Bush Leaves His Mark
A success.

June 20, 2001 8:20 a.m.

magine, for a moment, what we would be reading if last week's Euro-American Summit had been held not in Sweden but in the USA and that, after the departure of the European leaders, American cops had shot three anti-globalization demonstrators, wounding one seriously.

"Executioner Bush" would be the headline from Stockholm to Palermo — with acres of newsprint devoted to editorial lamentations over America's descent into Wild West barbarism.

Sweden's prime minister, Goran Persson, who last week described the European Union as "one of the few institutions we can develop as a balance to U.S. world domination," would doubtless be pointing out how this fascist repression underscored the need for some counterweight to a bullying Uncle Sam.

And the American media would solemnly add their two euros' worth with such reflections as "Bush-from Lightweight to Heavy" or "Is he the Ugliest American?" But since the demonstrators were shot by politically correct Swedish policemen, nobody seems to have noticed. Certainly there has been no suggestion that shooting demonstrators may indicate a lack of civilization in Europe. And no one has argued that perhaps Europe needs a permanent U.S. presence to restrain its recurrent tendency to violent barbarism. Given the course of European history, however, that may well be the case. And whether coincidence or not, a permanent U.S. presence in Europe may be exactly what emerged from Mr. Bush's successful European trip — despite the desire of numerous European Persson to build up the EU as a rival superpower.

Without backing down from any major U.S. position from Kyoto to capital punishment, Mr. Bush offered to consult with the allies on every point from Kyoto to capital punishment — drawing the sting of the charge that the Bush foreign policy was one of "global unilateralism." He won the qualified support of Italy, Britain, Spain, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic for missile defense (President Vaclav Havel even suggested that missile defense was a moral obligation for a fundamentally defensive alliance like NATO.) And, most significant of all, he declared that it was U.S. policy to expand NATO and the EU as far and as fast as possible — in a speech in Poland that won enthusiastic applause throughout central and eastern Europe.

Mr. Bush's main public argument for expanding both NATO and the EU is that this will extend Europe's zone of stability and prosperity. And the success of the first round of NATO expansion in doing just that shows how reasonable that is.

But there is a more direct American interest underlying the expansion of NATO and the EU. It will bring into both organizations countries that — like Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic — are strong believers in a permanent American presence in Europe and devout skeptics about the ambition of Europe to be a rival superpower. And since Britain, Italy, Spain, and some other EU-members are already America's natural allies on these points, the expansion of NATO and the EU could tilt both organizations significantly towards the U.S.

Mr. Persson would then find that the EU will be less able to provide a counterweight to "U.S. dominance" since there would be an effective pro-American counterweight inside the EU to Mr. Persson and those who think like him.

Such a prospect alarms not just the advocates of a European superstate, however. NATO (though not EU) expansion also discomfits the Russians who claim to see it as a threat to themselves. That argument is nonsense, of course; far from threatening Russia, NATO has actually stabilized its previously unsettled Western periphery and, by "keeping the Germans down" in Lord Ismay's formulation, guaranteed that Germany will never launch a revanchist onslaught on the country. What NATO expansion threatens is Russia's false sense of itself as a great imperial power and its foreign policy, rooted in that nostalgic imperialism, of building a "Common European House" with the EU that would exclude the U.S. Thus, the Russians want Baltic membership of the EU precisely because they hope that the EU, with its own Euro-army, will replace NATO as the main vehicle of European security policy. President Bush's speech in Poland, which stressed a united Europe allied with America in NATO, was a direct and necessary warning to both Euro-nationalists and Russian chauvinists that the U.S. was in Europe to stay.

Hence the importance of Mr. Bush's olive branch to Vladimir Putin two days later in Slovenia. For Russia cannot be treated as a power of no substance even if its opposition to NATO expansion must be rejected. Russia occupies a strategically central area of the world; it has immense natural resources; its population is large, able and well-educated; it retains an arsenal of nuclear missiles dangerous to the U.S.; and for all these reasons it sensibilities must be taken into account. If it is to be persuaded to abandon its great power chauvinism and its self-destructive flirtations with China and rogue states, it must be offered a respected place alongside the U.S. in the Western structure of power. Mr. Bush's suggestion that Russia might follow eastern Europe into NATO at some unspecified point in the future was exactly the enticement needed. It flattered Russian great power pretensions; it made NATO expansion seem even less of a threat than it is (i.e., no threat at all); it offered protection against any Chinese expansion into Siberia; it trumped any prospect of an EU-Russian partnership with the much more desirable U.S.-Russia partnership; and it laid down the strategic background for an agreement on a missile defense umbrella sheltering both present and future members of NATO.

After all, Saddam Hussein and Iran are next door to Russia and Europe. So ultimately a missile defense is a more valuable protection for them than for the U.S. Whatever their present criticisms, both Europeans and Russians will want a share of that defense once it is a going concern. Their current resistance to it is in part a perverse reflection of their great-power ambitions. Both Russia and the Franco-German core of the Euro-bloc fear that missile defense would reveal that America is so far ahead scientifically, militarily, and economically that they might take several generations to catch up. So their medium-term interest in defense against missile attacks by rogue states is at variance with their long-term ambition to be a rival and/or counterweight to the U.S.

Much therefore depends on whether or not the U.S. encourages or frustrates this ambition. And here Mr. Bush faltered slightly. Having won so many other points, he diplomatically conceded support for the EU's plans to establish a European Rapid Reaction Force (or the beginnings of a European Army.) He hedged that support about with qualifications about its subordinate role to NATO, and so on. He doubtless calculated that since European defense spending, already low, is declining at the rate of 5 percent annually, such a force poses as yet only a very theoretical threat to the role of NATO as Europe's main line of defense-and thus to U.S. leadership. And he probably shares the nervous belief of Europeans outlined above that, with (or without) missile defense, the U.S. is so far ahead in military technology that not even a united nationalistic Europe bent on building a powerful armed forces would ever catch up.

That would be a mistake. Even though the Soviet Union had a gross domestic product that was on a level with Denmark's, it was able to compete militarily with the U.S. for about forty years because it was willing to devote 40 percent of its investible resources to military and scientific research. The EU has a much larger population, vastly more wealth, many more advanced scientific institutes, and several impressive military traditions. If it were to devote even one tenth of its investment capital into the military, it would catch up and perhaps overtake America in decades or less. Recall how swiftly the U.S. became a major military power after Pearl Harbour, or how the Manhattan Project collapsed the scientific progress of  years into months. All that Europe lacks for such a military renaissance is a political culture that places a high value on military power and the world influence it buys. And that could change.

Indeed, the insistence of Euro-nationalist elites on the necessity of a European force for which they have the greatest difficulty in specifying a practical role is a sign that it may already be changing. Euro-nationalism, often of a frankly anti-American character, is the driving force behind EU integrationism. Why do we assume that this greater European nationalism will be so much more benevolent than the lesser European nationalisms it aims to displace?

To be sure, one need not go to the other extreme and argue that a united Europe with an independent defense force outside NATO would be a direct threat to America's security. That is unlikely in the highest degree. It might be seriously damaging to wider U.S. interests, however, if the possession of major independent military capability emboldened Europe to oppose U.S. positions on trade, the Middle East, Korea and in international organizations generally. And if such opposition continued over a long period, it could hardly do otherwise than undermine Mr. Bush's vision of an united Atlantic Community whose military expression is NATO.

In his successful trip to Europe, Mr. Bush offered the Western European allies a greater share in running the alliance; he urged extending the protection of NATO and the EU to eastern and central Europe; he offered the Russians a place within this democratic partnership down the road; and he laid the groundwork for protecting this wider West against the rogue missiles of rogue states on its periphery. Euro-nationalism and an independent European defense force are radically hostile to this concept of a united West under American leadership — as Mr. Persson would be the first to assert. The U.S. should place every possible obstacle in their way.