<nettime> europa, usa, nettime (kagan)

["geert lovink" <geert@xs4all.nl>]

(this article may be an interesting read if we apply it to nettime itself...
nettime was started in 1995 as an attempt to open up a critical
communication channel between europe and the usa about cultural and
political net issues. it wasn't global or anything as europe itself was
hardly online at the time. we didn't want to make such a bold claim, back
then. the issue then was wired's techno libertarianism. however, soon it
turned out that geography didn't really matter as there were as many dotcom
idots in eurostan as there were anywhere in the world. the whole idea of
geographical identities was foolish. yet, things have changed over the last
seven years. are americans again from mars and europeans from venus, really?
would that make it, again, important to open up trans-atlantic dialogues?
are the tendencies that kagan observes only applicable to the foreign policy
level or are they also visible on nettime and other new media channels or
the Internet in general? geert)

--

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

Policy Review

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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 - "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 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 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 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 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 agree!
ment 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 unavoidable challenges. The
difficulties of moving forward might seem insuperable were it not for the
progress the project of Europe!
an 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 sa!
ve 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

n 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 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." Eve!
n 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 "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
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 Ils 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 stabilit!
y 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 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 year!
ns 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 townsp!
eople 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 - 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 vita!
l 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 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

1. One 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).

2. The 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.

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

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

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

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

7. The 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.

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

9. John 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.

10. William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Challenge to Isolation,
1937-1940 (Harper Bros., 1952), 14.

11. See Thomas L. Pangle and Peter J. Ahrensdorf, Justice Among Nations: On
the Moral Basis of Power and Peace (University Press of Kansas, 1999),
200-201.



#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net