It is time to put aside specific European and U.S. differences over Iraq and to consider the more enduring consequences of the current transatlantic rift. Some commentators have noted that France, Germany, and the U.S. - due to their handling of the Iraq dispute at the United Nations (UN) - have stumbled almost by accident into a situation that will have far-reaching and perhaps unintended consequences. The greatest of those consequences may be the severing of a meaningful transatlantic military link.
It is not a great exaggeration to observe that the primary purpose of the "Transatlantic Bargain" that has governed U.S.-West European relationships for the last 60 years has been to establish the United States as Europe's army. This was most dramatically evident during World War II, of course, when U.S. military force gave the Allied powers their decisive edge against Nazi Germany. But the U.S. military never returned home after World War II, and the larger economic, diplomatic, and strategic arrangements that arose within Western Europe, and between Western Europe and the U.S. in the late 1940s and 1950s, depended on, and legitimized, Washington's military-security guarantee.
The Transatlantic Bargain was balanced and elegant in its simplicity. The United States was the first among equals in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the "Western bloc" in the UN Security Council, and the precursors to what is now the Group of 8 (G-8). This status allowed the U.S. to set the West's global security agenda and to establish priorities within that agenda. America's European allies were not treated as vassals, however. Indeed, when one considers the horribly weakened state of Britain, France, and Germany after World War II, it is quite accurate to note that the association of those nations with the U.S. actually gave them disproportionately high status in the new global order that emerged during the early Cold War. Europe's great nations not only had a place at the table but enjoyed a constant consultative role in the superpower standoff, bolstered by their theoretical power to veto actions inside NATO and the UN. In practice, of course, the Transatlantic Bargain depended on the absence of "vetoes" inside the Atlantic Alliance; conflicts were worked out behind the scenes with a clear deference to U.S. preferences.
Over time, a division of labor emerged in which the U.S. took on primary responsibility for military deterrence as well as for the occasional "hot" military conflicts of the Western alliance, while the European nations focused primarily on the exercise of their cultural, diplomatic and economic clout in the global order.
The "rewards" of this Transatlantic Bargain were evenly distributed and the desirability of the Bargain appeared to outlast even the end of the Cold War. The U.S. gained stability in Europe. Its military presence had an enormous calming effect within Western Europe, allowing the process of European integration to move forward free from the specter of military competition. The U.S. was spared any further "return trips" to Europe to sort out internecine fighting, and America obtained an open and compatible marketplace for its goods and services that greatly enhanced U.S. prosperity in the last five decades. The U.S. also gain bragging rights to leadership of a values-based alliance of unprecedented power - an alliance that helped bring out the spread of liberal democracy and free markets across a previously unimaginable swath of global territory.
Europe, for its part, gained security "on the cheap," enjoying protection from the greatest military threats ever assembled in human history (the Red Army and its nuclear arsenal) at essentially no cost. Even at the height of the Cold War, Western European expenditures for military defense were but a fraction of what would have been required without the U.S. security umbrella. In a very real sense, therefore, the Transatlantic Bargain facilitated not only the creation of the European Union but also the growth and (until recently) the stability of Europe's legendary welfare states.
Is Europe now ready to give up "its" Army, namely the United States of America? And is the U.S. ready to give up the charter members of its values-based alliance called "the West"? That is precisely what now stands at risk.
Both sides seem dimly aware of the stakes, but the alternatives they propose as replacements for the Transatlantic Bargain do not appear realistic or stable. What might be called the "Schroeder Option" is based on the notion that Europe no longer needs an army, U.S. or otherwise. During a recent series of speaking engagements in Germany I was surprised at how many of my German interlocutors claimed to believe that security risks were a thing of the past for their nation and for Europe, barely three years after Kosovo. Such hope for a new dawn of humanity - in which potential conflicts are defused via negotiations and weapons of mass destruction are made to go away as a result of inspections - is hopelessly naïve. What might be called the "Chirac Option," meanwhile, is to exploit the current collapse of transatlantic diplomacy by pushing for a European Army to replace dependence on Washington. The creation of such a force - if it is to be credible in a dangerous world - will require at least a tripling of Europe's defense expenditures for many years to come. And of course it will require the loyalty of all EU members to French military leadership, which remains the price of French participation. Neither of these requirements seems remotely obtainable.
Finally, what might be called the "Rumsfeld Option" is to declare America's European allies irrelevant, or at best selectively relevant, to America's ability to protect its own security interests in the 21st Century. Under a narrow, traditional realist vision of American foreign policy, such an approach might be sustainable. The U.S. could play to its strengths: military deterrence of threats to the U.S. homeland and ferocious military strikes (followed by quick withdrawals) to root out direct threats to America's security interests elsewhere. But that is not the vision being put forward by President George W. Bush. The current U.S. vision of democratization, and the active encouragement of other liberal values in the Middle East, is breathtaking in its audacity and implications. We cannot but hope for its success. But how can such a vision be both credible and obtainable if the greatest expression of liberal international order - the Atlantic Alliance - essentially ceases to exist as the U.S. commences its efforts at regime change in the Middle East?
A better option than any of these is a New Transatlantic Bargain. European and U.S. leaders should consider this option while we still have the opportunity to do so. Ronald D. Asmus and Kenneth M. Pollack argue in Policy Review (October-November 2002) that such a revamped arrangement will depend on a shared understanding of Western goals in the Middle East. They are almost certainly correct. Of course it will be extraordinarily difficult - perhaps impossible - for Europe and the U.S. to arrive at such a shared understanding. Without it, however, the future will look much bleaker than some of our leaders now suppose.