Defense of the West

Transatlantic security from Truman to Trump, Second edition

Stanley R. Sloan

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526146212
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Relations internationales

Written in a lively and readable style by the world's leading authority on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and US-European relations, Defense of the West is the history of a transatlantic security relationship that has endured for over seventy years.This latest edition of a classic work looks at how developments inside NATO and European Union member states affect their ability to defend against external threats while preserving Western values, in the era of Trump and Brexit. Sloan frankly addresses the failures and shortcomings of Western institutions and member states. But the book emphasizes the continuing importance of value-based transatlantic security cooperation as a vital element of the defense and foreign policies of NATO and EU member states.At a time of heightened tension and political turmoil, at home and abroad, Stan Sloan's lucid and far-sighted analysis is more necessary than ever.

Part I

Cold War alliance

1

The transatlantic bargain and defense of the West

The glue that has held the allies more or less together is a large, complex and dynamic bargain—partly an understanding among the Europeans, but mostly a deal between them and the United States of America. (Harlan Cleveland, NATO: The Transatlantic Bargain)¹

Crafted in the late 1960s, Harlan Cleveland’s description of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as a “transatlantic bargain” remains, in the early years of the twenty-first century, a helpful prism through which to analyze the North Atlantic alliance. Cleveland, a former US permanent representative to NATO, knew the alliance was far more than the sort of deal struck between business partners. Although the transatlantic bargain is based firmly on unsentimental calculations of national self-interest on both sides of the Atlantic, it also depends on some amorphous but vital shared ideas about man, government, and society. It is a “bargain,” to be sure, but a bargain with roots in the hearts (and values) as well as in the minds (and interests) of the partners. Because this alliance serves both values and interests, it has come to represent the primary framework for defense of “the West.”

The United Kingdom’s Lord Palmerston, a nineteenth-century British statesman, famously declared that “Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests.” Palmerston’s observation stood up well through the mid-twentieth century. However, the persistence of NATO—the leading component of the transatlantic bargain—seems to be challenging Palmerston’s assertion.

Following George Washington’s warning in his farewell address that the United States should avoid permanent foreign alliances, particularly with European states, the United States took his advice—until April 1949, when the North Atlantic Treaty was signed. As Lawrence S. Kaplan has observed, “The Europeans may have initiated the process, but bipartisan U.S. advocates brought it to a conclusion and terminated America’s 149-year tradition of political and military non-entanglement with Europe.”² Superficially, the treaty certainly looked like what Washington had warned against. However, both the circumstances and the alliance were in fact quite different than what Washington had considered.

This volume examines the origins and development of the transatlantic alliance with an eye on the major factors that have influenced its evolution, and may offer clues about its future. Throughout NATO’s history, the alliance has been said to be moving from one “crisis” to another, and its demise has frequently been projected by scholars and officials alike. So far, they have been wrong. The question is: will they continue to be wrong, or will intra-Western divisions on both interests and values bring down the West’s main alliance?

NATO and alliance theory

Before opening our historical examination of the transatlantic bargain, it might be useful to reflect briefly on some of the work that political scientists and international relations theorists have done on alliances: why they happen, what they do, and how they end.

The traditional international relations concept of alliances is that they are agreements among nation states to work together to achieve a specific purpose. Hans J. Morgenthau, considered the father of twentieth-century realist theory, regarded alliances as arrangements between states based on shared interests. According to Morgenthau, “Whether or not a nation shall pursue a policy of alliances is, then, a matter not of principle but of expediency.”³ Nations make alliances with others when they “need” to, and avoid them when their interests do not require them. Morgenthau’s formulation leads to the logical conclusion that when the need no longer exists, an alliance will be disbanded, or will simply fall into disuse.

The North Atlantic Treaty was designed to help organize the United States and its European democratic allies to defend against the perceived threat posed by the Soviet Union and communism. This goal satisfied the requirement that Morgenthau set for “common interests” to undergird the alliance. However, the drafters of the North Atlantic Treaty importantly layered an ideological commitment on top of the pragmatic heart of the transatlantic alliance. The preamble to the treaty declares that the signatories “are determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.”

Morgenthau judged that “A purely ideological alliance, unrelated to material interests, cannot but be stillborn.” On the other hand, he recognized that ideological elements can play a role in alliances, and “can lend strength to the alliance by marshaling moral convictions and emotional preferences to its support.” The danger, however, is that the ideological components could “obscure the nature and limits of the common interests” and raise expectations about “concerted policies and actions.”⁴ He went on to warn that alliances that don’t deliver more-or-less equal benefits to the participating states can seriously weaken the relationship—a warning that is evidenced in the long history of burden-sharing trials and tribulations over the persistent burden-sharing issue, which has weakened, but not so far destroyed, the transatlantic alliance.

Morgenthau saw alliances mainly as devices to ensure that power is balanced in the international system. During the Cold War—beginning in the late 1940s and ending in the early 1990s—NATO effectively balanced the power of the Soviet Union and its alliance, the Warsaw Pact. The character of these two “balancing partners” could not have been more different. Membership in NATO was a voluntary choice, and the alliance in fact was stimulated by requests from European democracies for American support. But membership in the Warsaw Pact was required by the Soviet Union for its “allied” states, all governed by communist regimes installed under Moscow’s control. The bottom line was that the two-alliance structure tended to keep the international system “balanced” and relatively stable, although the countries of Eastern and Central Europe forced to remain in the Warsaw Pact could be forgiven if they asked whether they were the ones paying the greatest price for this stability.

At the end of the Cold War, when the Warsaw Pact was disbanded and the Soviet Union disintegrated (see discussion in Chapter 6), the logical question from a realist perspective was why NATO should continue when its balancing partner had disappeared. But, not only did the United States and its allies decide that NATO should stay in business, it found new challenges in dealing with the conflict in former Yugoslavia, the desire of former Warsaw Pact members and Soviet republics to join the alliance, and the need for a constructive relationship with the diminished but still-important Russian Federation.

In fact, the decisions made by the allies in the 1990s lie behind the debate that has accompanied the 2014 Russian seizure of Crimea and support for separatists in the former Soviet republic of Ukraine. NATO enlargement was supported by the “liberal internationalists” of the Bill Clinton administration (1993–2000), motivated by the desire to enlarge the community of states sharing American values, and by the “neo-conservatives” of the George W. Bush administration (2001–2008), who wanted to enlarge the area of American power and influence.⁵ Today, “neo-realists” argue it was a big mistake. According to this perspective, argued strenuously by academic commentators John Mearsheimer⁶ and Stephen Walt,⁷ the process of enlargement overlooked important power considerations, stimulating a reaction from Russia that arguably has led to a “new Cold War” between Russia and the West (discussed in Chapter 8).

Ironically, no matter how one looks at the debate over “who lost Russia” at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Vladimir Putin’s more aggressive, expansionist approach to European security has given new life to NATO as a potential balancer against Russian power. Even before this development, however, one international relations scholar had offered a strong argument as to why NATO had survived beyond the end of the Cold War. Wallace J. Thies argued in 2009⁸ that NATO is different from previous alliances in at least two key ways. First, it was established not just to meet a specific threat or serve a narrow purpose, but was designed to have much more lasting utility. Second, NATO was an alliance among liberal democracies, with a value foundation that previous alliances had lacked. Perhaps the big question now is whether that value foundation is still strong enough to resist some of the value-based threats that have emerged from within the alliance, as well as those that have appeared from outside.

What was the original bargain?

The original transatlantic bargain, described in Chapter 2 of this book, was a bargain between the United States and its original European partners⁹ with the militarily modest but politically important participation of Canada.¹⁰ The first half of the deal was that the United States would support Europe’s economic recovery from the war if the Europeans would coordinate their efforts to use the assistance most effectively. The second half pledged that the United States would contribute to the defense of Europe if the Europeans would organize themselves to help defend against the Soviet threat.

The European allies were quite successful in developing the first half of the bargain. In 1948, the Organization for European Economic Cooperation was created to coordinate utilization of Marshall Plan assistance from the United States and to promote European economic cooperation. The Europeans constructed a European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC, 1951) and then, through the 1957 Rome Treaties, the European Economic Community (EEC)and the European Atomic Energy Community, the precursors of today’s European Union.

The allies were not nearly so successful in the security area. As discussed in Chapter 2, France had proposed the creation of a European Defense Community (EDC) to organize Europe’s military contribution to the bargain. When that initiative failed in 1954, the arrangements adopted in place of the EDC, considered in Chapter 3, left the transatlantic bargain highly dependent on US nuclear weapons and a substantial US force presence in Europe to give credibility to NATO’s defense against the Soviet threat.

Throughout the Cold War, the alliance lived with the 1954 “revised” bargain and a persistent burden-sharing debate between the United States and its European allies, as well as between successive US administrations and the US Congress.

Congress, given the crucial constitutional roles of the Senate in the process of ratifying treaties and the House of Representatives in legislating funding for government programs, participated actively in shaping and overseeing the US side of the transatlantic bargain. The involvement of Congress, judiciously sought by President Harry Truman’s administration in the late 1940s, ensured a solid foundation for US participation in the transatlantic bargain. But it also guaranteed that senators and representatives would, for the life of the deal, closely inspect its terms and conditions. From the beginning, this inspection process has focused particularly on whether the costs of the deal were being fairly shared. For most of the history, they have found the sharing process lacking; this continues to be the case today, even under much-changed conditions.

In addition to the important congressional “clause” in the transatlantic bargain, there were many subordinate bargains that were more important to individual allies than to the United States. For example, France wanted the deal to ensure that it would not have to face a resurgence of German power on its own. The United Kingdom wanted US participation in European defense to provide an effective deterrent to Soviet expansionism so that some British military assets would be available to maintain its position as a global power. Canada wanted the bargain not only to be about military power, of which it had little, but more about political values, which it held high. When the Federal Republic of Germany joined in the bargain, it accepted constraints on its military capabilities in return for sovereignty over its internal affairs.

Every addition to the membership of the alliance brought new subordinate bargains as European states sought specific benefits from the alliance. Recent candidates for membership, starting with the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in the 1990s, have seen belonging to NATO and the European Union as the two key tokens of acceptance in the Western community of nations and as protection against external domination by Russia or any other power.

Factors that emerged in the transatlantic relationship over the course of the Cold War still resonate in relations among the allies today, as discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. The period of transition and new missions from 1989 through the first decade of the twenty-first century is examined in Chapter 6, which looks at the challenges posed by the conflict in former Yugoslavia, the process of NATO outreach and enlargement, NATO and Russia, and the attempt to find a balance between transatlantic and European defense cooperation. Chapter 7 then examines the alliance in the 2000s, with a focus on the alliance after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, the disruptions...