP on defense today. Were Americans to increase that to 4 percent — meaning a defense budget in excess of $500 billion per year — it would still represent a smaller percentage of national wealth than Americans spent on defense throughout most of the past half-century. Even Paul Kennedy, who invented the term “imperial overstretch” in the late 1980s (when the United States was spending around 7 percent of its GDP on defense), believes the United States can sustain its current military spending levels and its current global dominance far into the future. Can the United States handle the rest of the world without much help from Europe? The answer is that it already does. The United States has maintained strategic stability in Asia with no help from Europe. In the Gulf War, European help was token; so it has been more recently in Afghanistan, where Europeans are once again “doing the dishes”; and so it would be in an invasion of Iraq to unseat Saddam. Europe has had little to offer the United States in strategic military terms since the end of the Cold War — except, of course, that most valuable of strategic assets, a Europe at peace.

The United States can manage, therefore, at least in material terms. Nor can one argue that the American people are unwilling to shoulder this global burden, since they have done so for a decade already. After September 11, they seem willing to continue doing so for a long time to come. Americans apparently feel no resentment at not being able to enter a “postmodern” utopia. There is no evidence most Americans desire to. Partly because they are so powerful, they take pride in their nation’s military power and their nation’s special role in the world.

Americans have no experience that would lead them to embrace fully the ideals and principles that now animate Europe. Indeed, Americans derive their understanding of the

4/24/2003

Page 18 of 21

world from a very different set of experiences. In the first half of the twentieth century, Americans had a flirtation with a certain kind of internationalist idealism. Wilson's "war to end all wars" was followed a decade later by an American secretary of state putting his signature to a treaty outlawing war. FDR in the 1930s put his faith in non-aggression pacts and asked merely that Hitler promise not to attack a list of countries Roosevelt presented to him. But then came Munich and Pearl Harbor, and then, after a fleeting moment of renewed idealism, the plunge into the Cold War. The "lesson of Munich" came to dominate American strategic thought, and although it was supplanted for a time by the "lesson of Vietnam," today it remains the dominant paradigm. While a small segment of the American elite still yearns for "global governance" and eschews military force, Americans from Madeleine Albright to Donald Rumsfeld, from Brent Scowcroft to Anthony Lake, still remember Munich, figuratively if not literally. And for younger generations of Americans who do not remember Munich or Pearl Harbor, there is now September 11. After September 11, even many American globalizers demand blood.

Americans are idealists, but they have no experience of promoting ideals successfully without power. Certainly, they have no experience of successful supranational governance; little to make them place their faith in international law and international institutions, much as they might wish to; and even less to let them travel, with the Europeans, beyond power. Americans, as good children of the Enlightenment, still believe in the perfectibility of man, and they retain hope for the perfectibility of the world. But they remain realists in the limited sense that they still believe in the necessity of power in a world that remains far from perfection. Such law as there may be to regulate international behavior, they believe, exists because a power like the United States defends it by force of arms. In other words, just as Europeans claim, Americans can still sometimes see themselves in heroic terms — as Gary Cooper at high noon. They will defend the townspeople, whether the townspeople want them to or not.

The problem lies neither in American will or capability, then, but precisely in the inherent moral tension of the current international situation. As is so often the case in human affairs, the real question is one of intangibles — of fears, passions, and beliefs. The problem is that the United States must sometimes play by the rules of a Hobbesian world, even though in doing so it violates European norms. It must refuse to abide by certain international conventions that may constrain its ability to fight effectively in Robert Cooper's jungle. It must support arms control, but not always for itself. It must live by a double standard. And it must sometimes act unilaterally, not out of a passion for unilateralism but, given a weak Europe that has moved beyond power, because the United States has no choice *but* to act unilaterally.

Few Europeans admit, as Cooper does implicitly, that such American behavior may redound to the greater benefit of the civilized world, that American power, even employed under a double standard, may be the best means of advancing human progress — and perhaps the only means. Instead, many Europeans today have come to consider the United States itself to be the outlaw, a rogue colossus. Europeans have complained about President Bush's "unilateralism," but they are coming to the deeper realization that the problem is not Bush or any American president. It is systemic. And it is incurable.

Given that the United States is unlikely to reduce its power and that Europe is unlikely to increase more than marginally its own power or the will to use what power it has, the future seems certain to be one of increased transatlantic tension. The danger — if it is a danger —

4/24/2003

Page 19 of 21

is that the United States and Europe will become positively estranged. Europeans will become more shrill in their attacks on the United States. The United States will become less inclined to listen, or perhaps even to care. The day could come, if it has not already, when Americans will no more heed the pronouncements of the EU than they do the pronouncements of ASEAN or the Andean Pact.

To those of us who came of age in the Cold War, the strategic decoupling of Europe and the United States seems frightening. DeGaulle, when confronted by FDR's vision of a world where Europe was irrelevant, recoiled and suggested that this vision "risked endangering the Western world." If Western Europe was to be considered a "secondary matter" by the United States, would not FDR only "weaken the very cause he meant to serve — that of civilization?" Western Europe, DeGaulle insisted, was "essential to the West. Nothing can replace the value, the power, the shining example of the ancient peoples." Typically, DeGaulle insisted this was "true of France above all." But leaving aside French *amour propre*, did not DeGaulle have a point? If Americans were to decide that Europe was no more than an irritating irrelevancy, would American society gradually become unmoored from what we now call the West? It is not a risk to be taken lightly, on either side of the Atlantic.

So what is to be done? The obvious answer is that Europe should follow the course that Cooper, Ash, Robertson, and others recommend and build up its military capabilities, even if only marginally. There is not much ground for hope that this will happen. But, then, who knows? Maybe concern about America's overweening power really will create some energy in Europe. Perhaps the atavistic impulses that still swirl in the hearts of Germans, Britons, and Frenchmen — the memory of power, international influence, and national ambition — can still be played upon. Some Britons still remember empire; some Frenchmen still yearn for *la gloire*; some Germans still want their place in the sun. These urges are now mostly channeled into the grand European project, but they could find more traditional expression. Whether this is to be hoped for or feared is another question. It would be better still if Europeans could move beyond fear and anger at the rogue colossus and remember, again, the vital necessity of having a strong America — for the world and especially for Europe.

Americans can help. It is true that the Bush administration came into office with a chip on its shoulder. It was hostile to the new Europe — as to a lesser extent was the Clinton administration — seeing it not so much as an ally but as an albatross. Even after September 11, when the Europeans offered their very limited military capabilities in the fight in Afghanistan, the United States resisted, fearing that European cooperation was a ruse to tie America down. The Bush administration viewed NATO's historic decision to aid the United States under Article V less as a boon than as a booby trap. An opportunity to draw Europe into common battle out in the Hobbesian world, even in a minor role, was thereby unnecessarily lost.

Americans are powerful enough that they need not fear Europeans, even when bearing gifts. Rather than viewing the United States as a Gulliver tied down by Lilliputian threads, American leaders should realize that they are hardly constrained at all, that Europe is not really capable of constraining the United States. If the United States could move past the anxiety engendered by this inaccurate sense of constraint, it could begin to show more understanding for the sensibilities of others, a little generosity of spirit. It could pay its respects to multilateralism and the rule of law and try to build some international political capital for those moments when multilateralism is impossible and unilateral action

4/24/2003

(LC)
Page 20 of 21

unavoidable. It could, in short, take more care to show what the founders called a "decent respect for the opinion of mankind."

These are small steps, and they will not address the deep problems that beset the transatlantic relationship today. But, after all, it is more than a cliché that the United States and Europe share a set of common Western beliefs. Their aspirations for humanity are much the same, even if their vast disparity of power has now put them in very different places. Perhaps it is not too naïvely optimistic to believe that a little common understanding could still go a long way.

## Notes

¹One representative French observer describes “a U.S. mindset” that “tends to emphasize military, technical and unilateral solutions to international problems, possibly at the expense of co-operative and political ones.” See Gilles Andreani, “The Disarray of U.S. Non-Proliferation Policy,” *Survival* (Winter 1999-2000).

²The case of Bosnia in the early 1990s stands out as an instance where some Europeans, chiefly British Prime Minister Tony Blair, were at times more forceful in advocating military action than first the Bush and then the Clinton administration. (Blair was also an early advocate of using air power and even ground troops in the Kosovo crisis.) And Europeans had forces on the ground in Bosnia when the United States did not, although in a un peacekeeping role that proved ineffective when challenged.

³Samuel P. Huntington, “The Lonely Superpower,” *Foreign Affairs* (March-April 1999).

⁴Steven Everts, “Unilateral America, Lightweight Europe?: Managing Divergence in Transatlantic Foreign Policy,” *Centre for European Reform working paper* (February 2001).

⁵For that matter, this is also the view commonly found in American textbooks.

⁶Notwithstanding the British contribution of patrols of the “no-fly zone.”

⁷The common American argument that European policy toward Iraq and Iran is dictated by financial considerations is only partly right. Are Europeans greedier than Americans? Do American corporations not influence American policy in Asia and Latin America, as well as in the Middle East? The difference is that American strategic judgments sometimes conflict with and override financial interests. For the reasons suggested in this essay, that conflict is much less common for Europeans.

⁸Charles Grant, “A European View of ESDP,” *Centre for European Policy Studies working paper* (April 2001).

⁹John Lamberton Harper, *American Visions of Europe: Franklin D. Roosevelt, George F. Kennan, and Dean G. Acheson* (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3. The following discussion of the differing American perspectives on Europe owes much to Harper's fine book.

4/24/2003

SIMON & SCHUSTER

Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

Copyright © 2001 by Henry A. Kissinger
All rights reserved,
including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form.

SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks
of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Designed by Karolina Harris

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kissinger, Henry, date.

Does America need a foreign policy? : toward a diplomacy
for the 21st century / Henry Kissinger.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. United States—Foreign relations. I. Title.

JZ1480.K57 2001

327.73—dc21

2001020564

ISBN 0-684-85567-4

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

No one has done more to make this book possible than my wife, Nancy. She has been my emotional and intellectual support for decades, and her incisive editorial comments were only a small part of her contribution.

I have been fortunate in my friends and associates, some going back to years together in government service, who permitted me to impose on them for advice, editing, research, and general comments. I will never be able to thank them enough for what they have meant to me over the years and in preparing this volume.

Peter Rodman, my tutee at Harvard, friend, and counselor of a lifetime, read, reviewed, and helped edit the entire manuscript, and I am grateful for his perceptions and critique.

The same is true of Jerry Bremer, another long-time associate, whose pithy advice and editorial comments sharpened my thinking.

William Rogers continued educating me on the chapter dealing with Latin America and regarding the legal aspects of the concept of universal jurisdiction.

Steve Graubard, professor at Brown University and former editor of *Daedalus*, and I were graduate students together and have been friends ever since. He read and commented on the manu-

Does America Need a Foreign Policy? 33

TWO

America and Europe:
The World of
Democracies I

THE Wilsonian ideal of an international order based on a common devotion to democratic institutions and settling its disputes by negotiations rather than war has triumphed among the nations bordering the North Atlantic. The governments are democratic, and the label "democracy" denotes genuinely pluralistic states with regular and peaceful alternation of parties in office. This is in contrast to much of the rest of the world where the word is often invoked to legitimize whoever is in power and where changes in government occur, if at all, by coups or coup-like procedures. In the Atlantic area, war is no longer accepted as an instrument of policy; in the past half-century, force has been used only at the fringes of Europe and between ethnic groups, not between traditional nation-states.

This is why, for half a century, the partnership of nations bordering the North Atlantic has served as the keystone of American foreign policy. Even after the disappearance of the Soviet threat, the Atlantic partnership has remained for the United States the crucial buttress of international order. Beyond the definition of mutual defense of a traditional alliance, the nations of the North Atlantic have evolved a web of consultations and relationships to affirm and

achieve a common political destiny. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, American assistance staved off Europe's economic collapse. And when the Soviet Union became threatening, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was called into being. Its military arm has been an integrated military command; its permanent Council of ambassadors has coordinated allied diplomacy. More recently, globalization has deepened economic ties to a point where investments by the two sides in each other have linked the well-being of North America and Europe in a nearly inextricable manner.

And yet—paradoxically—relations between North America and Europe are beset by controversy. It is not that allied relations have been traditionally idyllic or even smooth. Controversy marked the Alliance's growing pains—as was to be expected when nations which had dominated global affairs for three centuries found themselves suddenly largely dependent on decisions being made three thousand miles away in Washington. During the Suez crisis in 1956, the Eisenhower administration dissociated from its British and French allies and actively worked to defeat them; the Kennedy administration's handling of the Berlin Crisis in the 1960s was greeted with misgivings in both Germany and France; the Nixon administration's attempt to define a new transatlantic relationship in the 1970s was widely resisted, especially by France; and the placement of American nuclear missiles in Europe in the 1980s was opposed by demonstrations all over the continent.

There is now, however, an important qualitative difference. The early crises within the Alliance were generally in the nature of family disputes, having to do with differing interpretations of the requirements of an agreed common security. Today the very definition of common security and, indeed, of common purpose is being questioned. The issue of American dissociation from European colonial interests now seems almost historically quaint. At this writing, it is our European allies who dissociate from American policies outside the NATO area, often demonstratively—from sanctions against Cuba, Iraq, or Iran to America's policy in the Taiwan Strait and the plan to build a national missile defense. While,

34 Henry Kissinger

in the past, opposition parties in European countries often de-
nounced American deployment decisions, it is unprecedented for
heads of NATO governments to attack publicly, or side by side with
a Russian leader, the strategic judgments of an ally on whom their
security depends. Yet that is what happened when Russian Presi-
dent Vladimir Putin visited Paris in October 2000. At a joint press
conference with his guest, President Jacques Chirac, speaking on
behalf of the European Union—of which France held the presi-
dency for six months—attacked the Clinton administration's plan
to explore revision of the ABM Treaty:

The European Union and Russia have an identical view. We have condemned any potential revision of the ABM Treaty, believing that such a revision will involve a risk of proliferation that will be very dangerous for the future.¹

More challenging was the dispatch of a conciliation team from
the European Union to explore possibilities of easing tensions on
the Korean peninsula, with a mission the declared opposite of the
American policy proclaimed by President Bush barely two weeks
earlier. The merits of the two views are not at issue. But, at a mini-
mum, greater patience and restraint in an explosive region where
the United States is taking all the military risks would have been in
order.

During the Cold War, European integration was urged as a
method of strengthening the Atlantic partnership; today many of
its advocates view it as a means of creating a counterweight to the
United States. The distinctive feature of the European Union mil-
itary force, which will come into being by 2003, is to create a capac-
ity to act outside the NATO framework. In the same spirit, German
Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer has stated that, henceforth, the
United Nations would play a larger role in German foreign policy
and, in some cases, a larger role than NATO.²

When the Alliance was formed, its unifying element was a com-
mon policy toward the Soviet Union. Today the principal allies on
both sides of the Atlantic are seeking to define their own "special
relationships" with Moscow. While their efforts are not necessarily

Does America Need a Foreign Policy? 35

directed against each other, neither are they especially solicitous of
the views of their allies. What they seek is to magnify their own op-
tions—to some extent as an insurance policy against each other—
by gaining Moscow's goodwill.

What passes for a common Alliance policy toward Russia is often
a sentimental interpretation of the personality of the current Russ-
ian leader—at one time Boris Yeltsin, now (at least initially)
Vladimir Putin—leaving each ally free to gear national policy to
the psychological criteria it chooses to elaborate for itself.

The disagreements in the economic field are, if anything, even
sharper. Major trade frictions have erupted in a variety of threats of
United States retaliation against Europe, over bananas and beef,
and by the European Union against the United States over Ameri-
can taxation of exports. The two sides of the Atlantic are at this
writing deadlocked on how, or even whether, to launch a new mul-
tilateral trade negotiation in the World Trade Organization. They
disagree over both the substance and the process. On the horizon
looms another confrontation over energy policy, especially if oil
prices continue to remain high.

Even more worrisome is the loss of human contact between the
two sides of the Atlantic, which is occurring despite unprecedented
travel. More Americans and Europeans are visiting the other con-
tinent than ever before. But they move about in the cocoon of their
preconceptions or professional relationships, without acquiring a
knowledge of the history and intangible values of the other side of
the Atlantic. What the current generation of Americans knows about
Europe grows far more out of business deals than political or cultural
ties. On the other hand, the United States, about which most Euro-
peans learn through their mass media, is defined by the death penalty,
the allegedly inadequate system of medical insurance, the vast Amer-
ican prison population, and other comparable stereotypes.

To be sure, the principal leaders of Europe have used George W.
Bush's accession to the presidency to reaffirm their commitment to
Atlantic ties. The question remains, however, whether the Alliance
is still considered the expression of a common destiny or whether it
is turning into a safety net for essentially national or regional poli-

36 Henry Kissinger

cies. The leaders of both sides of the Atlantic face no more impor-
tant challenge than to answer this question.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF
THE ATLANTIC RELATIONSHIP

The drift in Atlantic relations is not caused by specific policies of
individual leaders; rather, these policies reflect reactions to four
fundamental changes in the traditional relationship:

* the disintegration of the Soviet Union;

• the unification of Germany;

* the increasing tendency to treat foreign policy as a tool of domes-
tic policy;

* the burgeoning of a European identity.

Ever since America's entry into the First World War in 1917, its policy has been based on the recognition that it is in its geopolitical interest to prevent a potentially hostile power from dominating Europe. To defend that interest, the United States abandoned its tradition of isolation after the Second World War and confronted the Soviet Union in a protracted struggle. Europe hailed America's role in both instances even when its missionary zeal and tendency to equate foreign policy with moral improvement grated on leaders whose national history had taught them the virtue of more limited ambitions. The consciousness that the Soviet threat could only be met by a joint effort of the nations bordering the Atlantic and by subordinating largely national interests to the common good spawned the existing Alliance structure—perhaps the most effective in history.

In the process, there developed an attitude on both sides of the
Atlantic that went beyond the traditional framework of common
defense: the members of the Atlantic Alliance thought of them-
selves as belonging to a unique and special community of values and
not simply as an aggregation of national interests. But the end of
the Soviet threat has revived the temptations of both more tradi-

Does America Need a Foreign Policy? 37

tional patterns of national diplomacy and of domestic politics, as
will be discussed later in the chapter.

The unification of Germany accelerated these tendencies. It is one of the ironies of history that Germany should have emerged stronger in relation to its neighbors after each of the world wars it lost than it had been before they began. Nothing proves more clearly the limitations of human foresight than the outcome of these wars. Germany was instrumental in starting the first—though the other European states eagerly seized the opportunity—and it single-handedly provoked the second to achieve European, and possibly world, domination. Had it never fought these wars, Germany would have reached almost automatically the preeminent position, at least within Europe, which it is now approaching on the basis of the strength of its economy and the vitality of its people—this in spite of two defeats, the occupation of its territory by foreign troops, and its partition into two competing states for more than four decades. The debacle of the Nazi period, the country's division, and the fact that the Cold War demarcation line ran through its center convinced the founders of the new German democracy that they must avoid above all any repetition of a solitary national course.

Germany, the last major European state to be unified, became a
nation not as the result of a popular movement, but because the
princes of the various German principalities proclaimed the state in
1871, following the lead of a Prussia which had defeated them mil-
itarily five years earlier. In Germany, unlike in the other major
European states, nationalism and democracy evolved on separate—
often conflicting—tracks for the better part of a century. As a result,
German nationalism frequently had about it an abstract, emo-
tional, and romantic quality.

Above all, it lacked a sense of proportion. This turned the strate-
gic problems produced by Germany's central geographic location
into a permanent source of instability for Europe. Before unifica-
tion in 1871, Germany's division into dozens of small states had, for
two centuries, enabled its neighbors to contest the European bal-
ance of power on German soil. After unification, Germany moved

38 Henry Kissinger

to the other extreme, seeking to ensure security against all its
neighbors simultaneously. But if Germany was strong enough to
defeat all its neighbors if they were allied, it was clearly strong
enough to overwhelm them individually. Thus Germany's effort to
escape its strategic predicament produced its worst nightmare: a
coalition of all the neighboring states against it. Germany has been
for centuries either too weak or too strong for the peace of Europe.

In the end, this problem has been solved only twice in German
history: by Otto von Bismarck in the first decades of a unified Ger-
many in the nineteenth century, and after World War II by Konrad
Adenauer and his successor chancellors of the Federal Republic.
Bismarck opted for security via diplomatic dexterity. He sought to
arrange the relations of European states toward each other in such
a manner that Germany would always have more options than any
possible rival, thereby preventing the formation of hostile coali-
tions. This tour de force proved too subtle and complex for his suc-
cessors who substituted an arms race for diplomatic skill and slid
into the First World War by the excessive flexing of muscles.

Adenauer and his successors inherited a defeated, partitioned,
and devastated Germany, whose taste for solitary adventures had
been exhausted by two wars. They had learned that Germany's past
conduct had generated too much distrust to allow for the Bismarck
style of subtle combinations, and that the German romantic ten-
dency would overwhelm the sense of proportion on which the Bis-
marckian diplomacy was based. In any event, a national diplomacy
was precluded by the realities of allied occupation.

As the Cold War division of Germany stretched into decades,
the Federal Republic emphasized both its Atlantic and European
vocations. It sought security from Soviet military pressures by sup-
porting American leadership in the Atlantic Alliance, and it strove
for legitimacy vis-à-vis the East German Soviet satellite by accept-
ing French political leadership on European integration. Playing
second fiddle to the United States within NATO and to France
within Europe, the Federal Republic emerged a few decades after its
unconditional surrender as the strongest military and economic
power in Europe and as a key building block of Atlantic solidarity.

Does America Need a Foreign Policy? 39

In the early stages of the Cold War, there was considerable op-
position to the Adenauer course. It was expressed mostly in the So-
cial Democratic Party, which had heroically resisted the Nazis and
included among its members some of the most admirable figures in
German politics. In the early days of the Federal Republic, its lead-
ers advocated what amounted to a national policy in neutralist
garb—in concrete terms, what they proposed was to give up West-
ern military ties in return for unification.

By the 1970s, the SPD (in its German acronym) had come to
terms with Germany's integration into the West. Two distin-
guished Social Democratic chancellors, Willy Brandt and Helmut
Schmidt, reinforced Germany's Atlantic and European ties, albeit
with a greater willingness to explore diplomatic options with the
Communist East, and supported by the United States, at first hesi-
tantly, later with conviction. Brandt's "opening to the East" in ne-
gotiations with Moscow led to the formal acceptance of Germany's
division and laid the basis for a four-power agreement on Berlin
which, in 1971, ended the threat to that city. The lingering interest
in Germany's eastern option as a road to unification and a differ-
ent approach to military strategy on the part of the SPD's rank and
file brought down Chancellor Schmidt when, in 1982, he was pre-
paring to implement the NATO decision to deploy American
intermediate-range missiles on German soil.

In 1998—after being out of office for sixteen years—the SPD took over the direction of Germany in coalition with the so-called Green (Environmental) Party, whose platform had been histori-cally hostile to the Atlantic Alliance. In office, neither of these par-ties has stressed the issues that characterized them in opposition—due in part to the fact that the post-Cold War world has overtaken many of the debates of the 1980s.

Inevitably, and independent of the party in office, the new in-
ternational alignment has brought about greater emphasis on the
German national interest. When the collapse of the Soviet Union
reduced (and, for a time, eliminated) the fear of military attack from
the East and when, in 1990, unification destroyed the East German
Soviet satellite, the political balance within Europe and NATO ba-

40 Henry Kissinger

sically changed. Germany's willingness to accept a subordinate status in NATO as well as in Europe has diminished. As Russian recovery gains momentum, the traditional temptation of special German relations with Russia has reappeared.

Three basic trends are likely to emerge as Germany becomes less dependent on the United States for security and on France for legitimacy:

* A greater assertiveness will become evident within both the Atlantic Alliance and European institutions. Gradually Germany may well seek for itself the role within Europe that France insists Europe should play within the Atlantic Alliance.

* Germany will always be far less prepared to put at risk its links to the United States than is provided for by French prescriptions for Atlantic relations. In that sense, it provides a limit to the implementation of French rhetoric.

* As Germany's relative role and power grow, and as Russia recovers, there will emerge temptations for a special Russo-German rapprochement based on the Bismarckian tradition that the two countries prospered when they were close and suffered when they were in conflict.

These tendencies will not be confined to the governing parties. Not only did the younger generation of Germans not experience the postwar trauma—not to speak of the Nazi one—but the former Communist third of Germany did not participate in the democratic experience until the last decade of the twentieth century. Thus a new kind of nationalism is likely to develop, not militarily aggressive but resistant to discrimination based on a past which the vast majority of Germans never knew and insistent on political influence for Germany commensurate with its economic and military potential.

These trends will tempt other European nations to court Russia, in part as a reaction to American dominance, in part as a counterweight to Germany—though, in such a contest, Germany's bar-

gaining position vis-à-vis Russia would appear to be much stronger. Were the United States eventually to enter the same game, the Atlantic relationship would change its character and become more like the traditional European diplomacy of balancing rewards and penalties.

## THE CHANGE IN ATLANTIC AND EUROPEAN LEADERSHIP

The leaders who created the Atlantic relationship had learned in the crucible of the Second World War that divisions among the democracies in the period of appeasement of the 1930s and during the long road to victory had nearly caused a worldwide catastrophe. They launched the Marshall Plan and NATO, overcame a series of direct and indirect Soviet challenges, and laid the basis for the eventual defeat of Communism.

The generation in office or dominating elections in the 1990s in the countries bordering the Atlantic emerged from quite a different set of experiences. Their fathers were reared on confidence in American power and the importance of allied unity. The sons and daughters grew up during the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s that had at their cores a profound distrust of American power and, indeed, of the role of power in international affairs in general. They identified foreign policy with nonstrategic causes and were uncomfortable with the notion of national interest. The question their attitude raised was not whether such issues are important but whether they can be sustained if the traditional framework of security is neglected.

The generation in office at the turn of the millennium in almost all the countries of Western Europe represented center-left parties that had had their formative experiences in some type of anti-American protest. Even in the United States, many in the foreign policy establishment of the Clinton administration had grown up with the conviction that America had no right to project its power abroad until it faced up to and overcame its own domestic shortcomings or, if it did, that it should do so only on behalf of causes

Does America Need a Foreign Policy? 41

42 Henry Kissinger

other than its own interests. Some of them held the view that it was
the United States that bore a heavy responsibility for the origins of
the Cold War, by awakening Soviet fears through an excessive con-
cern with military power.³

While the founding generation treated the Atlantic Alliance as
the point of departure for a union of democracies, the protest gen-
eration views the Atlantic Alliance as a relic of the Cold War, if not
an obstacle to overcoming it. Thus President Clinton, in a joint
press conference with Russian President Boris Yeltsin in March
1997, stated that the "old NATO" was "basically a mirror image of
the Warsaw Pact," in effect equating a voluntary association of
democratic nations with a structure the Soviet Union had imposed
on the subjugated countries of Eastern Europe.⁴ The protest gen-
eration's goal was less to strengthen an Atlantic community than to
"erase dividing lines." A good example is a speech by Clinton at
West Point in May 1997, during which he gave four reasons for
NATO enlargement:

* to strengthen the Alliance for "addressing conflicts that threaten the common peace of all" in the new century (presumably ethnic and out-of-area conflicts);

* to "help to secure the historic gains of democracy in Europe;"

* to "encourage prospective members to resolve their differences peacefully;" and

* along with the Partnership for Peace and the special arrangements with Russia and Ukraine, to "erase the artificial line in Europe that Stalin drew, and bring Europe together in security, not keep it apart in instability."⁵

While each of these arguments had merit, they omitted the most
important reason for admitting Poland, Hungary, and the Czech
Republic into NATO: to eliminate once and for all the strategic
vacuum in Central Europe that in the twentieth century had
tempted both German and Russian expansionism. It was left to the
United States Senate, in its resolution of advice and consent to
NATO enlargement a year later, to affirm that geopolitical truth.

Does America Need a Foreign Policy? 43

The senators declared firmly that NATO was "first and foremost a
military alliance," and that it existed for the purpose of preventing
"the reemergence of a hegemonic power confronting Europe."⁶

In the Clinton era, affirmations of the Alliance had a liturgical
quality which, step by step, edged the original concept of the Al-
liance ever closer toward the doctrine of collective security.

The distinction between the two concepts is not a legal quibble;
it marks an important philosophical difference. An alliance comes
into being when a group of nations decides to defend a specified
territory or a particular cause; it in effect draws a line, the violation
of which constitutes a *casus belli*. By contrast, a system of collective
security defines neither the territory to be defended nor the means
or machinery for doing so; it is essentially a judicial concept.
NATO is an alliance; the United Nations is a collective security
system. An alliance deals with a definite and defined threat and
often designates the forces to meet it. A system of collective secu-
rity is juridically neutral; far from defining the threat, it is obliged
to wait for it to emerge before action can be considered.

In a system such as the United Nations, the aggressor cannot be
named in advance and has a right to participate in the deliberations
regarding its actions; to do otherwise would be to abandon the im-
partial and quasi-judicial character of the organization. When a
threat arises, the participants in the collective security system are
supposed to agree on its nature, and only then are they free to as-
semble collective forces to meet it. In the United Nations, if the ag-
gressor happens to be one of the permanent members of the
Security Council, it has the right to veto the determination of who
is the guilty party or the collective actions to be undertaken.

This is why both the League of Nations and the Pact of Locarno
failed in the 1930s, as has the contemporary United Nations,
against the principal threats. The United Nations has occasionally
been helpful in peacekeeping, especially when all the parties agree
and when the issue is the technical implementation of an agree-
ment. But the United Nations has never succeeded in imposing
peace on reluctant parties or on a party backed by a permanent
member of the Security Council. When all the participants agree,

44 Henry Kissinger

the need for collective security is minimal; when they split, it is im-
possible to apply. When every member of an international system
has the same obligations, no country or group of countries has the
special obligation which is the essence of an alliance. Though the
terms "alliance" and "collective security" are often used inter-
changeably, the two concepts are, in fact, incompatible with one an-
other.

As a result of this confusion, NATO has in the 1990s been di-
luted in both concept and execution. A host of institutions has been
created, which bid fair to turn NATO into a mini-United Nations.
There is the North Atlantic Council, composed of the ambassadors
of the nineteen countries belonging to NATO; the Permanent
Joint Council, which includes the North Atlantic Council plus
Russia; the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, grouping NATO
and twenty-eight former East bloc countries; and the Partnership
for Peace, in which countries of Eastern Europe—including Rus-
sia—are invited to engage in joint training for unspecified multilat-
eral missions. All these countries, which extend as far east as
Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan, are represented at NATO
summits; all are serviced out of NATO headquarters, diverting the
historic Alliance missions into a plethora of multilateral collective
security enterprises of vague purpose.

Where is the limit of NATO? And how do these new structures
differ conceptually from U.N.-type organizations? To extend the
reach of American or Atlantic influence into other regions of the
world may be desirable. But is NATO the right instrument for that
mission? Seeking to direct this plethora of institutions from the
headquarters of a military alliance diffuses NATO's focus and con-
fuses its priorities. The annual summits of NATO chiefs of state are
now attended by nearly fifty leaders of the various groupings, in-
cluding the nineteen formal allies. All this threatens to dissolve
NATO into a multilateral mishmash.

This is evident in the way NATO has formalized its relations
with Russia. In the so-called Founding Act on Mutual Relations,
Cooperation, and Security signed on May 27, 1997 in Paris, partly
to pacify Russian concerns over NATO enlargement, a NATO-

Russia Permanent Joint Council was created, composed of the
original North Atlantic Council plus a Russian ambassador. The
jurisdiction of the Permanent Joint Council, required to meet at
least once a month, was explained at great length, and its structure
guarantees that Russia, if it wants, can have the major voice in set-
ting the agenda. This is because the Russian representative, the
Secretary General of NATO, and one rotating ambassador from
the North Atlantic Council will chair the permanent council. (Rus-
sia is to be permanently in the chair, while the United States pre-
sides only one nineteenth of the time.) If Russia fully exploited the
opportunities open to it (it has not done so at this writing), North
Atlantic Council sessions and Permanent Joint Council sessions
could end up merging.

The ambiguous priorities of NATO reflect the disappearance of
the immediate threat. As a result, it has become increasingly safe in
all NATO countries to give priority to domestic politics over for-
eign and security policy. Since almost all European center-left gov-
ernments have disappointed their core followers by carrying out
market economic reforms, they are reluctant to inflame the radical
wings even further by implementing national security policies
identified with the United States. Much of the European resistance
to a U.S. national missile defense program replays the 1980 argu-
ments against the deployment of offensive missiles—in some in-
stances, by the same leaders.

The Clinton administration fell in with distinguishing its priori-
ties from those of its predecessors in much the same way as the Eu-
ropean left. Though it affirmed the importance of NATO, it did so
in the context of values that scarcely related it to NATO's tradi-
tional strategic objectives. Nevertheless, in the face of the weaken-
ing of historic ties, personal relations between the leaders of the
Atlantic nations remained remarkably close during the Clinton ad-
ministration. Because of the congruence of domestic politics, Eu-
ropean leaders saw no contradiction between their personal
admiration for Clinton and vocal opposition to many of his poli-
cies, which they considered as having been partly imposed on him
by a fractious right.

Does America Need a Foreign Policy? 45

46 Henry Kissinger

As a result, the most freewheeling and satisfying encounters of Atlantic leaders occurred not at formal summit meetings but at "Third Way" get-togethers of world—mostly European—Social Democratic Party heads of government. The ostensible aim of these meetings has been to seek a middle way between traditional capitalism and socialism. This is why the Socialist Prime Minister of Portugal was invited, and the conservative Prime Minister of Spain was not; why the Socialist Prime Minister of France attended, but the conservative President of France was excluded. President Clinton, in attending these meetings as a regular participant, threw the prestige of his office behind one side in the domestic politics of the countries represented.

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, there existed a fixed set of foreign policy criteria to which all allies might appeal. It was then generally true that the American approach to foreign policy was somewhat more ideological and missionary, the European approach more traditional and realistic. America thought of itself as lifting Europe's sights while European leaders prided themselves on helping the United States discover the limits of the possible. The relationship did not depend on which party was in office on either side of the Atlantic. A return to such an attitude is necessary if Atlantic policy is to develop a coherent sense of direction.

The advent of a Republican administration will inevitably change the forum for consultation with Europe's leaders. President George W. Bush will not be eligible for Third Way meetings or, if he is, the European leaders heretofore excluded will have to be admitted as well, turning the conference into a heads-of-government meeting. And the leaders of Europe will find, once they get used to a relationship based on congruent national interests, that Atlantic relations will have a more permanent character.

Nostalgia for Cold War certitudes is no guide to a wise policy, but neither is the rote repetition of slogans of Atlantic solidarity in the face of a crumbling underlying reality. A new approach is needed to deal with a set of unanswered questions which are the legacy of the 1990s. Is the Atlantic Alliance still at the heart of transatlantic relations? If so, how does it define its purposes in the post-Cold War

Does America Need a Foreign Policy? 47

world? How will a unified Europe affect the concept of an Atlantic partnership? Is the Alliance a set of common purposes or a safety net?

## THE FUTURE OF EUROPEAN INTEGRATION

The emergence of a unified Europe is one of the most revolutionary events of our time. The impetus for it has sprung from a variety of motives, not all of them compatible. Initially, Europe saw integration as a way to overcome the suicidal rivalry that had led it into two catastrophic world wars, and to overcome the economic ravages of those wars by cooperative action. France supported European integration so that Germany would not again emerge as a national threat. The Federal Republic committed itself to the ideal of an integrated Europe as a way of differentiating itself from the East German Soviet satellite and as an emotional substitute for national unity. Britain, heir to a tradition that has historically considered a unified Europe a threat to British independence, went along grudgingly, supporting pragmatic technical and economic arrangements but always wary of any undertaking that might turn the United Kingdom into a province of Europe and jeopardize its special relationship with the United States.

A new impetus for European integration developed when Germany was unified in 1990. To assuage European fears of dominance by a united Germany, Chancellor Helmut Kohl made himself the principal advocate of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which called forth a European currency—the Euro—and initiated significant steps toward a common European foreign and security policy. France supported this process, partly to contain German strength, partly to enlist it in a policy of gaining greater freedom of action vis-à-vis the United States.⁷

Throughout this process of unifying Europe, the United States has played a major supporting role—at first as passionate advocate, more recently as foil. Since the first stirrings of European integration in the aftermath of the Second World War, the United States has strongly endorsed the project and sometimes even urged it on initially reluctant allies. As early as 1963, President Kennedy advo-

48 Henry Kissinger

cated the unification of Europe in order to bring about a more
equal relationship with Europe:

It is only a fully cohesive Europe that can protect us all against
fragmentation of the alliance. Only such a Europe will permit
full reciprocity of treatment across the ocean, in facing the At-
lantic agenda. With only such a Europe can we have a full give-
and-take between equals, an equal sharing of responsibilities, and
an equal level of sacrifice.⁸

In this view, generally shared by Kennedy's successors, the Atlantic relationship was analogous to a multinational industrial corporation in which influence is apportioned in relation to the responsibilities assumed. The trouble with this idea of burden sharing as the motivating force of the Atlantic Alliance is that it confuses the operation of a partnership with its purpose. Europe, whether it functions as a collection of nation-states or as the European Union, will share America's burden only if its objectives parallel America's own and if it believes that, without its contribution, the common purposes will not be achieved. This has not been the case. During the Cold War, there was indeed a common purpose, but America's allies were convinced at every step that America would carry out its global responsibilities even when its allies fell short. Today the nature of the common purposes is so much in dispute that the question of burden sharing is rarely reached.

The ultimate issue is not technical but philosophical: Will Europe's emerging identity leave room for an Atlantic partnership? Will America's triumphalism over winning the Cold War veer toward hegemony? French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine has left no doubt that, in his view, the purpose of achieving a European identity is to reduce the dominance of the United States:

> American supremacy today is . . . felt in the economy, in monetary affairs, in technology and in military fields, as well as in lifestyles, language and the mass culture products that are swamping the world, shaping the ways of thinking, and exercising a fascination that even works on adversaries of the United States. . . .

Does America Need a Foreign Policy? 49

In keeping with America's view both of itself and the rest of the world over the last two centuries, most great American leaders and thinkers have never doubted for an instant that the United States was chosen by providence as the "indispensable nation" and that it must remain dominant for the sake of humankind. . . . Americans have no doubts and the more forthright amongst them are quick to remind us that the contemporary world is the direct outcome of Europe's complete failure to manage its own and the world's affairs in the first half of the twentieth century.⁹

Védrine's analysis is not without merit. For much of the 1990s, America's Atlantic policies oscillated between imperiousness and indifference, between treating Europe as an auxiliary or as a photo opportunity. A serious strategic dialogue did not materialize, in part because the United States never paused long enough to conduct such a strategic dialogue with itself. A series of initiatives was undertaken unilaterally and made the subject of consultation—if at all—only after a decision had already been taken.

Whereas American unilateralism has resulted from policy decisions which can be modified, the challenge of European integration to America is structural, involving three key issues: the European Union's image of itself; the impact of European integration on Atlantic relationships; and American attitudes toward the different options for European integration.

In defining their identity, the European states are importantly the products—perhaps even the prisoners—of their historical experience. Centuries of operating a system of competing state sovereignies have taught them that persuasiveness in negotiations depends importantly on the options the negotiator has available or is perceived to have at his or her disposal. Europeans historically associated diplomacy with a balancing of rewards and costs; they have little use for an abstract concept of universal goodwill as a facilitator of diplomacy. Still, European societies are not shaped by uniform historic experience. This is reflected in the different attitudes of Britain, France, and Germany toward the idea of Atlantic partnership and European integration.

50 Henry Kissinger

During the Cold War, Britain was comfortable with American predominance in NATO because its historical experience differed so significantly from that of its neighbors on the continent. For continental nations, the nightmare has always been hegemony by a powerful neighbor. For Britain, the threat to independence has been associated with a hegemonical power on the continent of Europe; salvation in two world wars arrived from across the sea. In British eyes, the role of the United States in the postwar world appeared on the whole benevolent, and friendship with the United States has been the central theme of British foreign policy ever since the end of the Second World War, perhaps even since the First. This "special relationship" was not a primarily sentimental gesture; Britain had survived the centuries as an island outpost off the coast of Europe by never losing sight of its national interest. In pursuit of that interest, it built an independent nuclear force a decade before France did, a clear implication that there were limits to British reliance on the special relationship.

France, lacking the advantages of a common language with a rationalist system of education, conducts a less pragmatic foreign policy. Its leaders strive to create the impression that French (or European) policy has extracted from the United States what America might, in fact, have been quite willing to concede without pressure. Britain pursues its interests by making itself so much a part of the decision-making process that to disregard its views is almost embarrassing. France has pursued its interests by making it too painful to ignore them. Britain has treated Atlantic relations as a common enterprise; French leaders, flaunting their independence, conduct them as a zero sum game in which one side of the Atlantic or the other is bound to have the upper hand.

It is not that France does not understand the United States' role as the ultimate safety net for French (and European) autonomous policy. Nor do French leaders have any illusions about the relative power position of the two countries. In the major crises of the Cold War—the challenges to Berlin between 1957 and 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the Gulf War in 1990–1991—France proved a staunch ally; deployment of intermediate-range missiles in Ger-

many in 1983 would not have been possible without the eloquent support of French President François Mitterrand.

But the Cartesian, ultrarationalist education of French policy-makers causes them to believe that the United States will understand their somewhat cynical applications of *raison d'état*, and will always respect the motivations which induce France to define European identity as a challenge to the United States, even while relying on it as guarantor of France's security. This high-wire act, tolerable when an overriding danger set limits to the game, threatens to undermine the cooperation of last resort on which French leaders still count even when opposition to the United States has become standard operating procedure on many contemporary issues. The policy of seeking a European identity by challenging the United States works best when only one party resorts to it. If the United States retaliated systematically, as sooner or later it will, the strain with the European Union and, even more within it, could become severe.

Germany navigates uneasily between these two poles. It supports the European Union but, unlike Britain and France, it is not in a position to invoke a successful tradition of diplomacy based on the national interest. Even were it to sympathize with the goals of French policy in the abstract, it lacks the self-confidence to conduct the brazen policy of simultaneously challenging and relying on the United States—or perhaps has too great a sense of realism to attempt it.

The United States has watched the various options being proposed for integrating Europe with a benevolence toward the objective and a delicate neutrality that does not declare itself on the kind of Europe being built. The Cold War orthodoxy that European integration would lead automatically to a strong Europe and a more vital Atlantic partnership is still dominant.

But the time has come to take another look at this core assumption of American policy. For at least two other outcomes are possible: a Europe shrinking from global responsibilities, assuming the status of a mini-United Nations and delivering moral homilies while concentrating on economic competition with the United

Does America Need a Foreign Policy? 51

[L-C]

52 Henry Kissinger

States; or, alternatively, there could emerge a Europe challenging the United States and constructing a foreign policy of mediating between America and the rest of the world, rather like what India attempted during the Cold War. With domestic politics reigning supreme and no looming security threat, Europe may feel in no hurry to choose between these options. It may thus wind up merging the two approaches, either of which would, step by step, erode the Atlantic partnership.

The first issue to be dealt with is why the Atlantic partnership needs to be revitalized. What is to be the purpose of such an exercise?

Despite the absence of a commonly perceived unifying threat, geopolitics has not disappeared as an element of international politics. NATO still remains as an insurance policy against a new Russian imperialism. Without the United States, Europe would be a peninsular extension, even a hostage, of Eurasia, drawn into the vortex of its conflicts and a prime target of the radical and revolutionary currents sweeping so many adjacent regions. Without the United States, Germany would lack an anchor to restrain national impulses (even as a member of the European Union); both Germany and Russia would be tempted to view each other as their best foreign policy option.

At the same time, the United States, separated from Europe would become, geopolitically, an island off the shores of Eurasia resembling nineteenth-century Britain vis-à-vis Europe. It would become obliged to conduct the kind of balance-of-power strategy toward Europe that it has traditionally rejected. America lacks neither the means nor the opportunity for such a policy, but adopting it would require a psychological wrench and a huge adjustment in its national mode of operation which should be undertaken only as a last resort.

The test will be the ability of the Atlantic nations to work together on issues more immediate than geopolitical theory. At least three issues confront especially Europe, the outcomes of which will determine the future of all nations bordering the Atlantic. As democracies and practitioners of market economics, the Atlantic

nations have a stake in preventing economic recessions—the stability of their institutions depends on it. They really have no choice except to coordinate their policies to reduce the dangers of a global economic crisis, which is the major threat to contemporary democracy.

The economic challenge is compounded by a demographic one. In almost all European countries, the birthrate will not sustain the present population, which is already inadequate to meet the needs for labor in a globalized economy. With the improvements in medicine, the percentage of those having to be supported by a shrinking labor force will rise dramatically; the overall population of most European states will drop precipitously—and this in the face of mounting demographic pressures from the poor countries at the fringes of Europe to the east and the south.

Then there is the future of the vast region to the east of the borders of NATO and the European Union. The arrangements that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union were, in their nature, transitory, with respect to both the internal arrangements and the foreign relationships. In many of them—the Baltic states excepted—the generation that inherited power was almost invariably drawn from the previous Soviet leadership group, albeit with nationalist credentials. This generation is now passing from the scene.

Confronted on the one side by skillful, persistent, and insistent Russian pressures to draw them back into some sort of organic relationship with Moscow and, on the other, by the prospects of Europe and even of NATO, these successor states of the Soviet Union will be obliged to make some fundamental choices. Chaos beckons in that vast region unless Europe and the United States define a common task and not appear on the scene as potential rivals. Much depends on the future of Russia, its internal evolution and its relationship to the international order, which will be discussed later in this chapter.

The future of the Mediterranean basin is no less a challenge. The pressures of globalization, of demographic growth in all non-European countries of the region, are ushering in a period of ad-

Does America Need a Foreign Policy? 53

[LC]

54 Henry Kissinger

justment and potential turmoil comparable to the post-Communist adjustments in Eastern Europe. Most Atlantic nations, while paying lip service to the problem, avoid dealing with it on a systematic basis or approach it on a country-by-country basis, usually when a crisis is already at hand.

Finally, in the globalized world, the quality of life is taking on increasing urgency for peoples and leaders alike. The advocates of such issues have often isolated themselves by presenting their cause as an alternative to traditional foreign policy and by seeking to vindicate it through confrontational methods. But they have a case even when they stultify themselves by exaggerated, self-righteous rhetoric. Representing only 15 percent of the world's population but more than 50 percent of its GDP, the nations of the North Atlantic do indeed have an obligation to help alleviate global problems for which much of the world has neither the material nor the technological resources. It is in the nature of the subject that they need to do so collaboratively, requiring institutions and procedures without which there can be no successful pursuit of the kinds of nonmilitary goals that have heretofore not figured prominently on the Atlantic agenda.

But what if the cooperative course suffers shipwreck because of the European apprehension that any emphasis on Atlantic partnership will dissolve the prospects for identity? Those who seek identity via confrontation with America must not delude themselves into believing that the United States will remain forever passive when its policies are being challenged as a matter of principle. Sooner or later, it will be driven to defend its interests. Then the nations of the West will be back on the course that nearly destroyed them twice in a generation—this time not by war but by an exhausting national rivalry. Ironically, the upshot of such an evolution could well be a weakening of European integration, because, in the end, some key members of the European Union are bound to reject the risks of growing estrangement from the United States.

A consistent pattern of European opposition to American policies cannot be explained away indefinitely as part of the inevitable growing pains of the European Union, or obscured by ritual

protestations of allied unity at highly publicized, essentially ceremonial meetings. The United States owes it to its values and its interests to make every effort to revitalize the Atlantic relationship and to help it achieve a new set of common purposes, to treat Europe as a close partner, and to consult with it carefully in advance of major decisions. But, ultimately, Europe must be judged, and the American policy toward Europe adjusted, according to the same criteria as apply to other great powers—on the degree to which European policies and American national interests are able to reinforce each other. Future generations must not be able to ask themselves how it was possible for the nations bordering the Atlantic to spend their energies on abstruse debates of identity *against* cooperation when all around them fundamental problems were threatening the very framework of their societies, and the option of cooperation was always open.

## EUROPEAN INTEGRATION AND ATLANTIC COOPERATION

One of the obstacles to addressing the core issue of Atlantic relationships is largely bureaucratic: it is the time European leaders are obliged to devote to elaborating the process of integration itself. The complex discussion about enlarging the European Union, adapting its institutions, and devising common legislation imposes its own priorities and schedule. Projects for Atlantic cooperation—or other long-range issues—seem less urgent and, in the absence of an immediate crisis, less important. Day-to-day routine thus takes its toll on the habits of Atlantic cooperation, if only because the United States is excluded—by definition, as it were—from those activities which demand the greatest attention of Europe's leaders.

But even with respect to issues where the European Union and the United States interact, the new structures and the methods by which they operate are themselves becoming obstacles to closer cooperation. As the European Union moves toward a greater identity, the existing pattern of Atlantic consultations will inevitably change. This is a fact of life, and the United States needs to accept it.

Does America Need a Foreign Policy? 55

56 Henry Kissinger

The kind of European integration that evolves will importantly affect the process of Atlantic consultation. Three possible approaches are under discussion:

The first is the supranational one publicly put forward by German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer. It implies moving ahead with creating European federal institutions and endowing them with legislative powers. Fischer's proposal of European-wide elections leading to a European executive and legislature is the most far-reaching concept put forward thus far.¹⁰

Such a scheme runs up against the contradiction—in the words of French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine—between “enlarging Europe and strengthening it.”¹¹ Enlargement seeks to expand the European Union to the Russian border (and, in some scenarios, it includes Russia as well). Further integration—“deepening,” to use the technical jargon—is, in some respects, incompatible with expansion. This is because not every member of the projected European Union will be prepared to subordinate its sovereignty to the extent required by complete political integration.

The second is the proposal for a “multispeed Europe.” It would encourage the European Union, with its present core of fifteen nations, to proceed toward political and economic integration while permitting other European nations to associate with it on a less rigid set of procedures. A multispeed Europe would allow plural associations with the integrated core: some could be economic, others military, and all the members of the Union might participate together with the integrated core on some agreed decisions in a specified manner.¹²

Finally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has proposed a variation on the theme of a multispeed Europe.¹³ Because British public opinion would never accept a supranational outcome, and because Blair wants Britain neither to be left at the fringe of such a Europe nor to give up its close relationship with the United States, the Prime Minister has proposed a confederal Europe without a core group. Its members would be free to form various, more integrated, groupings within it for a variety of specified purposes.

The United States should not intervene directly in European

constitutional debates. On one level, they represent the internal matters of Europe. But since each involves some form of integrated European position, they raise what is evolving into the key issue of Atlantic cooperation. For the process by which the European Union, even in its present form, negotiates with the United States leaves little scope for a creative American contribution. When the United States deals with the nations of Europe individually, it has the possibility of consulting at many levels and to have its view heard well before a decision is taken. In dealing with the European Union, by contrast, the United States is excluded from the decision-making process and interacts only after the event, with spokesmen for decisions taken by ministers at meetings in which the United States has not participated at any level. When America encounters spokesmen for the unified Europe, it discovers that its interlocutors have very little flexibility, because decisions taken by the Council of Ministers can be altered only by going through the entire internal European process again. Traditional channels of U.S.-European cooperation are drying up with respect to economic matters. Analogous procedures are now being proposed as well for foreign and security policy. Growing estrangement between America and Europe thus is being institutionally fostered. In some respects, America's possibilities of consultation with the European Union are less substantial than with other friendly, nonaligned countries. A balance must be found between the United States insisting on its views as if it were a member of European institutions and its being so marginalized as to be able to participate in European deliberations only after they are, in effect, concluded.

Many advocates of the supranational Europe argue that the real American interest is to keep Europe divided into national states so as to enhance America's ability to dominate by exploiting European rivalries. This is a misconception. Hegemony is not in the American interest for reasons I will discuss in the concluding chapter. But neither is isolation. A wise American policy will seek to navigate between a Europe abdicating from international responsibilities and a Europe striving for a global role in rivalry with the United States.

Whatever the direction of European unification, a new approach

Does America Need a Foreign Policy? 57

58 Henry Kissinger

to Atlantic cooperation has become imperative. NATO can no
longer serve as the sole institution for Atlantic cooperation; its
functions are too limited, its core membership too small, and its as-
sociated membership too large to deal with the tasks ahead, includ-
ing even some in the field of security.

STRATEGIC DOCTRINE:

EUROPEAN MILITARY CRISIS MANAGEMENT

The subject that most immediately demonstrates the relation-
ship between Atlantic cooperation and European integration is the
so-called European Security and Defense Policy, which has led to
the creation of a European Force with command structure and po-
litical direction formally independent of NATO. Advanced first at
the Saint-Malo summit of December 1998 between British and
French leaders, the European Force proposal was accelerated im-
mediately after Kosovo at a European summit in Cologne in June
1999. On November 21, 2000, at a meeting of European defense
ministers in Brussels, a formal plan for it was announced. Accord-
ing to the Military Capabilities Commitment Declaration, the Eu-
ropean Force is slated to reach by 2003 a strength of one hundred
thousand persons, four hundred combat aircraft, and one hundred
vessels, capable of sustaining a mission of sixty thousand combat
personnel for a period of a year. The stress is on the "European
Union's autonomy in decision-making," though there is a provision
for an exchange of information with NATO which is to be negoti-
ated.

From a long-range point of view, a European military capacity is
a logical parallel to the emergence of a European political identity.
And such a force is bound to have a certain capacity for autonomous
action, much as the various national forces do, whether or not they
are technically assigned to NATO. The worrisome aspect of the
European Force is that its autonomy seems to be treated as its dis-
tinguishing feature, and cooperation with NATO appears to be
conceived as a special case.

Kosovo, so the proponents of the European Force argue,

demonstrated the vast disparity in military capabilities between the
two sides of the Atlantic. And heavy-handed American conduct
verging on the domineering contributed to the decision to speed up
the creation of an independent force to regain some means for vin-
dicating strictly European interests.

But the emphasis of the European Force so far has been on au-
tonomy rather than on increasing military capabilities. If one of the
motivations for the European Force is to reduce the sense of rela-
tive impotence inspired by the high-tech American military estab-
lishment, how can that be reconciled with the shrinking defense
budgets of almost all the European countries? If existing defense
budgets are maintained or reduced, funds for the European Force
will necessarily have to come out of projected NATO budgets.
Thus the European Force would be a net contribution to allied de-
fense only if it leads to an overall increase in European defense
budgets or if it is linked in some organic manner to NATO.

More important, what exactly are the autonomous interests being
served? Where precisely would the European Force operate? Since
European spokesmen have so far rejected the defense of European
territory as a mission, its major utility would be for minor actions at
the periphery of Europe in which no major power is involved, or out-
side the area of NATO responsibilities. Even then, only a very rash
group of European leaders would dare to mobilize the European
Force without American logistics and intelligence support or assur-
ances of American goodwill. In practice, the European Force is not
so much autonomous as it is designed for such symbolic efforts as
peacekeeping or special missions involving few risks.

The independent European Force will, in most foreseeable cir-
cumstances, have to be coordinated with NATO. And its plan in-
deed involves an arrangement to use the NATO logistics system.
But Javier Solana, the European Union High Representative for
Common Foreign and Security Policy, has spoken as if the Euro-
pean Force would be an organizationally distinct group that would
negotiate with NATO in much the same way it would with non-
NATO countries: "It remains to be seen . . . how to institutionalize
the EU's relation with NATO on the one hand and how to institu-

Does America. Need a Foreign Policy? 59

60 Henry Kissinger

tionalize relations between the EU and other non-NATO countries.”¹⁴

In Eurospeak language, it has been repeatedly affirmed that “the EU will only launch and conduct military operations where NATO as a whole is not engaged.”¹⁵ In practice, this can mean only one of two situations. Either the United States favors the projected operation but, for reasons of its own, chooses not to participate—in short, a kind of agreed division of labor. This might work, though the American dissociation must not reach a point where it tempts pressure on Europe from powerful countries like Russia. But what if the European Union undertakes a military action with which the United States disagrees? How should one interpret the extraordinary situation in which all members of the Alliance save America and Canada go to war while the strongest member and ultimate guarantor of security stands aloof? Would the European Force then have access to NATO logistics assets, which are, in the main, American? Would the United States come rushing to the rescue if things went wrong?

Behind these military questions looms a political one. Any crisis in which using the European Force is to be contemplated would require a meeting of Europe's Council of Ministers before NATO meets. The American NATO ambassador (or Secretary of State) would then encounter colleagues who have already reached a collective decision and could not participate in the discussion in their individual capacity, thereby creating a European caucus within NATO and imposing on NATO the procedures which already blight America's relations with the European Union. The United States is nevertheless put at risk because of its security guarantees and need for its logistics support. Leaders who question national missile defense for the United States because it might lead to the decoupling of America from Europe should respect American concern about new structures based institutionally on precisely such a decoupling.

The dispute being generated by the European Force bears some analogy to the controversy produced by President de Gaulle's decision to proceed with a French nuclear force de frappe. Like the Euro-

Does America Need a Foreign Policy? 61

pean Force, it was designed to be free-standing and independent of NATO; as now, it was justified as a possible alternative to—really a last resort against—an American failure to fulfill its Alliance obligations, or for the ultimate defense of French interests not shared by the United States. But there are important differences. The force de frappe applied only to the nearly inconceivable contingency in which a NATO country would risk nuclear annihilation without American support. The European Force, by contrast, is designed for contingencies most likely to arise—low-level conventional conflicts at the periphery of Europe or controversial peacekeeping missions on distant continents. The force de frappe was designed for the solitary action of a single ally. The European Force is designed for actions endorsed by all allies without the United States—symbolically a much more fateful step.

I supported the independent European nuclear forces at the time because I was convinced that, in the end, they would provide the basis for a more balanced partnership. In time, the European Force might play a similar role provided it can be related to an agreed political framework. The key issue raised by the European Force beyond the diversion of resources is the need for political coordination between the United States and the European Union, and between NATO and the European Force. This cannot be achieved by reassurances at meetings of heads of government that can only be tested when it is too late. A separate European military force can work only if the political coordination between the two sides of the Atlantic is enhanced. That, however, is the issue the advocates of the European Force are deliberately evading. Absent such an agreement, the so-called autonomous European Force could produce the worst of all worlds: disruption of NATO procedures and impairment of allied cooperation without any added allied military capability and without meaningful European autonomy.¹⁶ If an organic relationship can be established, the European Force could provide a new political flexibility for the Atlantic Alliance, including especially a link between NATO and the non-NATO members of the European Union.

For the membership of the European Union includes states

62 Henry Kissinger

which are not members of NATO—today Ireland, Sweden, and Finland, tomorrow several countries of Eastern and Central Europe. This reality confers a new dimension to the debate over further expansion of NATO. A properly conceived plan of interaction between the European Union and NATO might be able to achieve security guarantees for countries whose independence and territorial integrity are a vital interest of all the Western democracies but whose formal membership in an integrated NATO military command might prove too inflammatory. It could do so by elaborating a distinction between a guarantee of territorial integrity without membership in the integrated military command. This applies especially to the Baltic states. Were Russia to restore its rule, or even its dominance, in those countries, it would signal a return to the imperialism with which it threatened Europe for centuries and an unacceptable shift in both the European and the global equilibrium. On the other hand, the border of Estonia is thirty miles from St. Petersburg. Advancing the NATO integrated command this close to key centers of Russia might mortgage the possibilities of relating Russia to the emerging world order as a constructive member.

If the European Union aspires to be treated as a unit, it follows that some link must be established between the security of those of its members that are not part of NATO and the military structure of the European Union. If there is one region for the defense of which the European Force envisaged by the European Defense Initiative is organically appropriate, it would be precisely in such states. Nor is it possible in a well-conceived Atlantic partnership for NATO to ignore security threats to member states of the European Union, whether or not they are formally members of the Alliance. Strangely, in view of the frequent affirmations of European identity, the European Union insists that membership in it involves no security guarantees. But is Europe really prepared to claim that it has two categories of members, one category of which it is willing to expose to military attack? What then becomes of the oft-invoked European identity? Or of a security and defense policy that does not aspire to defend its own territory?

The European Union, to be truly worthy of its name, must in

time be prepared to resist by force attacks on the security of any of its members, much as its national states do today. And if the European Union is obliged to defend one of its members, whether or not it belongs to NATO, the United States will not be able to stand by.

The argument that the European Union would decouple from NATO were it to assume some responsibility for the defense of its own territory is, with all respect, nonsense. If that were true, the national forces maintained by members of the Alliance would also decouple their countries from NATO. If Europe becomes serious about defense, the expansion of the European Union and of NATO merge to some extent. These steps are needed: The European Union must affirm its determination to safeguard its territorial integrity. NATO needs to affirm that the territorial integrity of the European Union is a vital NATO interest. Then it will be possible to design security guarantees without forward deployments. An indispensable component of such a policy would be rapid membership of the Baltic states in the European Union even if they do not meet all the technical criteria; a union of three hundred million people should be able to make exceptions for the eight million in the Baltic region if the European and Atlantic interest requires it.

## STRATEGIC DOCTRINE: MISSILE DEFENSE AND THE ATLANTIC ALLIANCE

Every two decades, a debate about nuclear strategy seems to break out in the Alliance. The subject varies: in the 1960s, it concerned American opposition to national nuclear forces in Europe; in the 1980s, it was about deploying American nuclear missiles in Europe; at this writing, the subject is the American proposal to develop a missile defense system.

The current debate is turning into a test case about whether a serious strategic dialogue within the Alliance is still possible, or whether it will be submerged by domestic politics. The American President's first obligation is to provide for the safety of the American people by deterring attacks on the homeland, on American forces abroad, on America's allies, and to reduce the impact of such

Does America Need a Foreign Policy? 63

64 Henry Kissinger

attacks should deterrence fail. A bipartisan commission headed by Donald Rumsfeld—now President George W. Bush's Secretary of Defense—was set up in 1998 to study the danger of missile attack. The commission concluded unanimously that the threat posed by a number of hostile emerging states “is broader, more mature and evolving more rapidly than has been reported in estimates and reports by the Intelligence community.”¹⁷ Furthermore, the commission argued, “the U.S. might well have little or no warning before operational deployment” of missiles capable of reaching U.S. territory with biological, chemical, or nuclear warheads.¹⁸

Despite such warnings, national missile defense has become one of those symbolic issues against which elite opinion has rallied for decades, taking little account of the intervening political and technological changes. Five arguments are generally put forward in opposition to a national missile defense:

1. that a workable system cannot be designed;

2. that if it were, it would undermine the strategic doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction;

3. that it violates the 1972 ABM Treaty and would jeopardize the entire gamut of Russo-American relations;

4. that an anti-missile program would decouple the defense of Europe from America, because the United States might be perceived as withdrawing into a Fortress America (interestingly, this argument is never heard from America's Asian allies); and

5. that an American missile defense would promote nuclear proliferation—an argument put forward jointly by President Chirac of France and President Putin of Russia.

Without claiming to be a technical expert, I have been exposed to enough briefings to be convinced that the prospects of missile defense are promising. This view of America's potential is obviously shared by Russia and China, as is shown by their persistent opposition to any American missile defense system. Most of the technical doubts in the West have concentrated on the system developed in the Clinton administration in an effort to remain compatible with the ABM Treaty. It is designed to shoot down a nuclear

Does America Need a Foreign Policy? 65

warhead in the final phase of its trajectory when it is small, traveling extremely fast, possibly maneuverable, and very hard to detect. This is why most missile defense thinking now concentrates on shooting down the missile during the boost phase when the missile is moving slowly, cannot be maneuvered, and, because of its fuel load, is large and easier to detect.

As for the argument that national missile defense runs counter to the long-standing strategic concept of Mutual Assured Destruction, a reassessment of that doctrine is long overdue, whatever the view regarding missile defense. Advocates of the doctrine argue that nuclear war is best prevented by guaranteeing that the failure of deterrence will produce the most cataclysmic outcome. They therefore oppose any strategy based on discriminating targeting and any attempt to construct defensive systems. Security is sought in an essentially nihilistic insistence on leaving the civilian population, one's own as well as of potential adversaries, totally vulnerable to nuclear attack. In these terms, defense policy turns on itself; in seeking to guarantee the total vulnerability of the population, a doctrine of defense becomes explicitly anti-defense.

This theory emerged out of academic seminars and from theoreticians who would never be required to make the fateful decisions they were urging. It is one thing to theorize about mutual deterrence based on the threat of mutual suicide, quite another to implement such a concept in an actual crisis. Who, in fact, would be prepared to assume the moral responsibility for resorting to a strategy that guarantees the deaths of tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, on both sides in a matter of days? How can such a strategy be made credible? How can democratic governments implement such a course? It is impossible to believe that democratic governments in Europe, priding themselves on their humanitarian impulses, would in fact carry out their retaliatory threats.

The diplomacy appropriate for such a strategy would have to be designed to demonstrate that, when security is involved, normal calculations do not apply. Leaders would have to display a high propensity for recklessness to make such a strategy credible. But, in both Europe and the United States, the Mutual Assured Destruction

66 Henry Kissinger

tion theory is being advocated most passionately by those who started their public life in demonstrations attacking *any* reliance on nuclear weapons.

Whatever tenuous plausibility the MAD theory may have had in a two-power world evaporates when eight nations have tested nuclear weapons and many rogue regimes are working feverishly on the development of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons of mass destruction, as well as on the ballistic missiles with which to deliver them. If one of these weapons destroyed an American or European city by accident or design, how would democratic leaders explain to their publics their refusal—not inability, but refusal—to protect them against even limited missile attacks?

The contrast between the security situation of 1972, when the ABM Treaty was signed, and of today is stark. One signatory, the Soviet Union, has disappeared as a legal entity. Missile technologies have evolved in sophistication and proliferated into nations (North Korea, Iran, Iraq, India, Pakistan) not considered likely candidates for advanced military technology when the agreement was concluded.

Since I have held and published these views for four decades, it is appropriate to ask why an ABM Treaty was signed by President Richard Nixon in 1972, when I served as National Security Adviser. The blunt answer is that, while the Nixon administration started its term in office determined to move away from the MAD concept, it was partially forced back into its framework by congressional and bureaucratic pressures. Early in his first term, Nixon ordered the Pentagon to develop a strategy concentrating on military rather than civilian targets. In 1969, he also submitted to Congress a missile defense program providing for twelve sites to protect missile silos and the population against limited attacks from the Soviet Union, against attacks from emerging nuclear powers, and against accidental and unauthorized launches from any source.

Nixon's ABM program was criticized with precisely the same arguments being deployed against the contemporary programs for missile defense: that it would not work; that it would work so well as to be destabilizing; that it would weaken the Atlantic Alliance by

Does America Need a Foreign Policy? 67

decoupling the defense of the United States from that of Europe; that it would drive the Soviet Union into intransigence and an arms race.

Amid the passions of the Vietnam protest and in a Congress dominated by the opposition party, these criticisms merged with the prevailing assaults on the entire defense budget. The initial authorization for the ABM passed the Senate by one vote, the Vice President's. In subsequent years, Congress used the appropriations process to destroy what it had narrowly failed to defeat in the original authorization. Each year, the number of ABM sites was reduced by Congress until, by late 1971, only two remained. And the Soviets, aware of these domestic pressures, were stonewalling discussions on limiting their offensive buildup, proceeding then at the rate of two hundred long-range missile launchers a year. In this atmosphere, the Defense Department, acting through Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard, wrote to President Nixon in late spring of 1970 that a strategic arms control agreement should be negotiated as soon as possible. Failing that, the Soviets might soon outstrip the United States in strategic forces.

Nixon was far from converted to the MAD theory but, faced with a Congress determined to gut missile defense, decided to freeze—and thereby to preserve—a nucleus ABM deployment in return for equivalent limits on the Soviets' own missile defense, and to use that decision to put a ceiling on the Soviet offensive buildup. At the Moscow summit of 1972, the Soviets accepted the American insistence that offensive weapons be limited simultaneously with defensive weapons. This history is relevant because many who treat the ABM Treaty as the cornerstone of arms control misunderstand the original impetus for it.

In assessing Europe's reactions to contemporary missile defense, it must be kept in mind that the arguments largely recycle what European opponents of American defense policy have been alleging about every major new American weapons program or strategic doctrine for the past thirty years—from Kennedy's "flexible response" in the 1960s, to Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and intermediate-range missiles in the 1980s. Opposing new offen-

68 Henry Kissinger

sive weapons placed in Europe in the 1980s and new defensive weapons based in the United States in this century, these critics—often the same personalities—have charged on each occasion that the new programs would decouple America from Europe and torpedo important negotiations with Moscow.

In each case, the critics have been proved wrong. In the Nixon administration, the United States ABM program broke the deadlock in U.S.-Soviet strategic arms control negotiations. In the Reagan administration, SDI and intermediate-range missiles in Europe brought the Soviets back to the conference table. The same outcome is likely today—indeed at this writing there are already indications of a Russian willingness to explore some kind of missile defense. Russia has thousands of nuclear weapons in its arsenal. Therefore it will be many decades, if ever, before an American missile defense program precludes an ultimate Russian nuclear safety net, even as it constrains many of the more limited ones. Every opportunity exists, therefore, for continuing a diplomacy designed to make a nuclear conflict between the two largest nuclear powers ever less probable.

Finally, once European critics disenthrall themselves from outdated slogans, they will recognize the absurdity of the proposition that an America totally vulnerable to nuclear attack from any direction is the best guarantee for Europe's security. Common sense suggests that the opposite must be true. A United States that is totally vulnerable to nuclear attack is much more likely to shrink from fulfilling Alliance obligations. And these arguments apply as well to the defense of European territory against missile attack.

The argument that an American missile defense system spurs nuclear proliferation makes no more sense. Why should countries not now possessing nuclear missiles be more likely to acquire them because penetrating American territory has become more difficult? Large countries seeking or possessing nuclear missiles and weapons may indeed add to their numbers to defeat American defenses. But even if they are able to sustain that race—which for the so-called rogue states is highly improbable—it would leave America's popu-

Does America Need a Foreign Policy? 69

lation no worse off against an all-out attack than it is today, and it would have to be at the sacrifice of an adversary's other military options. Without an American missile defense, the calculations of a country seeking to blackmail the United States are limited only by the reliability of its weapons. With a missile defense, the calculations become more complicated. The adversary cannot know which warheads will get through even if he calculates some will. Or else it would require a scale of attack that verges on all-out war.

Many countries, including China, which is not a signatory to the ABM Treaty, have joined the chorus of opposition to missile defense. So long as there is uncertainty about America's decision, that chorus can only grow in intensity. An early American commitment to a program is therefore essential. Within that context, there should be consultation with allies, especially about giving them an opportunity to participate in the defense system and to extend its coverage to Europe.

But, with all respect for the views of allies and other important countries, the United States cannot condemn its population to permanent vulnerability. All this implies the urgent need to clarify the purpose of missile defense, its technology, and the diplomacy associated with it. Partly for domestic reasons, the purpose of missile defense has been defined exclusively as resisting attacks from rogue states, sparking a debate about what a rogue state is or whether the threat is real. But it is important to avow that the missile defense is needed as well against established nonrogue nuclear powers. Given the cataclysmic consequences of even a single explosion, the United States must protect itself to the extent possible against accidental launches, unauthorized attacks, or limited attacks for whatever purpose. Or, to put it another way, the United States needs to raise the admission price of any nuclear attack as high as possible. In this concept, missile defense may be effective against small nuclear powers or reduce the options of large countries to efforts of a scale that they are not prepared to risk, because the consequences would be too unpredictable.

The decision on missile defense having been made, an open-

70 Henry Kissinger

minded study should seek to determine the most appropriate tech-
nology. This had been inhibited by efforts of the Clinton adminis-
tration to develop a technology that might fit into the ABM Treaty.
But were this possible, what would be the relevance of the treaty?
At any rate, it has become clear that the most studied technology is
probably the least suitable for effective defense. An urgent decision
is needed on this issue, unimpeded by those whose vested opposi-
tion to defense causes them to demand criteria the fewest new
weapons have ever met. Only when the United States has defined
its necessities can it conduct a serious dialogue on whether to
amend or to withdraw from the treaty. It will also be the most
meaningful basis for a negotiation on agreed limits to missile de-
fense and an arrangement on nuclear stockpiles appropriate to the
contemporary technology and political environment.

RELATIONS WITH RUSSIA

The West's relations with Russia have always been laced with
ambivalence. For Europe, Russia was a relative latecomer on the
international scene. Backward, mysterious, elemental, enormous, it
exploded on Europe's consciousness only in the eighteenth century.
In the first quarter of that century, Russia was still fighting Swedish
invaders deep inside what is present-day Ukraine. Less than fifty
years later, during the Seven Years' War, Russian armies stood on
the outskirts of Berlin. Another generation later, after the defeat of
Napoleon, Russian troops occupied Paris.

More autocratic than any of the European states, Russia prac-
ticed a mystical and nationalistic form of the Christian religion in
Russian orthodoxy—a state church which endowed Russia's quest
for prestige and expansion with legitimacy. Though Russia partici-
pated in the diplomacy of the European balance of power, it did not
apply its principles to neighboring countries. It proclaimed a zone
of special influence in the Balkans, where it advocated both Pan-
Slavism and the right to protect Orthodox Christianity against the
Muslim Ottoman Empire, as well as in Central Asia, where it pur-
sued both a colonialist and a religious mission.

Does America Need a Foreign Policy? 71

Russia has always been sui generis—especially when compared to its European neighbors. Extending over eleven time zones, Russia (even in its present, post-Soviet form) contains the largest land-mass of any contemporary state. St. Petersburg is closer to New York than it is to Vladivostok, which is in turn closer to Seattle than it is to Moscow. A country of that size ought not to suffer from claustrophobia. Yet creeping expansionism has been the recurring theme of Russian history. For four centuries, Russia has subordinated the well-being of its own population to this relentless outward thrust threatening all its neighbors. In the Russian mind, the centuries of sacrifice have been transmuted into a mission, partly on behalf of security, partly in the service of a claimed superior Russian morality.

Throughout history, Russia's achievements and ambitions have
kept pace with its physical dimensions. On two occasions, Russia's
vastness and its peoples' capacity for endurance prevented a con-
queror from dominating Europe: Napoleon in the nineteenth cen-
tury, Hitler in the twentieth. But, in the aftermath of each
stupendous national effort, Russia identified peace with imposing
its autocratic domestic principles everywhere within the reach of its
armies: in the name of conservatism through the Holy Alliance in
the nineteenth century, and in the name of Communism in the
twentieth century.

On both occasions, Russia overextended itself and suffered a
shipwreck: in the Crimean War in the nineteenth century, and
when the Soviet Union collapsed in the twentieth. Throughout its
history, with all its ups and downs, Russia has conducted a persis-
tent, patient, and skillful diplomacy: with Prussia and Austria
against the specter of French domination; with France against Im-
perial Germany; with England, France, and Hitler's Germany to
avoid isolation; with the United States and Britain to avoid disaster
during World War II; and, during the Cold War, by trying to split
Europe from the United States through a combination of nuclear
blackmail and the support of movements that portrayed the United
States as the greater threat to nuclear peace.

Russia's history has left Europe with a legacy of romantic nostal-

72 Henry Kissinger

gia for the periods of cooperation but also with a vague dread of Russia's vastness and inscrutability. Many in Germany identify national disasters with the abandonment of Bismarck's legacy of always keeping open a diplomatic option to Russia; France recalls having been saved in two world wars by alliance with Russia. Britain's historical memory is more sober and less sentimental; too much of its history is bound up with resisting Russian threats to the Bosporus and on the approaches to India.

The historical memories of all these countries are reinforced by the pressure of public opinion urging their governments to act as a pivot between Russia and the United States. This is why some European leaders talk of inviting Russia, at some point in the future, to join the European Union. It also is the impetus behind the efforts of all the major nations of Europe to establish a special relationship with Russia, both to prevent a recurrence of historic pressures and as a hedge against their neighbors doing the same thing.

The American historical experience with Russia has been less direct. In the nineteenth century, Russia was treated as the epitome of European autocracy; after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, it became for many the incarnation of radical evil. The United States did not establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union until the beginning of 1934. In the 1930s, some small groups, spurred by the rise of Nazism, saw in Communism the best barrier to Fascism and the harbinger of a new and more just world order. Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union gave rise to a feeling of goodwill toward the victim together with a sentimentalization of Soviet reality. President Franklin Roosevelt treated the Soviet Union as one of the pillars of an incipient world order, apparently convinced that neither centuries of tsarist autocracy and imperialism nor a generation of Stalinism would pose an insuperable obstacle to postwar Soviet-American collaboration.

The honeymoon proved to be short-lived. Stalin's intransigence, Communist ideology, and the Soviet occupation of Europe up to the Elbe River and dividing Germany produced a reaction of suspicious hostility. International relations became essentially bipolar as the two superpowers confronted each other across a divid-

ing line running through the center of Europe and multiplied their nuclear armaments on both sides of it.

During these forty years of confrontation, a minority in the United States—and somewhat larger groups in Europe—challenged the underlying premises of Atlantic Cold War policy. Sometimes exploited by Communist peace offensives even when independent of them, the advocates of a return to the Soviet-American camaraderie of the war years blamed the United States for excessive preoccupation with nuclear strategy and power politics. During the last two decades of the Cold War, a series of negotiations was conducted with the Soviet Union, mostly dealing with arms control but motivated in good part by the consciousness that, whatever the parties' ideological and geopolitical differences, nuclear weapons posed the risk of a cataclysm threatening the very survival of civilization, and that the two nuclear superpowers had a duty to limit or, if possible, to eliminate it altogether.

These negotiations led to a three-way split of American opinion: a group that believed that the Soviet system would be transformed by the very process of negotiations (or had indeed already transformed itself); a group that viewed Communism as the principal, if not the only, challenge to peace in the world and held that permanent peace could be achieved only by a crusade to bring about the collapse of Communism; and a third group that sought to contain the Soviet Union by a combination of diplomacy and strategy until exhaustion eroded Communist ideological fervor and changed the Soviet Union from an ideological cause to a state pursuing traditional national interests.

The debate among these three groups came to an end with the end of the Cold War itself. But because the first two groups had based their views on the same premise, namely that the Russian challenge was almost exclusively the consequence of the Communist ideology and structure, post-Cold War American thinking about Russia became increasingly preoccupied with the internal changes taking place in Moscow. As Communism unravelled, the relations of the Atlantic nations with Russia were based less on geopolitical considerations than on assumptions regarding Russia's

Does America Need a Foreign Policy? 73

74 Henry Kissinger

internal situation. And that, in turn, became identified with the personality of the Russian leader, Boris Yeltsin.

The Western democracies began to act as if Russia's domestic reform were the major, if not the sole, key to a stable relationship. Russia was treated not as a serious power but as the subject of occasionally condescending disquisitions on the state of its internal domestic reform.

Acting as if they were themselves a party to Russian domestic politics, Western leaders during Boris Yeltsin's term in office showed him with accolades, attesting to his commitment to reform. President Clinton, on the occasion of Yeltsin's resignation, spoke of Russia as having become "a pluralist political system and civil society competing in the world markets and plugged into the Internet." He explained Yeltsin's leaving office as "rooted in his core belief in the right and ability of the Russian people to choose their own leader."¹⁹ Almost every other observer viewed Yeltsin's resignation as a skillful manipulation of the Russian constitution in order to entrench as his successor a KGB-trained protégé practically unknown six months earlier, and to protect his own and his family's post-presidential existence.

Equating foreign policy with Russian domestic politics tended to identify the United States in the minds of many Russians with the weird Yeltsin-era hybrid of black markets, reckless speculation, outright criminal activity, and state capitalism in which huge industrial combines were run by their erstwhile Communist managers, all in the guise of privatization. This state of affairs enabled Russian nationalists and Communists to claim that the entire system was a fraud perpetrated by the West to keep Russia weak.

As a general proposition, when foreign policy toward Russia is identified with shaping Russian domestic politics, the ability to influence the external conduct of the Russian state is weakened. Yet it is precisely the external actions of Russia that have historically presented the greatest challenge to international stability. Indeed, the Western democracies, by making themselves so much a party to Russia's domestic drama, provided an incentive for Russia's leaders

to escape present-day frustrations by evoking visions of a glorious past.

Whatever the merit of these views during Russia's precarious transition from Communism and however considerable Yeltsin's achievement in navigating it without catastrophe, the world is now dealing with a new type of Russian leader. Unlike his predecessor, who cut his political teeth in the power struggles of the Communist Party, Putin emerged from the world of the secret police. Advance-ment in that shadowy world presupposes a strong nationalist com-mitment and a cool, analytical streak. It leads to a foreign policy comparable to that during the tsarist centuries, grounding popular support in a sense of Russian mission and seeking to dominate neighbors where they cannot be subjugated. With respect to other powers, it involves a combination of pressures and inducements, the proportion between which is reached by careful, patient, and cautious manipulations of the balance of power.

On December 31, 1999, the day before his elevation to the presidency, then Prime Minister Putin wrote: "It will not happen, if it ever happens at all, that Russia will become the second edition of, say, the United States or Great Britain. . . . For Russians, a strong state is not an anomaly, which should be got rid of. Quite the contrary, they see it as a guarantor of order and the initiator and the main driving force of any change."²⁰ Putin explicitly reaffirmed Russia's imperial tradition in his inaugural address in May 2000: "We must know our history, know it as it really is, draw lessons from it and always remember those who created the Russian state, championed its dignity and made it a great, powerful and mighty state."²¹

Both Russia and the United States have historically asserted a global vocation for their societies. But while America's idealism derives from the concept of liberty, Russia's developed from a sense of shared suffering and common submission to authority. Everyone is eligible to share in America's values; Russia's have been reserved for the Russian nation, excluding even the subject nationalities of the empire. American idealism tempts isolationism; Russian idealism has prompted expansionism and nationalism.

Does America Need a Foreign Policy? 75

76 Henry Kissinger

This attitude was reflected in a Russian national security policy document adopted on October 3, 1999, when Putin was Prime Minister, and signed into law as one of his first official acts upon assuming the acting presidency in January 2000: "to create a single economic domain with the members of the Commonwealth of Independent States"—that is, all the former constituent republics of the Soviet Union (with the exception of the Baltic states, which are not members of the Commonwealth but which are nevertheless facing constant Russian pressure).²²

The document does not define what is meant by a "single domain," or how such an ambition could be confined to the economic field. Faced with almost unanimous resistance to these designs, Russian policy under Yeltsin, and even more so under Putin, has sought to render independence so painful for the former constituent republics of the Soviet Union—through the presence of Russian troops, the encouragement of civil wars or economic pressure—that a return to the Russian womb appears as the lesser of these evils.

This policy is making significant progress. In Moldova, the Communist Party has won the most recent election. Georgia faces unremitting Russian pressures: economic, in the manipulation of Russian energy exports; military; and political, in Russian support for dissident groups. Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan face similar pressures. Belarus is already a de facto satellite of Russia. And Ukraine is rent by domestic divisions, of which Russia is partly the cause but also appears to some as the solution to the besieged government (which is responsible for some of its difficulties). And throughout its former empire, Russia is extending its domestic influence by skillfully using the process of privatization to buy up industries in former republics of the Soviet Union, thereby magnifying its economic influence.

One of the key challenges to the relations of the Atlantic nations with Russia is whether Russia can be induced to modify its traditional definition of security. Given its historical experiences, Russia is bound to have a special concern for security around its vast periphery and, as discussed earlier, the West needs to be careful not

to extend its integrated military system too close to Russia's borders. But, equally, the West has an obligation to induce Russia to abandon its quest for the domination of its neighbors. If Russia becomes comfortable in its present borders, its relations with the outside world should rapidly improve. But if reform produces a strengthened Russia returning to a policy of hegemony—as, in effect, most of its neighbors fear—Cold War-style tensions would inevitably reappear.

The United States and its allies need to define two priorities in their Russia policy. One is to see to it that Russia's voice is respectfully heard in the emerging international system—and great care must be taken to give Russia a feeling of participation in international decisions, especially those affecting its security. At the same time, the United States and its allies must stress—against all their inclinations—that their concerns with the balance of power did not end with the Cold War. The United States must do more than demonstrate about Russia's support of Iran's nuclear program, its systematic attack on American policies in the Gulf, especially in Iraq, and its eagerness to foster groupings whose proclaimed aim is to dismantle what Russian leaders persist in describing as American hegemony. The United States should respect legitimate Russian security interests. But this presupposes that the Russian definition of "legitimate" be compatible with the independence of Russia's neighbors and that it takes seriously such American concerns as limiting proliferation of nuclear and missile technology.

Russia's internal evolution cannot be treated as the principal answer to the foreign policy challenge with which it has always confronted its neighbors. The relationship between market economics and democracy—and between democracy and a peaceful foreign policy—is not nearly so automatic as conventional wisdom proclaims. In Western Europe, it took centuries for the process of democratization to come to fruition and did not preclude a series of catastrophic wars. In Russia, lacking a vital tradition of capitalism or democracy and which participated in neither the Reformation, the Enlightenment, nor the Age of Discovery, this evolution is likely to prove particularly complicated. Indeed, in the early stages,

Does America Need a Foreign Policy? 77

78 Henry Kissinger

the process may provide an incentive for Russian leaders to mobilize domestic support by appealing to nationalism.

With all these reservations, the United States and the Atlantic nations have no small stake in a Russia which develops economically and becomes democratic, a Russia which, for the first time in its history, gives priority to its domestic growth rather than seeking security through foreign adventures. They should be patient, but they cannot mortgage the security of Russia's neighbors, or their own, to this quest. For its part, Russia should have every incentive to reverse its historic priorities. Its large armory of nuclear weapons, even if technologically less useful for offensive operations—and perhaps precisely because of that—provides a safety net against Napoleonic or Hitlerian designs on its territory. And even nonnuclear weapons have become so powerful and accurate that old-style wars between major powers grow less and less conceivable.

For well-disposed foreign countries, the thorniest foreign policy challenge posed by Russia is how a potentially powerful country with a turbulent history can develop a stable relationship with the rest of the world. Now reduced to the boundaries of Peter the Great in Europe, Russia must adjust to the loss of its empire even as it builds historically unfamiliar domestic institutions.

The Atlantic allies owe it to Russia to acknowledge that it is undertaking a historic transition and to be helpful where they can. But however sympathetic the Atlantic nations are to this effort, they do themselves no favor by pretending that Russia has already accomplished a process of reform that is only in its infancy, or by celebrating Russian leaders for qualities they have yet to demonstrate. Whether Russia enters the international trading system as a reliable partner will depend to a large extent on its ability to introduce a transparent legal system, a predictable governmental structure, and genuine, rather than oligarchic, market economics. As these goals are approached, Russia's natural resources and its large pool of trained manpower will surely produce a substantial flow of foreign investment.

Some imagine that Europe can assist Russia in its integration

Does America Need a Foreign Policy? 79

into the international community by acting as the middleman between Russia and the United States. Prime Minister Tony Blair has claimed a role for Britain as "pivot," applying it to the contentious issue of missile defense. Others hint at Russian membership in NATO as an ultimate goal. Still others speculate on Russia's eventual membership in the European Union as a counterweight to either the United States or Germany.

But neither course represents a meaningful option for the next two decades. Russian membership in NATO would turn the Atlantic Alliance into a mini-United Nations type of security instrument or, alternatively, into an anti-Asian—especially anti-Chinese—alliance of the Western industrial democracies. Russian membership in the European Union, on the other hand, would split the two sides of the Atlantic. Such a move would inevitably drive Europe further toward seeking to define itself by its distinction from the United States and would oblige Washington to conduct a comparable policy in the rest of the world. An institutional relationship between Russia and Europe that is closer than that of Europe with the United States, or even comparable to it, would spark a revolution in Atlantic relations—the reason why Putin is so assiduously courting some of America's allies.

Every serious student of history recognizes the importance of a significant role for Russia in the building of a new international order without encouraging it into its historic patterns. At the end of the Napoleonic wars, Europe had faced a similar dilemma. Despite the fear of a resurgence of French militarism, Europe nevertheless succeeded in integrating France into the international system. The Quadruple Alliance—of Russia, Britain, Austria, and Prussia—protected Europe against a militarily resurgent France. At the same time, France was made an equal participant with the members of the Quadruple Alliance in the so-called Concert of Europe, which dealt with the political issues affecting the political stability of Europe.

Some analogous solution is needed for the contemporary international order. NATO must be maintained as a hedge against a

80 Henry Kissinger

reimperializing Russia. Coincidentally, the industrial democracies should design a responsible system of cooperation with Russia. The political consultative mechanisms within the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) should be strengthened, raised to a head-of-state level, and meet periodically to review the international situation. Russia is already participating in the G-8 heads of state meetings. In this manner, a new order in Europe will be built from west to east and not, as some are urging, from east to west.

## TOWARD A NEW STRUCTURE IN ATLANTIC RELATIONS

NATO will no longer prove adequate as the sole institutional framework for Atlantic cooperation. A vehicle for Atlantic cooperation going beyond security is needed to embrace all the nations of the European Union, including those which are not members of NATO, the various institutions of the European Union, and the North American members of the Atlantic Alliance—the United States, Canada, and, in time, Mexico.

A Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Area (TAFTA) would serve such a purpose. Initially designed for manufactured goods and services, with negotiations regarding agriculture to follow, TAFTA would accelerate the movement toward free trade to which all the nations of the North Atlantic region are committed. It would also counter the centrifugal forces weakening North Atlantic cooperation and give a new impetus to a sense of common destiny among the nations bordering the North Atlantic.

The conditions are propitious. Labor standards, wage scales, and environmental concerns on the two sides of the Atlantic are comparable. In time, NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement including the United States, Mexico, and Canada) and TAFTA could be merged. At that point, new consultative machinery in the political and social fields would need to be developed to forge closer links between the Western Hemisphere and the European Union. As Russia's economy develops and its internal policy

becomes more constitutional, associate membership for it in such a free trade area would become a distinct possibility.

The realm of political consultation requires the greatest burst of creativity. The central issue is just how much unity the Atlantic democracies need to manage their future, and how much diversity they can stand. It is in America's interest that Europe become a more active participant in world affairs. But it is not in America's interest that this identity be defined in opposition to the United States. An Atlantic Steering Group representing the various components of the Atlantic area should be formed, composed of the United States, the integrated European Union, the European nations not part of the politically integrated Europe, the NATO Secretary General, and the European Union High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy. It should meet at stated intervals, backed by a secretariat, to develop parallel approaches to world affairs but also to manage differences as they arise. The membership of this group could also participate in the mechanism for consultation with Russia under the auspices of the OSCE described earlier.

The Atlantic region would, in this conception, be characterized by a series of overlapping circles. On the military side, there would be NATO, together with whatever military force the European Union generates and which, in practice, would have to be integrated with NATO in some manner. On the security side, all members of the European Union must have some kind of NATO guarantee even when they are not part of the integrated command. Whatever the adaptations, NATO would remain as the key security organization. On the economic side, there would be the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Area. Political issues would be dealt with by the Atlantic Steering Group.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the future of democratic government as we understand it depends on whether the democracies bordering the North Atlantic manage to revitalize their relations in a world without Cold War and whether they can live up to the challenges of a global world order. If the Atlantic relationship gradually degenerates into the sort of rivalry that, amidst all its great achieve-

Does America Need a Foreign Policy? 81

82 Henry Kissinger

ments, spelled the end of Europe's preeminence in world affairs, the resulting crisis would undermine those values the Western societies have cherished in common.

While many pay lip service to the importance of this goal, there has been no real urgency in dealing with it. The disputes within the Atlantic area are real enough, and many of them—especially in the economic field—involve significant competing constituencies on both sides of the Atlantic. The desire of Europe for a greater identity is valid and, in the long run, also in the interest of the United States. The difficulty is to find a definition of identity that is something other than almost congenital opposition to the United States. A relationship of genuine cooperation implies that the two sides of the Atlantic are willing to modify their immediate short-term interests for the long-term necessities of a broader vision. But as Western democracies are ever more driven internally by short-term considerations, the constituencies for the long term shrink; the political rewards are for actions either which demonstrate immediate benefits or reward short-term passions. It therefore comes down to a question of leadership on both sides of the Atlantic.

While many of these pages have deplored trends within Europe, anyone concerned with the future of Atlantic relationships must recognize that overbearing American triumphalism bears its own share of responsibility. There has been too great a tendency to identify cooperation with concurrence with an American agenda; too much American domestic legislation being applied to close allies in their own countries; too little understanding of the needs of societies adjusting to the loss of their previous preeminence. A more sensitive American policy is essential. But so is a less doctrinaire European one. After all, the task of leaders is to take their societies from where they are to where they have never been.

ELCT

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

THREE

# The Western Hemisphere: The World of Democracies II

## REVOLUTION IN THE REGION

To the extent that political and economic institutions determine the nature of a region's international role, Latin America is comparable to the nations bordering the North Atlantic. Its political systems are democratic; its economies are increasingly market-oriented; disputes between its nations are settled by negotiation or arbitration. Wars between the countries of Latin America are, to all practical purposes, excluded. Occasional border confrontations, such as those between Peru and Ecuador in the 1980s, stand out as throwbacks to an earlier age, unlikely to be repeated in any significant way in the years to come. Arms expenditures as a proportion of the domestic product are lower in Latin America than in any other region of the world. From these perspectives, Latin America—especially Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico—is entering the globalized world and marks a success story for the principles of democracy and free markets. When President Clinton, at the Western Hemisphere summit in Miami in December 1994, proposed a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), he was appealing to this Latin American world.

But there is also another Latin American world that is underde-

B51

Washington Post 12/10/02

LCS

Henry A. Kissinger

# A Dangerous Divergence

NATO was created more than a half-century ago to protect its members against the threat of aggression, specifically a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. That threat having disappeared for the foreseeable future, NATO is not so much expanding as transforming itself into a different institution. It has become more akin to a collective security organization, like the United Nations, than to a traditional alliance. An alliance defines a *casus belli*, a dividing line and a specific set of obligations; it assumes an unambiguous threat. Collective security organizations define the threat from case to case and negotiate the method of resistance, if any, in light of circumstances. The various Berlin crises of the Cold War were dealt with in an alliance mode; the anti-terror campaign launched in September 2001 has been handled as a collective security matter, with our allies acting in their national capacities from case to case. NATO as an institution has not been involved.

This tacit transformation creates two potential fissures within the alliance: between Eastern and Western Europe, and between Europe and the United States. NATO expansion would have proceeded much more grudgingly, if at all, had the European nations still believed in a Russian threat or the possibility of a nuclear war over NATO's new frontiers—in other words, if our European allies had considered the alliance more needed. Moreover, most of Western Europe views Russian membership in NATO as only a matter of time. Meanwhile, a sort of halfway house has been arranged, giving Russia access to the NATO consultative machinery and weakening the purpose of the alliance for many of its new members.

For the attitude of the nations now entering NATO is much the same as the attitude of Western Europe during NATO's infancy. Having lived under Russian rule for decades, the new members see in NATO the instrument to prevent a recurrence of aggression or pressure from the East. Unlike some of their partners from Western Europe, they do not consider NATO a potential brake on American impetuosity; they seek to strengthen America's international commitments, not to restrain them.

Similarly, the new international environment alters the relationship between Europe and the United States. So long as there was a uniform perception of threat, Europe had an incentive to keep up its defense expenditures, though even then, its domestic outlays always exceeded its security spending. But in the absence of such a shared perception, European nations increasingly subordinate defense expenditures to domestic priorities. At the same time, the massive U.S. defense effort does not bolster allied cohesion, for it is widely perceived in Europe to be designed to deal with contingencies not related to European interests. Indeed, it magnifies the fear of many in Europe that the world is becoming unipolar while Europe would prefer it be multipolar.

Recognizing these trends, the Bush administration has abandoned pressures for increasing the over-

BY MARK WEBB

*If European distinctiveness is defined by disagreement for its own sake, Western civilization is on the road to destroying its substance, as it did in the first half of the 20th century.*

substance. The administration was surely right in pointing out that the defining characteristic of the traditional international system has been fundamentally altered by contemporary ideology and technology. That system assumed that the domestic jurisdiction of states was beyond international challenge; hence the principal threat to international stability was perceived to be the attempt to change frontier by force of arms. Neither assumption is still valid.

Terrorist threats challenge the social cohesion and weapons of mass destruction can alter the balance of power and threaten devastation primarily through technological developments within the territory of a sovereign state. In those circumstances, the potential victims cannot wait until the threat has been implemented. Preemption is inherent in the technology and ideology of the 21st-century international system. But the administration went too far in presenting what is an international reality as it were an American dispensation. Our allies will no longer acquiesce in leaving the definition of preemption to an ally, however close and powerful. Nor can it be in America's interest to encourage every nation to define preemption in purely national terms. The solution to this dispute is to seek to narrow the gap between substance and procedure to develop together some principles of preemption.

To make this work, it is necessary that our allies treat such an effort as having purposes beyond restraining the United States and that they take seriously the need to redefine the threat environment. In the end, preemption is not so much a new concept as the application of a norm long recognized in international law: the right of self-defense. What the argument is about is rules for lowering the threshold of

an European defense effort. Instead, it has concentrated on the creation of a relatively small intervention force of 20,000 under the NATO institutional umbrella to confront threats that used to be considered "out of area."

But the future of NATO depends less on its military structure than on the ability of its members to develop common political purposes. And therein lies reason for profound concern. European media and some political figures continue to present the United States as the land of the death penalty, rapacious capitalism, unilateral diplomacy and a cowboy mentality. The psychological gulf was evident when, at last month's NATO summit in Prague, so staunch an advocate of Atlantic ties as Czech President Vaclav Havel asked for understanding of "the occasional insensitivity, clumsiness or self-importance that may come with this [global] responsibility." Even the consensus on Iraq at the Prague summit will face a moment of truth when there is a need to define what constitutes a material breach of U.N. resolutions and what remedies are appropriate.

At the same time, many in the United States see Europe as a region of incipient neutrality, free-riding on U.S. defense capabilities and seeking to protect its security by substituting multilateralism for alliance responsibilities. There is a growing insistence on having the United States act as the sole arbiter of the global interest. These attitudes are at the heart of the dispute that goes under the heading of multilateralism vs. unilateralism.

The slogans obscure the underlying reality, which concerns the relative importance to be given to domestic and foreign policy. Europeans are no more willing than Americans to subordinate their perception of vital national interests to multilateralism in the abstract—witness their behavior with respect to the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union. But they define their vital interests in more parochial terms and regard global issues as matters that can be used to gain the support of national constituencies. In this way, European multilateralism often merges with new forms of self-righteous, moralistic nationalism.

For its part, America defines its national interests in more strategic terms. Europe defers worries about the operation of such new institutions as the International Criminal Court partly because of the lower priority it gives to foreign policy altogether. The United States is concerned about the immediate impact of an institution with a vague charter, unsettled procedures and no system of checks and balances, one that can affect the many Americans engaged in global responsibilities. Hence it contests the ICC's provisions with the same intensity Europeans devote to common agricultural policy.

The difference in Europe's reaction to the Bush administration's rejection of the Kyoto Protocol and the International Criminal Court, compared with its treatment of the policies of the Clinton administration, shows that the controversy is more about style than substance. Europeans were pacified by the multilateral process of negotiation even though they must have known that what was being negotiated would not be implemented. The Senate, by a vote of 95 to 0, had made clear its refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. And President Clinton, in signing the ICC convention three weeks before leaving office, emphasized that he had no intention of submitting it to the Senate for ratification or of recommending that his successors do so.

Similarly, the furor surrounding the notion of pre-emption concerns procedure probably far more than

when this principle can be applied.

As the alliance shifts its emphasis from the military to the political arena, from defending a geopolitical dividing line to what in NATO parlance used to be called "out of area" conflicts, both sides of the Atlantic need to define for themselves why NATO still important.

The United States must resist basing foreign policy on hegemonic power. Many of the problems affecting world order are not susceptible to solution by military means. History shows that sooner or later every powerful country calls into being counter vailing forces. And at that point—and I would insist even now—the United States will not be able to solve every international problem alone without exhausting itself physically and psychologically. We will need allies, and the countries that most share our values and history are the NATO countries. And however much conventional wisdom balks at the concept of a clash of civilizations, that is what Western societies face together from the radical, crusading version of Islam.

The ultimate challenge for U.S. foreign policy is to turn dominant power into a sense of shared responsibility; it is to conduct policy as the Australian scholar Coral Bell has written, as if the international order were composed of many centers of power, even while we are aware of our strategic preeminence. It implies the need for a style of consultation less focused on selling immediate policy prescriptions than on achieving a common definition of threats and long-range purposes.

By the same token, Europe must resist the temptation of "distinctiveness" for its own sake. Criticism of U.S. culture and policy has been a staple of European opponents of NATO for 50 years. What is unusual now is that governments in key countries are making no efforts to stem the tide, and they occasionally even stir it up. The alliance needs a clearer declaration of what is intended by a "European" foreign policy and one less geared to pacifying domestic pressure groups. Europe must be allowed scope for disagreeing with its partner. But if distinctiveness is defined by disagreement for its own sake, Western civilization is on the road to destroying its substance, as it did in the first half of the 20th century. Europe must take seriously the idea that America's attempt to shape a world order reflects a sense of global responsibility and not the psychological orientation of particular leaders.

In this context, the debate between multilateralism and unilateralism assumes a different dimension. Abstract multilateralism is as incompatible with a new Atlantic relationship as abstract unilateralism. The former absorbs purpose in a quest for a general global consensus, the latter in overemphasis on a special national character. But NATO, to be meaningful, needs to have a special character between these two extremes. It must be able to define common purposes more precise than the attainable international consensus and more embracing than the national interest of an individual partner, however powerful.

Is this possible? Or are we condemned to drift apart? We cannot know the answer today, but the future of our civilization requires that we make the effort to find it.

The writer, a former secretary of state, is president of Kissinger Associates Inc., an international consulting firm. He wrote this article before being named chairman of a special panel to investigate the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

© 2002 Tribune Media Services International