A post-NATO era is beginning | European Voice
A post-NATO era is beginning | European Voice
Europe has failed NATO's existential test in Afghanistan
Smiles on stage but sighs behind the scenes will be the story of the NATO summit at Lisbon on 20 November. Politicians from Europe and the US will deny it fiercely in public, but the truth is that we are entering a post-NATO era. The war in Afghanistan was an existential test for the alliance. If it cannot fight missions in far-away countries, it is not worth the money.
The failure is much bigger than in Iraq. That war could be blamed on George W. Bush's recklessness, and the incompetence of Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon. But lefty Europeans were among the loudest in demanding international intervention against the gay-stoning, women-hating puritans of the Taliban.
Now Europe is failing its own test. Mostly too timid or too weak to fight and too ignorant of Afghanistan to train or help, Europeans (with some honourable exceptions) look pretty useless from a US military point of view. When US troops pull out of Afghanistan in the coming years, they will not return to their old bases in expensive, ungrateful Europe, but go home – or on new missions elsewhere.
Self-indulgently, Europeans want a different, more appreciative US as an ally and different wars too – easy ones, preferably. That is fantasy. In 2010, NATO resembles a marriage where the spouses holiday separately, wishing that the other party would make more of an effort. Soon come separate bedrooms and bank accounts. Finally, the unhappy couple will meet only at breakfast, to haggle over the household bills.
Not only has NATO failed as an expeditionary alliance; plugging Europe's remaining hard-security gaps no longer needs its bloated civilian and military bureaucracies. The people who work at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) and NATO HQ may not know it, but it is well past closing time in the ‘Last-Chance Saloon'. Their well-padded Cold War lifestyles will soon be history, withering and vanishing just as the elephantine and luxurious French, UK and US ‘military governments' in West Berlin did in the early 1990s. When the US needs help, it will seek it from the handful of European countries with real soldiers willing to kill and be killed in foreign wars. It does not need NATO for that.
The US will remain residually committed to European security, partly out of sentiment, partly for precautionary reasons, and partly because it retains a lingering worry about Russia's approach to its former empire. But the set of problems that ties the US to Europe is shrinking. It is Germany, not the US, that is tidying up the western Balkans, getting the Russians to lean on the Bosnian Serbs, brokering a deal between Greece and its nameless northern neighbour, and trying to unscramble the clotted mess of Transdniestria.
The US will continue to work with European allies in the High North and the Arctic. Oil and Israel mean that the US will stay in the eastern Mediterranean and keep an eye on the Black Sea (but not by pushing NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia: relations with Russia matter more). Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland are the only European countries that the US really needs, theoretically, to defend from Russia.
To that end, the US is giving increasing weight to Nordic-Baltic security co-operation (on which a high-level meeting took place last week in Washington, DC). For the US, non-NATO Sweden and Finland matter a lot more in keeping that region stable and safe than most ‘nominal NATO' countries do.
Europe will be a place where the US bases its missile defences, which provides logistical support for US missions overseas and which – I hope – maintains a strong diplomatic transatlantic alliance in support of battered ideas such as political freedom and the rule of law.
The writer is central and eastern Europe correspondent of The Economist.
source: A post-NATO era is beginning | European Voice
Europe has failed NATO's existential test in Afghanistan
Smiles on stage but sighs behind the scenes will be the story of the NATO summit at Lisbon on 20 November. Politicians from Europe and the US will deny it fiercely in public, but the truth is that we are entering a post-NATO era. The war in Afghanistan was an existential test for the alliance. If it cannot fight missions in far-away countries, it is not worth the money.
The failure is much bigger than in Iraq. That war could be blamed on George W. Bush's recklessness, and the incompetence of Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon. But lefty Europeans were among the loudest in demanding international intervention against the gay-stoning, women-hating puritans of the Taliban.
Now Europe is failing its own test. Mostly too timid or too weak to fight and too ignorant of Afghanistan to train or help, Europeans (with some honourable exceptions) look pretty useless from a US military point of view. When US troops pull out of Afghanistan in the coming years, they will not return to their old bases in expensive, ungrateful Europe, but go home – or on new missions elsewhere.
Self-indulgently, Europeans want a different, more appreciative US as an ally and different wars too – easy ones, preferably. That is fantasy. In 2010, NATO resembles a marriage where the spouses holiday separately, wishing that the other party would make more of an effort. Soon come separate bedrooms and bank accounts. Finally, the unhappy couple will meet only at breakfast, to haggle over the household bills.
Not only has NATO failed as an expeditionary alliance; plugging Europe's remaining hard-security gaps no longer needs its bloated civilian and military bureaucracies. The people who work at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) and NATO HQ may not know it, but it is well past closing time in the ‘Last-Chance Saloon'. Their well-padded Cold War lifestyles will soon be history, withering and vanishing just as the elephantine and luxurious French, UK and US ‘military governments' in West Berlin did in the early 1990s. When the US needs help, it will seek it from the handful of European countries with real soldiers willing to kill and be killed in foreign wars. It does not need NATO for that.
The US will remain residually committed to European security, partly out of sentiment, partly for precautionary reasons, and partly because it retains a lingering worry about Russia's approach to its former empire. But the set of problems that ties the US to Europe is shrinking. It is Germany, not the US, that is tidying up the western Balkans, getting the Russians to lean on the Bosnian Serbs, brokering a deal between Greece and its nameless northern neighbour, and trying to unscramble the clotted mess of Transdniestria.
The US will continue to work with European allies in the High North and the Arctic. Oil and Israel mean that the US will stay in the eastern Mediterranean and keep an eye on the Black Sea (but not by pushing NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia: relations with Russia matter more). Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland are the only European countries that the US really needs, theoretically, to defend from Russia.
To that end, the US is giving increasing weight to Nordic-Baltic security co-operation (on which a high-level meeting took place last week in Washington, DC). For the US, non-NATO Sweden and Finland matter a lot more in keeping that region stable and safe than most ‘nominal NATO' countries do.
Europe will be a place where the US bases its missile defences, which provides logistical support for US missions overseas and which – I hope – maintains a strong diplomatic transatlantic alliance in support of battered ideas such as political freedom and the rule of law.
The writer is central and eastern Europe correspondent of The Economist.
source: A post-NATO era is beginning | European Voice
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