CSDP – the Atlantic Alliance’s saviour?
Published on by European Geostrategy
Even before the onset of hostilities in Libya it was obvious to insiders on both sides of the Atlantic that NATO was increasingly dysfunctional. Libya has now shown the wider public that the emperor has no clothes.
Cohesion used to be NATO’s trademark, but there is little of that left. And the reputation of the ‘greatest military alliance’ is a diminishing commodity for younger American military officers as I recently found out during a visit to a United Sates Navy aircraft carrier. During dinner I was seated between the ship’s two senior officers. The older Executive Officer felt NATO was the cornerstone of Western defence, while the younger commander of the ship’s attack squadrons told me it still had to be proven to him that NATO was still useful.
Left dangling in this state NATO will soon become irrelevant to the security needs of the Euro-Atlantic area. Worse, its internal tensions will continue to damage the already brittle transatlantic ties.
After speaking with over fifty military and government leaders from Europe and the United States, I believe the answer to NATO’s woes is to bridge the alliance with the European Union’s Common Security and Defence Policy, and shift the responsibility for the defence of Europe and its periphery to the European Union. In a forthcoming report for the United States Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, I recommend that the President of the United States initiate a meeting with the leadership of the European Union and Canada to execute this change over a period of three to five years.
America has underwritten the security of Europe for over sixty years. It is not a state of affairs that I believe the increasingly pressured American taxpayer will look upon favourably any more. Especially considering that the European Union’s gross domestic product now exceeds America’s and the combined defence budget of the Member States of the European Union of around €200 billion (over $300 billion) is not appreciably smaller than America’s defence budget – after removing the expenses of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and subtracting the expenses of America’s world-wide responsibilities, a global role that Europeans seem to have no desire to underwrite or assume.
Rebalancing security responsibilities will also be a sign of how deep and wide the transatlantic relationship really is, and how far it has come from the days when Europe was completely reliant on the United States for its very survival. Yet, a refashioned NATO with a unified European pillar existing alongside the North American pillar will ensure that there is a mechanism to enable the European Union, the United States, and Canada to act together, if that should ever become necessary again.
It would be a pity to let NATO fade away; because it will then have to be reinvented someday. And that will not be easy.
Sarwar Kashmeri is a senior fellow in the International Security programme of the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC and a fellow of the Foreign Policy Association in New York City. His new book – NATO 2.0: Reboot or Delete – was published by Potomac Books, April 2011. A European launch of the book is being organised in Brussels by the Bertelsmann Stiftung for 15th June 2011.
Very much agreed; I reached a similar conclusion:
Just shift responsibility? Now you just have to get the leaders and people of the twenty-eight NATO nations to go along with raising more taxes, overcome their seemingly inbred inhibitions to force, and agree on the five ‘W’s for strategy, operations and tactics. Good luck.
European Union Member States are simply too pacifist to assume greater defence expenditures, even on their own behalf. European squishiness is so pronounced that the German defence minister was forced to resign because of civilian deaths in Afghanistan, even though, as mature cultures realise, such tragedies are inevitable in war. Many NATO nations don’t allow their soldiers combat roles. An American parent with a son in Afghanistan might wonder, what’s the point? As you note, Europe is long accustomed to the United States’ security umbrella, and like a spoiled child, consider Americans’ paying their way and dying on their behalf, a birthright.
The European Union is collapsing under its own contradictions. In the long run you cannot tie a common currency to different cultures and diverse economies. And though the European Union has a gross domestic product exceeding that of the United States., it remains a fragmented entity of competing national interests (i.e., France, Germany). The European Union will never act decisively for the common good simply because there isn’t a common good.
It’s ironic how Mr. Obama’s ineptness in Libya exposed NATO for the money sucking, rat’s nest for bureaucrats that its become. And just in time for American taxpayers to consider the wisdom of a new billion dollar NATO headquarters in Brussels. Instead of shoehorning new security realities into the old NATO paradigm, let emergence fashion new and improved structures and relationships.
What have you got to lose, except a billion dollars worth of power point conference rooms in Belgium.
Sorry Roger, that billion dollar NATO HQ won’t get any traction in the United States. It is a rounding error. We need at last $10 billion to shake the tree. I’d put the HQ in Brussels if it has to be built and make it a JFHQ for CSDP and NATO.
Will the addition of an alphabet soup bureaucracy representing a group of entitiies still unwilling to take military action when needed ‘save’ the transatlantic military relationship? Not likely. How would that change the motives of those avoiding urgent action through obfuscation (read: Deutschland)? What would it do to cut off a Member States friendly dealmaking with a cretin?
The only way it would work would be if Member States transfer their sovereign authority to commit forces and conduct foreign relations to the European level, and I can’t see the remaining states with some military and diplomatic capacity (France, and the United Kingdom) do that – and for one simple reason: why would they allow a smaller state with a deployable force much smaller than their own commit their troops to risk? In a sense, the British would suddenly find themselves repeating the sentiment of an earlier age when they were slagged off for being ‘willing to fight to the last Canadian’.
There are only two options: Kissinger’s one phone number, or a conference call where some of the callers can be cut off when their views aren’t tolerable to a plurality of the CSDP parties.
Right now it’s just a noisy party line that enables parties to construct a wall of obfuscation. They’re lucky the Pentagon returns their phone calls.
As for NATO headquarters, it’s a Belgian make-work racket that actually is high enough in cost that it certainly costs fighting men material and equipment. If the purpose is to impress civilisation with the blingiest, shiniest, glass and metaliest, pedantically seedum-roofed talking shop in the world, it will have no actual value. As it is, it obscenely over designed in the manner that only present-day Europeans can do, and every monstrously huge glass-plate, unable to support Force Protection needs and progressive collapse is costing an overage that is certainly costing some soldier new armour.
NATO’s purpose is to be capable to kill people and break things on a scale greater than the sum of its parts for the purpose of deterrence. No other function, no secondary tool of security, no other benefit of any sort is possible without NATO guaranteeing that it has the greatest deterrant capacity on the planet.
I also think it’s safe to say that the United States is firmly fed up with having to provide virtually all the ‘street cred’, which one can more appropriately call spilt blood and severed limbs. In other contexts, the Australians and Canadians feel the same way, having had to incur losses and take up harder deployments in Afghanistan to compensate for the unwillingless of many European parties to expose themselves to taking up a fair share of risk or being under-equipped.
Nonetheless they still want to appear to be involved. I rather think that risk-averse parties should not be involved if it does little more than impose a larger burden on others just to present a pretense of solidarity.