The European Dream (51 page)

The intervention into the Bosnia conflict in 1992 and the Kosovo War at the end of the last decade proved embarrassing. European military forces were virtually powerless to impose their will on a ragtag army of thugs under the command of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic. The Kosovo conflict was particularly painful for the European military command. Were it not for U.S. military intervention, it’s unlikely that Europe could have mustered the military might necessary to stop the hostility. Having to rely on American military forces for what was essentially a low-grade military action was humiliating. If Europe could not keep the peace in its own backyard against a less than formidable foe, how could the EU expect to maintain the peace and security of 455 million people living in twenty-five different nations?

The Kosovo War demonstrated just how lame the European military machine had become. The European forces were so ill trained, their weaponry so outmoded, and their surveillance and command-and-control structures so inadequate that they couldn’t even be effectively integrated into what was essentially an American-led war effort. In the end, the European contribution to the war effort actually hindered the execution of the war.

The American military command was frustrated not only by the military shortcomings of the Europeans but also by what it perceived to be battlefield ineptness by European generals. Politics often got in the way, sending ambiguous messages to Milosevic about the Allies’ intentions and willingness to fight. General Wesley Clark, the commander of NATO forces, complained that military decisions were continually being second-guessed and put on hold as Europeans fretted over the legal and political ramifications. “It was always the Americans who pushed for the escalation to new, more sensitive targets,” said Clark, “. . . and always some of the Allies who expressed doubts and reservations.”
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Clark offered a sobering assessment of the “joint” NATO operation in Kosovo: “We paid a price in operational effectiveness by having to constrain the nature of the operation to fit within the political and legal concerns of NATO member nations.”
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As for the Europeans, they wondered out loud what they would do in some future conflict on European soil if the United States were not there to bail them out and take command.

The difference in the relative military effectiveness of the U.S. and the EU is almost mind-numbing. The American military machine has no match in history. American military spending alone is more than the next nine largest defense budgets combined. The U.S. now accounts for 80 percent of the world’s military R&D and 40 percent of the world’s total military spending.
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If the U.S. government continues to increase its military budget at the current rate, its military expenditures will shortly be equal to the combined military expenditures of the rest of the world.
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European defense spending, by contrast, is only €155 billion, or less than half that of the United States.
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Although far behind in technological preparedness, the European Union actually has more soldiers under arms than the U.S.—some 2 million troops.
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The U.S. has only 1.4 million troops in uniform.
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One would expect that with half of the military budget of the United States, the EU combined forces would enjoy at least half the military capability. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Europe’s strategic reconnaissance capability is a mere 10 percent of the U.S.’s, it’s airlift capacity is only 20 percent of America’s, and its precision-guided air-deliverance ordnance is approximately 10 percent of our own.
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According to public opinion surveys, more than 70 percent of Europeans support a common defense and security policy for the European Union.
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But, as already mentioned, when it comes to the question of paying for the increased military expenditures that would be required to modernize the EU’s military machine, the public is less enthusiastic. As of 2001, the amount spent by the EU and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe on conflict prevention was less than the cost of one fighter jet.
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A RAND study done in the 1990s estimated that the cost of training, arming, and deploying a fifty-thousand-soldier force with state-of-the-art military capabilities over the next twenty-five years would run the EU somewhere between $18 and $49 billion, with an additional cost of between $9 and $25 billion if it wanted to create satellite intelligence capability.
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To even hope to approach American military readiness, the European Union would need to increase its overall military spending from its current level of approximately 2 percent of GDP to over 4 percent of GDP.
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No one, on either side of the Atlantic, expects that will happen.

Defense budgets have actually been shrinking in all of the EU countries, with the exception of Ireland and Greece.
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In a period of slow economic growth and tighter government budgets, it’s unlikely that member countries of the EU will choose to increase military spending at the same time they are being forced to cut social benefits. Karl Zinsmeister, of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative American think tank, sums up the feeling of many fellow conservatives in the United States. He writes,

Many American government officials and military analysts, not to mention political observers, have run out of patience with what they regard as a silly EU foreign policy buttressed by a virtually nonexistent military presence. And they are not alone. British political observers have joined the rising chorus of disenchantment here in the U.S. over “fuzzy” foreign policy thinking among European elites. The British conservative Michael Gove’s acid comments on the subject are typical of the talk among the “realpolitik” crowd. In his opinion,

Americans and Europeans, then, sport two very different ideas of the way foreign policy and security ought to be handled. The Europeans seek security in strengthening international laws, and especially laws governing universal human rights. The aim is to minimize hostilities among foes and to use military intervention selectively to separate warring factions. The EU puts a high premium on conflict resolution rather than military victory. It uses economic assistance as a means of empowering the poor, spreading democracy, and bringing potential trouble spots into the community of civilized people. The current Bush Administration and a vast number of Americans—whether a majority or not is difficult to ascertain—are of a different mind. Many would agree with President Bush’s national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who wrote, at the time of the 2000 presidential election campaign, that America would be best off by proceeding “from the firm ground of the national interests, not from the interest of an illusory international community.”
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A growing number of American critics of the European Union’s foreign and security policies argue that the only reason Europe can present itself to the world as a “good guy idealist” is because the U.S. has to play “big daddy realist” and lean on the “bad guys” to preserve peace and order in Europe and elsewhere. The oft-heard refrain is that America is carrying Europe’s water.

More tempered voices are likely to acknowledge that there is a role for both strategic approaches to foreign policy and security and that they might even complement each other—kind of like a foreign policy analogy of the bad cop, good cop model. The idea is that the United States, with its superior military capabilities, uses its unchallenged dominance to act as a sort of global disciplinarian, punishing wrongdoers for their transgressions and evil ways. The European Union, with its conflict-resolution and peacekeeping abilities, can serve as the rehabilitator, helping the wrongdoers, through a combination of peacekeeping and economic assistance, to see the error of their ways and reform their behavior. That dual scenario has played out in numerous occasions already in troubled regions of the world. America “does the hard war-fighting and Europe picks up the burden of peaceful reconstruction afterwards.”
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In political circles, the way they often put it is this: “America does the cooking, Europe does the washing up.”
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Not surprisingly, when Europeans and Americans were asked whether they would support such a dual formula, 52 percent of Europeans said they agreed with the division of labor, while only 39 percent of Americans concurred.
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From the European perspective, American taunts about Brussels’ childish idealism ring hollow. Europeans have shown that they can use the tools of dialogue, process, and consensus-building to create bridges among people and put an end to age-old rivalries. The EU’s twenty-five member nations are proof, on a large scale, of the wisdom of their approach. They reason that if 455 million Europeans of different persuasions and contending interests can transcend their ancient animosities and join together as an extended community in pursuit of peace and economic prosperity, why not beyond Europe?

Europeans are somewhat more circumspect when it comes to the second charge, of freeloading on the coattails of America’s military might. European leaders and the European public know, deep down, that there is truth to the charge. They also worry that a unipolar world dominated and controlled by the United States might ultimately prove to be a less safe place for everyone—not because America has evil intentions but, rather, because whenever a single power can act as a hegemon, however noble its intentions, it invites countermeasures and retaliatory responses. French president Jacques Chirac voices the concerns of many other world leaders when he warns that “any community with only one dominant power is always a dangerous one and provokes reactions.”
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The European Union is beginning to realize that it has to create a credible military operation if it is to ensure the safety and security of its citizenry. There is a recognition that America is likely to be less willing to commit American troops in or around Europe in the future, even under NATO’s umbrella, to fight battles that should be fought by Europe itself. However, it should be noted that the U.S. government appears to be of two minds on the matter. On the one hand, it continues to nudge the European Union to take more responsibility for the defense of Europe. On the other hand, it has repeatedly warned the European Union in recent years not to attempt to build its own military organization independent of NATO, fearing that if this were to happen, the U.S. might lose its ability to dictate the terms of any potential military engagement in the European theater. In other words, the U.S. would like the EU member countries to pony up greater military expenditures and to ratchet up their commitments to the defense of Europe, but within the NATO rubric, so as to maintain U.S. military dominance in that part of the world.

The idea for a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) was agreed upon as far back as 1993 in the Treaty on the European Union signed at Maastricht. But the plans to implement the CFSP languished for much of the remainder of the decade. The EU member countries had long been split on the question of whether or not to create a truly independent military force of their own. The French favored an EU fighting force accountable only to EU member nations. French president Chirac reiterated the French position in a speech to the European Parliament in the year 1999. He told the MPs that the European Command “cannot fully exist until it possesses autonomous capacity for action in the field of defense.”
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The British, however, worried that a bid for European military autonomy might undermine NATO and anger its American ally. Britain’s commitment to the EU has always been more tentative than that of other EU countries. Caught between a special relationship with the U.S. and its ancient ties to Europe, it has sought refuge in both camps and has often found itself torn between loyalties and not sure where its ultimate self-interests might lie.

The U.K. began to soften its stance on a European military force in the late 1990s, in part to assuage the feeling of other EU members for its refusal to adopt Europe’s single currency. The Balkan crisis also convinced the U.K. that the EU’s military weakness had to be addressed. Great Britain came to believe that a European military force could serve two masters, NATO and the European Union. It would address U.S. concerns that Europe was not doing enough to shoulder its weight in the defense of Europe. And, if the European forces were subsumed under NATO, it would strengthen the North Atlantic alliance rather than weaken it. The French saw the new British willingness as an opening wedge to its long sought-after goal of an independent military presence.

In December 1998, a Franco-British summit was convened in St. Malo, France. The two countries established the terms for what was to become the European Security and Defense Policy.
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France and the U.K. signed a declaration that would commit the European Union, for the first time, to becoming a military as well as civil power. The declaration stated that the EU needed the “capacity for autonomous action backed up by credible military forces, the means to decide to use them and a readiness to do so in order to respond to international crisis.”
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The declaration made clear that the new proposed EU military force would act only in those situations where the whole of NATO was not involved and that it would not duplicate NATO operations.
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