By Philip Stephens Financial Times April 14 2011
America’s GIs are waving goodbye. Good Europeans should cheer them on their way. More than two decades have passed since the end of the cold war. You do not have to be French (or Russian) to agree it’s time for the Yanks to go home.
Diplomatic gossip has it that the president could also cancel plans for state-of-the-art missile defences in Europe. The Europeans would like a Nato missile shield to guard against rogue regimes such as that in Tehran. The trouble is they don’t want to pay their share.
All in all, Mr Obama’s stance lends credence to the notion that the US no longer sees Europe as a focal point of its geostrategic interest. Sure, the president will turn up in London next month for a two-day photo-call with the Queen at Buckingham Palace. He will drop in on the G8 summit in France and also spend a few hours in Warsaw. But this is form over substance. Americans are giving up on Europe.
The US has more pressing priorities – in east Asia, in Pakistan and Afghanistan and in the Middle East. Europe may have forgotten about Iraq, but the US is still heavily engaged. At home, Mr Obama has multi-trillion-dollar deficits to close. If Europeans are unwilling to pay for their own security, why should US taxpayers pick up the bill?
Not everyone in Washington is comfortable about this. Senator Richard Lugar, a prominent Republican voice in foreign policy, has objected to the latest troop withdrawals. A forward presence in Europe, he says, is a vital emblem of the US commitment to the alliance. Mr Lugar, however, is among a diminishing band of old-school Atlanticists, even in his own party. George W. Bush’s administration, after all, suggested even deeper cuts in European-based forces.
You can see why European leaders might be alarmed. They are already struggling to enforce the Libyan no-fly zone, which scarcely counts as even a medium-size conflict. Germany, unhelpfully, has sided with Russia and China in opposing the operation. So has Poland.
Italy, Sweden and the Netherlands have contributed warplanes, but with caveats. Their pilots can patrol the skies, but must not shoot at anything. That leaves most of the burden on the French and British, who are said to be running short of precision bombs. What would Europe do in a real war?
I have spent a fair chunk of my time lately at conferences, seminars and symposiums about the future of western security. The most recent, an excellent gathering at the Ditchley Foundation, took a hard look at the nature and distribution of European power.
Several themes run through every such discussion: one says that Europe’s backyard is becoming a less predictable and more perilous place; a second that Europe faces new and asymmetric threats, whether from cyberattacks or terrorists; a third that the US is tiring of acting as Nato’s paymaster; and a fourth that European voters are unwilling to face up to the security challenge.
The threats are obvious enough. The Arab uprisings hold out the long-term prospect of a more stable and prosperous neighbourhood south of the Mediterranean. In the short term, as we are seeing in Libya, the risks are of prolonged conflict and chaos on Europe’s doorstep.
The western Balkans are another source of danger. Some 15 years beyond the Dayton accords, the region remains one of armed instability. Bosnia looks perilously close to ethnic fracture. Serbia refuses to accept Kosovo’s statehood. Much of the former Yugoslavia now serves as a command and control centre for international crime, drug-dealing and illegal migration.
Across the eastern half of the continent, there are justified fears that a more assertive Russia will exploit the departure of the Americans to reassert hegemony over the former Soviet space and beyond. Dmitry Medvedev has given Russian foreign policy a slightly friendlier face. The real decisions are still made by Vladimir Putin.
In the circumstances, many would say that the intelligent course for Europeans is to plead with the Americans to stay. The harsh truth, though, is that Europe needs shock treatment. As long as they are nestling comfortably under the US security umbrella, Europeans will continue to inhabit a postmodern utopia in which the only thing to do with defence spending is to cut it and the only power worth talking about is of a distinctly soft variety.
Granted, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain’s David Cameron tell us the world is a more dangerous place. Europe also has a responsibility to prevent regimes such as that of Muammer Gaddafi from slaughtering their own people. But what are these leaders doing even as they seek to oust the Libyan regime? Imposing deep cuts on their armed forces.
The figures are set out by Tomas Valasek in an illuminating report for the Centre for European Reform. Most European nations are already spending far below the Nato target of 2 per cent of national income. Denmark alone plans to increase its budget in coming years. One or two others are planning to freeze spending. All the rest are cutting.
Mr Valasek rightly calls for the pooling of costs and capabilities. But the problem goes beyond national pride. Partly the cuts are about fiscal austerity; partly about a reluctance to explain new threats to doubtful voters. Post-Iraq, many policymakers seem to unable to distinguish prudent precaution from madcap plans to start unnecessary wars. My own experience is that to say Europe should spend enough to protect its citizens is to be branded a disciple of warmongering US neoconservatives.
The clincher, though – the get-out that allows politicians and policymakers to live with the contradiction of rising threat levels and shrinking armed forces – is the American security blanket. As long as the GIs are over here, Europe can delude itself. As I said, it’s time the Yanks went home. Then we Europeans can grow up.
