Robert Kagan’s Transatlantic
Sir, — I am flattered though slightly disconcerted that Robert Kagan (“Power and Weakness,” June/July 2002) bases his argument in part on my book American Visions of Europe. I think his article is a thought-provoking and valuable contribution to the debate on transatlantic relations, but I question the basic argument that Europe has opted out of the world of power politics.
It is interesting that while Kagan says the Europeans “see the world through the eyes of weaker powers,” and behave as weaker powers, nowhere does he say they are weak. This is because they are not. One need only look at their combined gdp. France and Britain have serious armed forces and their military traditions are alive and well. Germany had a very good army during the Cold War and would again if necessity required it. In the wake of the common currency (and of their Kosovo humiliation) the Europeans are setting up a Rapid Reaction Force which will sooner or later be put to the test. There are projects underway to build a European fighter and transport aircraft. The eu recently approved funding to build a satellite-based global positioning system. (This was opposed by the Pentagon.) It is true that European defense spending is nowhere near U.S. levels, but are current American levels a reasonable benchmark? Mixed with tsk-tsking about European weakness and lack of capabilities I detect American irritation (and a certain anxiety) at the fact that Europe is not prepared to concede a monopoly of power and diplomatic initiative to the United States.
My book argues that along with Roosevelt’s impulse to “retire” Europe from world politics and Acheson’s to embrace and control it in a U.S.-led alliance (both mentioned by Kagan), there is a third American approach. I associate it mainly with George F. Kennan, but Eisenhower summed it up best when he said that the United States should not oppose but encourage the emergence of “a third great power bloc.”
Eisenhower did not prefer or think sustainable over the long run (nor to his credit does Kagan) a situation in which the U.S. remained Europe’s “pacifier” and protector but in so doing provided a permanent alibi for the Europeans to do less. He foresaw that with U.S. power taxed by global commitments, Europe would have to assume the main responsibility for the security of the continent (at a minimum). The next 10-15 years may prove him right.
John L. Harper
The Bologna Center
of the Johns Hopkins University
School of Advanced International Studies
Bologna, Italy
Sir, — Robert Kagan’s article on the divide between Europe and the United States is a serious and challenging contribution to the debate on this important matter. I applaud his conclusions, particularly about shared values and the need for honest discussion of differences. I also appreciate his description of European policy formation as “post-modern.”
Even so, I find myself disagreeing with Kagan on many areas of detail. Above all, I question the extent to which differences in foreign policy can be ascribed to Europe’s relative weakness and America’s relative strength.
Back in the days of the Cold War, European governments certainly tended to be less confrontationalist than Washington in their approach to the Soviet Union. But did this reflect perceived weakness? I must say that, having lived in the then West Germany during the Brandt/Schmidt era, I formed the contrary impression. I recall the Ostpolitik of those years as a brave experiment on the part of an increasingly self-confident democracy and not as a quivering response to Soviet might.
I think it’s fair to say that, during the Cold War, American administrations were worried about Soviet communism while Europeans were worried about Russia. European governments may have feared their mighty and tyrannically-ruled eastern neighbor but they also understood her and recognized that she too suffered from the traumas of a terrible past. It wasn’t primarily a question of relative strength (although this could obviously not be ruled out of the equation) but of whether you saw your opponent in abstract or concrete terms. Americans, true children of the Enlightenment, tend to prefer the abstract. Europeans tend to know, from often bitter experience, that they’re always dealing with the concrete.
Moreover, both the British and the French have been more than willing over the past few decades to use armed force in pursuit both of their own interests and of broader humanitarian goals. The Falklands campaign was, surely, just the kind of successful, long distance projection of force of which Donald Rumsfeld talks (albeit conducted with 1980s technology), while Britain’s recent involvement in Sierra Leone may have set the standard for armed altruism for some time to come. If such campaigns do not loom large for Robert Kagan, could this simply be because the interests of the United States were not directly involved?
Having said which, Americans taken in the round do these days seem to have a more bellicose approach to international affairs than do Europeans and are more prone to think in terms of quick and violent fixes. According to Kagan, this reflects the greater American capacity for resolving problems, as a result of its huge preponderance of weaponry.
But the most powerful military machine that has ever existed did not prevent the atrocities of 9/11. Moreover, although high-tech warfare certainly played a key role in dislodging the Taliban from power in Kabul, it is proving of only limited use in flushing al Qaeda out of its remaining foxholes. Similarly, 30 years ago, the best military technology in the world failed to tame Indo-China. And, as Israel is discovering, its own regional military preponderance offers little protection against the suicide bomber. In fact, a characteristic of most (though not all) recent international crises is that they are simply not amenable to straightforward military solutions.
Almost certainly, the United States could overthrow Saddam Hussein. But could it provide Iraq with a post-Saddam settlement that would stick? Could it, moreover, guarantee that the main beneficiaries of Saddam’s defeat would not be pro-Iranian militant Shiites? And what about the Kurds? Would they not make yet another bid for independence? If so, how would Turkey react and what consequences would its reaction have for nato’s South-Eastern flank? How would the “Arab street” respond? Would the throne of the Hashemites stand the strain? Would the Mubarak regime go the way of all flesh? Would the House of Saud survive? Above all, would Saddam decide to go down guns blazing, loosing chemical and biological terror on Israel? It is not weakness to ponder these questions. It is wisdom.
As dealers in the concrete, Europeans are conscious of these conundrums. They do not understand why the current United States administration seems to ignore them. Nor, as dealers in the concrete, do Europeans understand why a humane people such as the Americans seems so unaware of the misery its policies threaten to impose on the innocent.
To claim, as the United States does, that the current sufferings of Iraqi civilians are the fault of Saddam Hussein is to take refuge in an abstraction. It would be similarly abstract to dismiss as collateral damage the mountain of corpses which would inevitably attend Saddam’s overthrow.
For many Americans (the shades of Vietnam now apparently laid to rest), war seems to have become a regrettable but rational continuation of policy by other means, particularly if the main American commitment consists of massive aerial bombardment from safe altitudes. But for Europeans, and not least for Clausewitz’s own compatriots, war still means ruined cities, the stench of rotting corpses, destroyed infra-structures, lost loved ones and starving children shivering in the rubble.
This does not necessarily make all Europeans doctrinaire pacifists. But to live responsibly in the world of concrete reality is to accept that only the most extreme circumstances can justify the carnage inherent in modern warfare. Do we face such extreme circumstances today? I suspect that most Europeans, and most non-American westerners, think otherwise.
Ian Morrison
Auckland, New Zealand
Sir, — I like Robert Kagan’s article “Power and Weakness,” but I believe it is weak on two points. The first is the idea that Europeans are relegated to “doing the dishes” in peacekeeping missions. A better view is that there is a division of labor between the Americans and the Europeans in peacekeeping missions, with each having roles peculiarly suited to its skills. The second deficiency is a misperception of the role of U.S. military power within European politics, stemming, oddly, from an inadequate use of Hobbes’s analysis of the foundation of a polity.
In regard to peacekeeping missions, they are usually divided into two phases. The first phase involves terminating the hostilities and stabilizing the situation; the second phase is the more delicate matter of establishing a stable political situation so that hostilities will not resume. Stabilization requires the ability and willingness to use force and the willingness to escalate the amount of force beyond the capabilities of any of the combatants. More important, the perception that one is willing to escalate the amount of force beyond the capabilities of any of the combatants. Clearly, the U.S. is uniquely poised to perform this service. Within the metaphor of preparing a meal, this is the step of butchering the cow — the technical skill of applying enormous force to a difficult but fundamentally straightforward problem.
The second phase of peacekeeping, reconstructing the polity, nation-building, is a more complex operation that requires entirely different skills. And who is better positioned to do this than the nations of the eu? What other polity of former adversaries has been assembled over such a short period without imperial conquest?
Who, for instance, is better positioned to teach the Balkan nations how to set aside a thousand years of wars than a sophisticated group of countries who have themselves set aside a thousand years of wars? Within the metaphor, we can compare nation-building to cooking the meal, in that it requires a delicate judgment in handling many complex, interacting factors.
In regard to Europe’s military situation, Kagan likens it to Kant’s “Perpetual Peace.” But I would prefer to look at it as a commonwealth, in Hobbes’s term. In this regard, the eu can be seen as a sovereign, which is hardly a radical concept. But where is the sovereign’s military capability, with which he keeps the peace among his subjects? How does the sovereign ensure that his subjects obey his rules? In short, if France and Germany take a trade dispute to the point of military conflict, what suppresses the conflict?
When said in that way, the answer is simple — the United States. The U.S. has already done it twice, after all. This leaves a situation where the enforcement of the peace is left to a force that isn’t under control of the sovereign of the polity. However, this is not uncommon — in any modern state, physical violence is prevented within a million organizations not by the organization, but rather by the state’s police force. The eu has decided that it is adequate to leave the heavy police work between the members (and between the members and the outside world) to the United States.
In this regard, the eu seems to have decided that the interests of the U.S. are close enough to that of the eu that they can trust the U.S. to handle the job. Or at least, that the savings in military expenditure will make up for any inadequacies. And in this regard, the eu seems to be correct — despite the U.S. being a “hyperpower,” its ability to use its hegemony to dominate other industrialized countries seems to be quite poor. For instance, the banana tariff mess looks like it will be settled by the wto, not by gunboats. Similarly, the United States could crush Canada militarily in a day, but due to economics and international politics, is constrained to deal with Canada as an equal. Hegemony ain’t what it used to be.
Dale Worley
Waltham, Massachusetts
Sir, — Robert Kagan’s article provides a neat summary of the differences in mindset between Europe and the U.S. in the matter of international relations; nevertheless, it appears to rest on certain somewhat simplistic presuppositions. First, the notion that power alone is the defining factor in the approach taken to international relations. This seems far-fetched. Kagan argues that weak nations, mostly for the lack of alternatives, choose a “Kantian” approach (establishment of an international-legal regime to supervene national sovereignty) while strong nations, because they can push their weight around, choose a “Hobbesian” approach (in which nations act without regard to the law). While there is undeniable truth to this statement, it is certainly not the whole story. Kagan implies that there is no other choice; that we must either be “Kantian” or “Hobbesians” in this regard; but there is another choice, in fact the baseline approach to international law since the sixteenth century. We might label this the “Vitorian” approach in remembrance of the “founder” of international law, Francisco de Vitoria. Here there is most certainly a universal law, the so-called jus gentium, which postulates nations as the bearers of sovereignty, upholding an international law the essence of which is the right of communication — trade, travel, church missions. It is a law which binds the nations but which also depends on nations for enforcement. And to my mind, the U.S. from its inception has been “Vitorian,” even in the postwar world in which it has been the superpower.
Kagan quotes Briton Robert Cooper, who argues that outside of the Europe of today, other standards apply than apply within Europe. There, “we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era — force, preemptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary.” But the notion, as I say, is based on a bifurcation, law sans force or force sans law.
It should be a simple matter to realize that law needs to be enforced, and it needs to be enforced by force if necessary. Underlying Cooper’s notion of a “double standard” is the belief that force is somehow backwards, a lower stage on man’s evolutionary ascent to a forceless world where conscience rules. The same notion underlies the view that the abolition of spanking would signal mankind’s ascent to a higher level of civilization; here, the Swedes serve as a shining example to us all.
But the most glaring fault in this fine article, to my mind, is Kagan’s view that Europe in its postwar phase has chosen to eschew power. He argues that the formation of the European Union is not about power but about restraining power. My own experience has led to the exact opposite conclusion. The European Union is all about power, not military power per se but economic power, diplomatic power, the power to dominate the world of international organizations and institutions, with the ultimate goal of establishing “universal jurisdiction,” bypassing national sovereignty altogether (and thus pesky U.S. obstruction as well). It will require power and plenty of it to erect such a global jurisdiction, and the Europeans are game for it. And they recognize in the U.S. the biggest obstruction to their world.
This is nothing new. Since the nineteenth century, power in Europe has been pursued by scapegoating capitalism, and, by extension, the Anglo-Saxons and their ilk, they being the chief proponents of said capitalism. This scapegoating has been part and parcel of the European self-image, especially in Germany with its contrast between German Kultur and British Zivilisation. Two times now the forces of Anglo-Saxonism have triumphed on continental Europe, but the underlying opposition to Zivilisation, far from disappearing, has simply taken on a new guise. For this reason I view Kagan’s sanguinity about the European Union with general alarm. For behind the ideological divide separating Europe and the U.S. is a fundamental conflict in worldview and a fundamentally opposed approach to international order. The conflict between these two approaches, I am convinced, will determine the shape of the future world order.
Ruben Alvarado
Aalten, Netherlands
Sir, — Sitting “down under” one gets somewhat worried at some of the actions and lack of action in the northern corridors of power, and angry at the inconsistencies (apparent or otherwise) of (especially) American international policy.
I think that you’ve explained this, and in such a way that both understanding of and sympathy for the Americans is enhanced, even though a reasonable inference is that “the end justifies the means” — which perhaps it does in the case of our good friend, the Iraqi president.
However, given one’s acceptance of your thesis, it would be good to see the U.S. be more overt in explaining its policy and strategy to the rest of us. My assumption here is that the U.S. (with the rest of the “West” and a fair amount of the rest) believes that democracy is the best form of governance so far devised, and that the values underpinning this are at least reasonably universal (e.g. freedom of association, religion, safety etc), therefore this should be actively pursued and encouraged.
Given this, applying the existing double standard with people like the Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad, should be accompanied by a friendly message to the effect that “we appreciate your support, pal, but our longer-term goal includes a democratic state in Malaysia.” Or wherever.
In addition, we who believe in democracy (preferably of a secular kind) should be doing whatever we can to help people at the community level in the poorer and/or fundamentalist countries to raise themselves to an economic and educational level where the niceties of our system can be appreciated.
Ian Burns
Melbourne, Australia