WASHINGTON - The growing gap between the United
States and its European allies over the Iraq war - most
recently highlighted by last weekend's Spanish elections
- belies deeper strains that date to the end of the Cold
War, according to a report released on Friday by the
influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
Now, tensions produced by Iraq have brought
these strains "to the point of crisis", and both sides
of the Atlantic need urgently to reassess their
positions and move decisively to renew trust and
understanding, adds the report, produced by a task force
co-chaired by former secretary of state Henry Kissinger
and treasury secretary Lawrence Summers.
"The
task force believes that Europeans and Americans must
now work together to ensure that the Iraq crisis becomes
an anomaly in their relationship, not a precedent for
things to come," the document says. Stated more bluntly:
"We can't let this relationship fall apart," says
Charles Kupchan, who directed the project.
The
report, which offers five major recommendations for
restoring cooperation, beginning with new guidelines for
the use of military force, as well as five basic
guidelines to managing relations, was approved by a
26-person task force, about one-third of whose members
were from Europe, while the rest came from the US.
The group represented a range of political views
on the US side, ranging from senior officials in the
administration of former president Bill Clinton, such as
Summers on the left, to neo-conservative thinker Robert
Kagan on the right.
Its center of gravity,
however, was clearly the traditional internationalist
establishment, represented by Republicans from the party
of current US President George W Bush, such as
Kissinger, former national security adviser Brent
Scowcroft and Harold Brown, defense secretary to
president Jimmy Carter.
Europeans included
former Italian prime minister Guiliano Amato, historian
Timothy Garten Ash and editor of the German newspaper
Die Zeit, Josef Joffe.
The report was drafted
before last week's bombings in Madrid and the election
victory upset three days later that handed power to the
Socialist Party, whose leader, Jose Luis Rodriguez
Zapatero, has vowed to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq
at the end of June unless the United Nations takes
control of peacekeeping operations there.
After
his election, Zapatero also reaffirmed his intention to
abandon the staunchly pro-US policies of outgoing Prime
Minister Jose Maria Aznar and realign Spanish policy
with France and Germany, which both opposed the Iraq
war.
His statements prompted a number of attacks
by right-wing and neo-conservative allies of the Bush
administration, who accused Zapatero of "appeasement" in
the "war on terrorism", comparing Madrid to Munich in
1938 and Zapatero to former British prime minister
Neville Chamberlain.
The exchanges highlighted
what Kagan, who warned earlier this week that the
Spanish elections had moved US-European relations "to
the edge of the abyss", once famously observed as the
fundamental difference between the two continents'
foreign policies: "Americans are from Mars, and
Europeans are from Venus."
The task force
report, "Renewing the Atlantic Partnership", agrees that
the situation is indeed fraught, but traces the divide
to the end of the Cold War, most specifically to what it
calls "11/9", November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall
came down, and the Soviet Union neared its final
collapse.
"Threats to survival tend to
concentrate minds," says the 32-page report. "Without
such threats, other needs loom larger in shaping the
decisions of governments ... the urgency of maintaining
a common front diminishes. Thus, the end of the Cold War
set Europe and the United States on separate paths when
it came to defense spending, social priorities, the
efficacy of military force and even optimal
configuration of the post-Cold War world.
"If
11/9 increased the scope for disagreements between the
United States and Europe", the report goes on, "9/11
created the grounds for disagreements that are truly
dangerous for the transatlantic relationship," in major
part because they resulted in "the most sweeping
reorientation of US grand strategy in over half a
century."
European strategies, by contrast, went
largely unchanged. As such, differences have now been
transformed into "active confrontation", the document
says.
"Clashes over substance and style have
isolated and weakened political constituencies that have
traditionally kept Atlantic relations on course,"
raising serious questions about the future viability of
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and
whether a cooperative transatlantic relationship can be
re-forged.
The report asserts that three
fundamental mutual interests that have remained
unchanged despite 11/9 and 9/11 - maintaining common
Western values; removing or neutralizing risks that
threaten shared security and prosperity; and helping
others, including the Arab and Islamic world, "share in
the benefits of democratic institutions and market
economies".
Based on those fundamentals, the
report argues for the adoption of five priorities to
restore transatlantic cooperation, beginning with the
establishment of new guidelines for the use of military
force, including preventive action.
"Europeans
could agree not to reject preventive action in
principle, while Americans would agree that prevention
would be reserved for special cases and not be the
centerpiece of US strategy," the task force concludes.
Similarly, Europe and Washington should develop
a common policy to deal with "irresponsible states" that
seek weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or support
terrorism. In that respect, Europeans should acknowledge
"the need for credible threats", while US leaders should
accept that "threats do not in all cases produce
acquiescence".
The two sides should also agree
on the role of multilateral institutions by, for
example, Europe accepting that the bodies will not work
without Washington's support, and Washington
acknowledging that unilateral action bears heavy
political and other costs.
Similar efforts
should be made to bridge differences on the greater
Middle East, particularly the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict, according to the report, which also names as a
top priority NATO's revitalization, in part, by
increasing operations beyond Europe's borders.
All of this must be underpinned by agreement on
five basic guidelines to managing relations, argues the
task force.
First, the purposes and benefits of
European integration should be clarified in a way so
that Europe's leaders resist the temptation to define
its identity in opposition to the United States, while
Washington must resolve its own ambivalence about an
emerging Europe.
"As long as the European Union
frames its policies in complementary terms, Washington
should continue to regard Europe's deepening and
widening as in America's interest," the report states.
Conversely, "any effort by Europeans to use the
US as the 'other' against which a European identity can
take shape would, of necessity, set the EU and the US on
diverging paths, if not on a collision course," project
director Charles Kupchan says. Second, both sides need
to learn from their failures over Iraq, particularly the
difficulties of achieving success in the absence of a
common strategy.
At the same time, a common
strategy should not be understood as requiring
equivalent capabilities. "If the United States is the
indispensable nation in terms of its military power,
then surely the Europeans are indispensable allies in
most of the other categories of power upon which
statecraft depends."
Fourth, maintaining the
Atlantic alliance will require strong domestic
leadership on both sides that is committed to reminding
its own constituencies of the value of the relationship.
Finally, the reports says that both sides should
seek greater integration in their trade and investment,
since economic cooperation reinforces political ties.
