Therapy's end: thinking beyond NATO.

• Author: Merry, E. Wayne

THE IRAQ conflict ignited transatlantic tensions smoldering since the end of the Cold War. Although politicians in both Europe and America profess to regret the obvious split within the once-sturdy Atlantic Alliance, the United States and its people clearly perceive their security needs very differently than do most of Europe's governments and all of its populations. NATO is not the solution to this split; it is the heart of the problem. The continuing existence of this Cold War relic stands in the way of the necessary evolution of European integration to include full responsibility for Continental security. In the 21st century, Europe can neither become a responsible power center nor a competent partner for the United States so long as Europeans remain dependent on a non-European power for their security--or even for the appearance of their security.

A Transatlantic Watershed

WHAT A.J.P. Taylor called "the struggle for mastery in Europe" is over, replaced by the slow construction of the "Common European House." Europe today faces no external military threat, but many dangers in other fields. This is, by the destructive standards of European history, a uniquely blessed set of circumstances. Nor does the United States exercise a dominant role in European affairs--despite the overheated rhetoric about American "imperialism", "hegemony" or "hyperpower" status. The ability of European governments to thwart Washington's agenda on Iraq in the United Nations, and the inability of American diplomacy to open doors in Brussels for genetically-modified agricultural products, helps to demonstrate that Europe retains its freedom of action when and where it chooses to exercise that freedom. Sadly, and without justification, Europe remains willfully subservient to the United States in the security realm.

Today's tensions are not the temporary kind the Alliance experienced during the Cold War. There is no Soviet threat to bring us together, nor much memory among our populations of the shared burden of maintaining the West during those decades. As the distinguished German commentator Josef Joffe said recently in these pages,

The Atlantic Alliance has been dying a slow death ever since Christmas Day 1991, when the Soviet Union committed suicide by dissolution. Having won the Cold War, the Alliance lost its central purpose and began to crumble like a bridge no longer in use--slowly, almost invisibly. (1) The United States did not assume the role of European ordnungsmacht either quickly or willingly and has always carried the burden uneasily. Even after World War II, the United States initially responded to Europe's crisis with economic rather than military support. For many Americans, the Marshall Plan was seen as an alternative to what eventually became NATO. Only thanks to the crudeness of the Soviet threat did the United States again engage itself in European security affairs, but even then without believing it would involve a long-term commitment of forces. When the Alliance was formed, it was to serve a European purpose: to provide military security during a period of postwar reconstruction and the reforming of the European state system. The United States, albeit reluctantly, undertook this task because it could find no other viable means to prevent Western Europe from falling prey to Soviet power.

Today, the Alliance serves a non-European purpose, that of "force multiplier" and "toolbox" for supporting U.S. military interventions outside Europe. Many in Washington are understandably attracted to this seemingly useful transformation of NATO, but the change contains a fundamental flaw. The entire rationale for the Alliance--collective defense in Europe--has been reversed, or even inverted, without any revision of the North Atlantic Treaty or consideration by national legislatures. This transformation of the Alliance came about for the most bureaucratic of reasons: to give NATO something to do so as to justify its continued existence. Yet, redefining the Alliance as a "toolbox" for global power projection raises the issues of whose power and for whose purposes? These questions are the cancer that has been eating away at NATO for the past decade.

No longer can thoughtful Europeans argue that Europe's interests are congruant with NATO's purpose. The United States envisions a NATO that no longer provides for Europe's security, but instead requires Europeans to serve as auxiliaries in distant enterprises of questionable benefit to Europe (and with little if any genuine consultation). Whether out-of-area activities are valid on their merits is not the point. In going out of area to avoid going out of business, in the formulation of a former Secretary-General, NATO has carried out a silent, political coup d'etat on its member-states.

Some Europeans, especially in the former Warsaw Pact countries now entering the Alliance, are concerned about Russia. Yes, Russia presents a real, even acute, security crisis, but to itself more than to others. While Russia retains major nuclear capabilities, the bulk of its ground forces have deteriorated to such an extent that they may be more of an internal danger than a direct one to any potential adversary. In Russia (as in Ukraine and Belarus) multiple crises--demographics, epidemic diseases and health care, environmental degradation, industrial and agricultural collapse, the weakness of both civil society and the rule of law--combine to present the rest of Europe with the potential of large failed states on its eastern edge.

The challenges Europe will face on its eastern edge are similar to those already posed by Africa: legal and illegal migration, organized and disorganized crime, plus new strains of drug-resistant diseases and HIV/AIDS on an epidemic scale. No military alliance can respond to these dangers. Indeed, the real threat is that Russia and its neighbors may be permanently excluded from the Common European House by the...