NATO’s Impact on Transatlantic Relations

The Cold War, NATO, and an Evolving Alliance of Values
Let me just say a couple of words about the Cold War. The Cold War was fought in many places, many of them in Asia. It was fought in Korea; it was fought in Vietnam, perhaps by mistake; perhaps also by mistake, it was fought in Afghanistan. It was fought in a different way in conference rooms and in the domestic politics of many countries, including this one. There was the Berlin airlift and there were tanks facing each other in the streets, but in Europe, strangely, there was no fighting. It reminds me a little bit of a sumo bout where the two sumo wrestlers face each other and glare at each other. They stamp their feet and, of course, throw the salt—in the Cold War terminology that was SALT I and SALT II—but, in the end, they don’t fight. That seemed to me to be a very satisfactory way to deal with a conflict.

I think in that period we learned some useful things in the alliance. We learned that what mattered was sorting out our own quarrels (and there were lots of them). The alliance survived Suez, détente, ostpolitik, the two-track decision on missiles, star wars, and many other life-threatening situations. We learned that what you are may be more important than what you do. And what we were was a pluralistic, quarreling alliance, an integral part of a pluralistic society. Because of that quarreling, pluralistic nature of the alliance we learned, perhaps with a twinge of regret, that U.S. leadership was also quite useful. But we also learned that with deterrence went dialogue, that the best security comes from good political relations, not from weapons. You need weapons, but good political relations are, ultimately, what you should aim at.

The big surprise, though, has come to us now ten years after the end of the Cold War. The big surprise for me is that NATO still exists. There is almost no historical precedent for an alliance outliving its enemy, from the Delian League to the Grand Alliance of World War II. When the enemy goes, the alliance goes. But NATO somehow hasn’t gone. Instead, what NATO has done is to adapt in a number of ways. First of all, it has developed a new strategic concept over the last ten years, a concept which emphasizes crisis management as well as territorial defense. It has a whole series of new relationships: It has three new members; it has twenty-five countries associated with NATO in the Partnership for Peace program; and it has a new relationship with Russia—a difficult new relationship with Russia, but a very important one. Russia’s relationship with the West is going to be one of the key issues for the next era and NATO is an important part of that relationship. It’s still a work in progress. But that also is not a bad way for a conflict to end. An important lesson was learned at the end of the Second World War: Turn former enemies into partners.

And so NATO is not now an alliance against anything; it’s an alliance on the basis of common interests and common values. We saw this to be true in Kosovo, which was a campaign fought about European values. The objectives of the campaign were the withdrawal of Serb forces and the return of 800,000 Kosovar refugees. We achieved both. There were mistakes and failures, but that is common to all military activity. The question you have to ask is, Did you achieve the objectives? And the answer to that is, Yes, we did.

But I think in the process we have learned how different the world is. We’ve learned two things, in particular. One is that this was a different kind of war from the ones that we were used to in the 20^th century. The First World War, the Second World War, and the Cold War were all, in a sense, total wars. These were wars of survival and potentially of annihilation. The campaign in Kosovo was a limited campaign for limited objectives. Such wars end not in unconditional surrender, but in negotiation. We are still waiting for the negotiation and we may have to wait some time, but when Serbia wishes to return to Europe we will negotiate. All of this means that political cohesion and solidarity is at least as important as military effectiveness, and the alliance demonstrated remarkable political cohesion during the bombing campaign.

The second thing that we are learning is that peace is often more complicated than war. The military bit, in some respects, now looks like the easy bit. Going in successfully is easy. Leaving successfully is the real test. There is a lot of work to be done and it can’t all be done by NATO. NATO now has to work with other bodies—the UN, the OSCE, the EU, and a whole host of NGOs, as well. I should mention here the Japanese contribution which Professor Takemi referred to earlier today. We valued Japanese political support during the campaign. We value Japanese engagement in rebuilding Kosovo.

Another thing that the Kosovo campaign demonstrated very strongly is the widening gap between American and European military capabilities. The vast majority of the bombing sorties were flown by American planes and it was only American planes that could bomb through cloud. Again, the pattern in peace is a bit different from war. In peace you will find that 80 percent of the soldiers on the ground are European and about 85 percent of the money for reconstruction is European. Nevertheless, the military campaign left a lot of us with the feeling that the alliance was unbalanced and almost unhealthy. This is strange because if you add up European defense budgets you find that the total is about 60 percent of the U.S. defense budget, but if you look at European capabilities it looks more like 20 percent.

How does that come about? Well, there are two reasons. The first is that European forces were geared to the Cold War. The Cold War in a sense like the industries of the old economy—big, long, heavy, hard. And that’s more or less what European forces were like—big, solid, heavy, rather immobile. What we need in the future is something different. We need, I wouldn’t say soft forces, but we need well-equipped, mobile, more responsive, professional forces. A move in that direction is happening in Europe. France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal are already moving from conscript armies to professional armies. Germany is discussing the issue.

The second reason why European capabilities are poor is that we are sixteen separate countries with sixteen separate defense budgets, sixteen separate sets of logistical arrangements, and sixteen separate armed forces. There are real economies of scale that we are missing out in Europe. If we want to raise our capabilities, either we are going to have to raise our spending (and many would argue for that too) or we are going to have to work together better.

European Defense Capabilities and Transatlantic Imbalances
This brings me to the European defense initiative. The point of this initiative, essentially, is to raise European capabilities by combining our defense efforts. We are not really talking about defense in the sense of territorial defense. That is NATO’s responsibility. But we are talking about improving Europe’s capability to carry out crisis management jobs. The first choice will still be action through NATO, but we want to provide a better European contribution to NATO and that means a more integrated European contribution. It doesn’t mean a NATO consisting of two blocks, but it does mean that the EU would have the option of acting if the U.S. does not want to join them, perhaps with other European allies, such as Turkey or Norway. It will mean providing the U.S. with a better and a more capable partner. A more capable partner, I hope, will be a more influential partner, as well. I am sure the U.S. would have no difficulty with that. Pluralism is one of the strengths of the alliance.

Initially Europe has set itself the objective of creating a rapid reaction force—a force of 60,000 men that can be put in place within 60 days notice. You ask yourself why can’t Europe do this already, seeing that it’s got about one and a half million troops. The answer is it simply can’t and it’s going to require a serious effort to change this situation. The rapid reaction force, I hope, is a beginning. I hope that we will go further. In any case, it will be a good thing if at the end of this process we have more flexible and more mobile forces.

You never know when and where you will be needed. A year or so ago, no European country would have dreamed that it was going to deploy forces to the South Pacific, but Britain, France, Germany and Portugal have all contributed to the UN force in East Timor. The point is that if your friends are involved, you are involved. That has been the U.S. attitude in the Balkans and the example of East Timor shows the definition of “friends” goes some way beyond the narrow confines of the alliance.

Three Personal Observations
Let me finish by making three personal observations. I underline the word personal. Let nobody make the mistake of thinking that I have checked this with the Prime Minister or anybody else.

First, I’d like to echo what Dr. Kissinger said yesterday. It seems to me that there is a risk in having NATO function as the main carrier of transatlantic relations. Putting transatlantic relations entirely through a military framework may have a distorting effect, both on the military side and on transatlantic relations in general. There is, of course, an EU—U.S. relationship, although it doesn’t work very well. Somewhere we seem to be missing a political relationship between the U.S. and Europe. That should be on our agenda.

The second observation is a question I’d like to ask: Having changed the strategy and being in the process of changing the structures, does NATO also need to change the mindset? The mindset that you needed for the Cold War, which was a total war, was a mindset that permitted no kind of failure. But when you are dealing with crisis management and with limited campaigns, then there may come a point in campaigns when you wish to cut your losses. And perhaps we need to ask ourselves whether NATO ought to be a little bit more robust about failure. Do we need to put NATO’s credibility on the line every time? Organizations which survive failure, it seems to me, have a particular kind of strength. NATO’s problem, perhaps, is that it has never had a failure yet.

The third issue is whether in the long run—and I would say personally, this is perhaps the point that worries me most—there isn’t a risk of a cultural separation taking place between Europe and the U.S.—a culture of power on one side of the Atlantic and a culture of law on the other side. Or, if you like, Hobbes on one side and Grotius on the other. Actually we need both law and power; we need both Hobbes and Grotius. The combination of the two works extremely well, but a division of labor along those lines would be a division of the alliance and inherently unattractive.