Stars with Stripes

The Essential Partnership between the European Union and the United States

Anthony Luzzatto Gardner

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030299668
• Categoría: Politique et relations internationales
• Categoría: Politique

For sixty years, the United States has supported European integration on a bipartisan basis—not only because this has served European interests, but because it has promoted American interests as well. As core partners in transatlantic efforts to address regional and global economic, political and security challenges, the US and the EU have collaborated critically over the years to make the world a less turbulent place. That is, until the 2016 election of Donald J. Trump. In this era of Brexit and President Trump's incendiary rhetoric regarding Europe, it has never been more important to understand and defend the EU as a significant and valuable American ally. Written by President Barack Obama's Ambassador to the European Union, Stars with Stripes provides an analytic yet accessible look at how the US and the EU have worked together effectively on numerous core issues such as trade, the digital economy, climate change and more. In blending humor, personal experience, references to popular culture, and incisive analyses of the major issues and players in the diplomatic relationship between the US and the EU, former Ambassador Anthony Luzzatto Gardner tells an illuminating story of this essential partnership, and provides an exclusive insider look at US/EU diplomacy as well as the Brussels political scene.

© The Author(s) 2020

A. L. GardnerStars with Stripeshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29966-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Anthony Luzzatto Gardner¹

(1)

London, UK

Anthony Luzzatto Gardner

End Abstract

“Athens, Athens, conditions for Bruges please.” Every evening on the way home from my office I would hear my embassy driver Alain Dupaix speak these words into a long-range walkie-talkie. “Athens” was the code word for the guardhouse outside the official residence in which I lived for three years as the Ambassador to the European Union. “Bruges” was the code word for the official vehicle when I was riding in it. And every night, except for one following the terrorist attacks in Brussels in March 2016, the guardhouse would radio back the message: “conditions green at all locations.” That meant that it was safe to approach. But conditions were hardly “green” when I arrived at my diplomatic post in Brussels on March 3, 2014. They were amber and started flickering red a few months thereafter.

This was a stark contrast to the heady optimism I had experienced as a young intern in the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, in 1990–1991. The European Economic Community, as it was then known, had launched an ambitious program to break down national boundaries inhibiting a true single market in the flow of goods, services, workers, and capital (as largely exists in the United States). Brussels felt like a Washington, DC in the making—the capital of an increasingly unified (and expanding) area of nation states. The Berlin Wall had just fallen and the newly liberated countries of Central and Eastern Europe were waiting at the door for financial and technical assistance, as well as eventual membership in the club. I took the rather unusual decision in 1992 to start my legal career in Brussels, rather than in the United States, in the belief that Brussels would increasingly be at the heart of Europe.

The admission into the bloc of three new members in 1994, ten more in 2004, and a further two in 2007 boosted optimism about the future of the European integration project. Despite the deep slump that Europe experienced in the financial crisis shortly thereafter, continuing optimism seemed justified when the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded its Peace Prize to the European Union in 2012 for its contribution “to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe” for over six decades. Croatia joined the club in 2013 and other applicants from the Balkans had started the application process.

But by the time I arrived at post in March 2014, the mood had worsened dramatically. The future suddenly wasn’t what it used to be, to paraphrase the adage of Yogi Berra, an American baseball player. Upon my arrival, I received two recently published books about the EU with identical titles: “Unhappy Union.” The first was written by Professor Loukas Tsoukalis, who had sparked my interest in the EU during my studies at Oxford in the mid-1980s; the second was written by John Peet and Anton La Guardia, two journalists for The Economist whom I had met before my departure from my home in London. They argued that the Union is like a dysfunctional marriage that stays together, not out of love or idealism, but out of practical concerns: the high financial costs of breakup (especially the breakup of the Eurozone and a return to national currencies) and the fear of being alone and with less influence in an increasingly turbulent world. One might add that there are also fears of what would happen to the “children”—the recent arrivals from Central and Eastern Europe—if the marriage were to end in divorce: They might well slide back into bad habits of authoritarian rule or might be sucked back into the chilling embrace of Mother Russia.

Storm Clouds Over Crimea

There was no doubt that the Unhappy Union was already in difficulty by early 2014. Things were about to get significantly worse. Crimea, a territory gifted to Ukraine by the Soviet Union in 1954, provided one of the most serious crises that were to define my diplomatic mission. At the end of 2013, Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, under heavy pressure to accept cheaper gas and financial aid from Moscow, refused to sign a trade and political association agreement with the EU that would have led to closer integration into Western Europe. Anger about this refusal, as well as widespread indignation about the widespread corruption of government officials, led to protests that culminated in mid-February with riot police and snipers killing dozens of peaceful demonstrators.

I was watching these dramatic events unfold in Frankfurt, Germany, where I was taking an intensive German language course as I waited for final Senate confirmation of my ambassadorial appointment. Over one weekend, as I was tucking into my Sunday brunch at a local restaurant, I practically gagged on my müesli when I saw that all the leading German newspapers were widely reporting a conversation, between my friends and future colleagues, US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, US Ambassador to Ukraine. In that conversation, probably intercepted and leaked by the Russian secret services, Nuland dismissed EU concerns about the US desire to impose punitive sanctions and to have the United Nations play an intermediating role in the crisis. “Fuck the EU,” she said. I thought to myself: “Well, my future assignment just got more interesting.” Even the normally pro-American Süddeusche Zeitung published a scathing editorial arguing that the remark (though intended to remain private) displayed an emblematic lack of respect for Europe.

In the weeks before my arrival, a new technocratic and pro-Western government had been formed; Yanukovych and other high government officials had fled the country for Russia. Armed men without insignia (but acting on instructions of the Russian military) had taken over the Supreme Council of Crimea and strategic sites, such as the Sevastopol Airport and the port hosting the Russian Black Sea Fleet. In the subsequent days, the occupation of Crimea was completed, with a pro-Russian government installed and Crimean independence declared. Russia formally annexed the territory in mid-March.

As described in Chapter 7, I devoted a significant portion of my diplomatic mission to ensuring a coordinated US–EU response to these events, including the implementation and repeated renewal of strict sanctions against Russia.

My first official meeting on the first day of my arrival in Brussels on March 3, 2014, was with the Ukrainian Ambassador to the EU, Konstantyn Yeliseyev, later to become the National Security Adviser of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. My last official meeting on my last day on January 20, 2017, was with his successor, Ambassador Mykola Tochytskyi. By contrast, I never had a formal meeting with my Russian counterpart, Ambassador Vladimir Chizhov, a long-time veteran of the Brussels diplomatic corps. When asked about the clear presence of Russian troops in Ukraine, he denied that there were any there: “Let me assure you that the Russian army is not an army of the future which can make its soldiers invisible.”¹

Without coordinated US–EU sanctions on Russia, Moscow might well have decided to press its advantage even further in Crimea and beyond. (The separate sanctions that the US and the EU imposed on Iran, also described in Chapter 7, were equally effective in bringing Teheran to the negotiating table to hammer out a comprehensive agreement that limited its nuclear ambitions.) I also participated in US efforts to assist the EU, described in Chapter 8, to enhance Ukraine’s ability to withstand Russia’s use of gas supplies as a political weapon and to improve the EU’s energy security.

Although the Russian aggression in Ukraine was tragic, I was grateful to Vladimir Putin for helping to deflect attention from a transatlantic rift over data privacy caused by allegations of US government surveillance, including of European citizens. As The Economist astutely observed: “Unwittingly, perhaps, Vladimir Putin is playing Cupid to America’s Mars and Europe’s Venus: By seizing Crimea, he has rekindled the love lost between the transatlantic allies.”² I hung the cartoon accompanying the article on the wall behind my office desk. It depicted Putin as cupid, bare-chested, and wearing army fatigues, just after firing his arrow at a tree where the US and EU have carved their initials in the shape of a heart. In the distance, President Obama and a woman dressed in the EU flag are walking arm in arm. As the article argued, “Russia is reminding both sides of the ties that bind.” Without the Ukraine crisis, the “love lost” due to the rift over data privacy would have been much worse (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

“Putin, Obama & EU”

(© Peter Schrank, 2015. The Economist. Reprinted with Permission)

Storm Clouds Over Data Privacy

Even with this helpful deflection of attention, Europe’s loss of trust in the US because of perceived breaches of European citizens’ privacy rights became the single greatest preoccupation during my diplomatic mission. As described in Chapter 5, I focused considerable energy on addressing this problem as it had the potential to poison the well of US–EU relations and frustrate progress toward numerous common objectives.

One important objective was the negotiation of a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Agreement (TTIP). As described in Chapter 4, I was actively involved in the public outreach and strategy of the negotiation. Other important objectives, described in Chapter 6, were to ensure that the EU’s Digital Single Market Program would be consistent with US interests and to promote a transatlantic digital economy. The US and the EU made important progress in all these areas but our failure to conclude TTIP will remain my biggest regret.

The transatlantic rift was due in large part to the actions of Edward Snowden, an outside contractor at the National Security Agency. In 2013, he had fled to Hong Kong with highly classified documents about US intelligence programs (that he subsequently leaked to the press). Some of the leaks related to previously clandestine surveillance programs to collect user data from many leading US technology companies and to harvest significant information from Internet activity around the globe. Based on these leaks, German magazine Der Spiegel reported that the NSA had placed listening devices in EU diplomatic offices in Washington and New York, breached an EU computer network that provided access to internal e-mails and documents, and accessed phone lines in EU headquarters in Brussels.³ Bill Kennard, my friend and predecessor in my post, valiantly coped with the fallout of these revelations prior to his departure in July 2013.

Many in Europe saw Snowden as a brave “whistle blower” who had done a great public service. In 2013, he had been shortlisted for the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize, Europe’s top human rights award. I strongly disagreed with this view. He appeared to have joined the NSA (and stayed a mere six weeks) for the specific purpose of inflicting maximum damage on the United States; much of the leaked information revealed sources and methods of US intelligence, thereby putting lives at risk and compromising military readiness and defenses against terrorist threats. According to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Snowden had regular contact, from the moment of his arrival in Moscow, with Russian intelligence services and shared information with them.⁴

Things got even worse in the fall when news reports in Germany revealed that the US intelligence services had been tapping the cell phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. News reports alleged that the eavesdropping was being conducted from equipment stationed on the roof of the US Embassy in Berlin, next to the Brandenburg Gate, the German Parliament and government offices. There were further allegations over the following months. For example, the NSA had allegedly exploited its cooperation agreement with the German intelligence services to spy on European politicians and companies. The US and the UK, moreover, had allegedly hacked into the internal computer network of Gemalto, a European company and the world’s largest manufacturer of SIM cards for mobile phones, to steal encryption keys to monitor mobile communications.

Although President Obama and the Chancellor quietly patched up the serious breach in trust, the incident caused significant disruption in transatlantic relations. This was true above all in Germany where data protection has been a highly sensitive issue since Hitler’s dictatorship and Eastern Germany’s authoritarian regime, both of which had collected masses of personal information in order to crush dissent. By contrast, the NSA revelations elicited a collective yawn in the United Kingdom, an established democracy where the government and intelligence services command widespread respect.

The Snowden disclosures were a black cloud that threatened to cast a shadow over the entire US–EU relationship. A few days after I arrived in Brussels, I strolled around my new neighborhood in Uccle, a leafy suburb, and came across a large outdoor advertisement of Carlsberg Beer: “Unhacked by the NSA Since 1847.” I thought to myself: Houston, we have a problem. Lack of trust in the United States, due to data privacy concerns, had even entered popular culture.

In the fall of 2013, the European Commission, under pressure from the European Parliament (especially its Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs), called for a reassessment of the US–EU Terrorist Financing Tracking Program (TFTP). This program, described in Chapter 9, has been a critically important tool for the US and its allies in combating serious crime and terrorism worldwide. It enables the US government, under strict controls, to obtain financial transaction information related to serious crime and terrorism from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), a Brussels-based global provider of financial services, including a nearly universal routing code for bank transfers.

The agreement had been painstakingly negotiated and approved in 2009, before being at first rejected by the European Parliament in 2010, revised and then finally ratified four months later after intensive lobbying and a high-profile visit of Vice President Biden to Brussels. The Snowden disclosures had prompted concerns that the US had been collecting SWIFT data in a manner not explicitly authorized...