Is Europe Irrelevant?
Paul Starobin at the National Journal‘s Security Experts Blog has kicked off a spirited debate surrounding Europe’s military capabilities (or lack thereof). The jumping off point in the discussion is Robert Gates’s speech to NATO officers last month, in which Gates lamented that:
“The demilitarization of Europe — where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it — has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st.” [Justin Logan blogged about this here.]
Starobin asks: “Can America Count On Europe Anymore?”
Is Gates right? What exactly does “the demilitarization of Europe” mean for U.S. national security interests? Should Americans care if Europe has to live in the shadow of a militarily superior post-Soviet Russia? Is NATO, alas, a lost cause?
[...]
In short, should the U.S. be planning for a post-Europe world? Does Europe still matter? Can we count on Europe any more?
It would be unwise for Americans to write off Europeans as a lost cause, congenitally dependent upon U.S. military power, and unable to contribute either to their own defense or to policing the global commons. We can’t count on Europe — right now — but that doesn’t mean we can never count on Europe in the future.
Americans who complain about Europe’s unwillingness to play a larger role in policing the globe, and who would like them to do more, should start by exploring the many reasons why Europe is so weak militarily.
Consider, for example, Europe’s half-hearted and inconsistent steps to establish a security capacity independent of NATO — and therefore independent of the United States — since the end of the Cold War. Such proposals have failed for many reasons, but we shouldn’t ignore the extent to which Uncle Sam has actively discouraged Europe from playing a more active role. Most recently, Hillary Clinton expressed the U.S. government’s position that political and economic integration would proceed under the EU, but security would continue to be provided by NATO. This echoes similar comments made by the first Bush and Clinton administrations with respect to European defense. (See, for example, Madeleine Albright’s comments regarding European Defence and Security Policy (EDSP) in 1998).
Madeleine Albright’s Confusion
Former secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright writes in Parade magazine that 20 years after the Berlin Wall, “We Must Keep Freedom Alive.” A commendable sentiment, but the article is a bit confused, notably in that it seems to use “freedom” and “democracy” interchangeably. But as Fareed Zakaria and Tom Palmer, among others, have demonstrated, they’re not the same thing. Freedom is the right and ability of individuals to make the important decisions about their lives. Democracy — especially constitutional democracy, with separation of powers, the rule of law, and constraints on government — can be the most effective way to protect liberty. But democracy isn’t liberty, and we shouldn’t confuse the relationship.
Albright writes:
democracy is a prerequisite to economic growth.
That seems clearly, spectacularly wrong. Consider some historical cases of great economic growth: Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan grew rapidly in recent decades without being democracies. (And I would say that that growth led to Taiwan’s becoming a democracy.) Beyond that, look at the United States and Great Britain during the unprecedented growth of the 19th century; neither was a democracy by modern standards. And of course China has been experiencing rapid growth in the past 30 years without democracy.
But look at Albright’s complete sentence:
In fact, democracy is a prerequisite to economic growth, which only flourishes when minds are encouraged to produce, invent, and explore.
That is a much stronger hypothesis. Indeed economic growth flourishes “when minds are encouraged to produce, invent, and explore.” And the condition in which that happens is actually called freedom, not democracy. So perhaps the problem is just that Albright is using the terms “freedom” and “democracy” loosely. And if by democracy she means the modern Western conception of a system of individual rights, private property, and market exchange protected by a limited constitutional government featuring divided powers, an independent judiciary, and free and independent media, then it would be true that that kind of “democracy” is a solid foundation for economic growth — though not a prerequisite, as the examples above demonstrate.
The relationships between the rule of law, popular participation in government, constraints on government, protection of property, the market economy, and economic growth deserve serious study, and that study should start with conceptual clarity.
Other Countries as Ends-in-Themselves
Here in Babylon on the Potomac, most foreign policy discussions begin and end with the United States: How can we extend our control of the world? Who is challenging us? What problems might, say, a rising China, pose to American primacy? We are, as Madeleine Albright asserted, the “indispensable nation.” One popular scholar recently advanced the theory that the U.S. government is, and should be, the world’s government. There’s a real refusal to recognize that we are, as a simple matter of fact, isolated by the blessings of geography and power. We’re just not a 19th century continental European power, no matter how much we threat-inflate and conceive of ourselves as the only source of order in a disorderly world.
You’d think we’d be inclined to recognize the luxury that our isolation affords us, but you’d be wrong. Consequently, in discussions about the rise of China, for example, U.S. analysts generally pose the question as a simple U.S. vs. China confrontation: How quickly can they challenge us? Where should our “red lines” be? Which allies will support us? If our strategists were smart, they’d be thinking more creatively about offloading responsibility to countries that live more closely to China, and waiting to see how things progress. While the ChiCom menace tends to get represented as ten feet tall in these discussions, the Chinese have a host of significant problems, including the internal unrest that has been on display recently, among others.
High on the list of “other problems” is China’s relationship with countries like India. Much more so than the United States, countries like India and Japan have a lot to lose, potentially, from China’s rise. Liberal international relations thinkers are right to point out the positive-sumness of economic relations between potential adversaries. Economic ties between China and Taiwan, China and the U.S., China and Japan, are also positive forces that can help to moderate security competition. That said, security itself is zero-sum. Either you control your sea lines of communication or else another country does. If another country does, bad things can happen to you, as, for example, Japan remembers all too well.
All of which is a long-winded way of introducing this excellent article by James Lamont and Amy Kazmin in the Financial Times. Lamont and Kazmin highlight the growing unease in New Delhi about China. Unease tends to crop up when a big powerful neighbor does things like claim whole provinces of your country as its own territory, as China does with the Indian province of Arunachal Pradesh. (For more on this subject, see my talk on Capitol Hill from May 2008: video here.)
In fairness, the Bush administration did some smart things on this front, like trying to improve ties with India. For years, U.S.-India relations had been tainted by a cold war mindset where we resented their association with the Non-aligned Movement. (I think the India nuclear deal has a lot of downsides, but the intentions underpinning it were smart ones.) Similarly, the Bush administration signed a joint agreement with Japan stating that a peaceful resolution of the Taiwan dispute is a “common strategic objective.”
But the important part will be beyond getting other countries to accept our goodies (the India nuclear deal) or sign a statement of interest (the joint Japan-US statement on Taiwan). Those countries would rather, ceteris paribus, stand tall against China from over the shoulder of the United States. The only way that we will get to a point where the countries with the most to lose pay the most for a hedge against China is for the United States to credibly commit to do less. And on that front, there is a lot more work to be done.
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