Home › Books & Reviews › Capsule Reviews › Alliance Within The Alliance: Franco-German Military Cooperation And The European Pillar Of Defense; The Europeanization Of The Alliance

Alliance Within The Alliance: Franco-German Military Cooperation And The European Pillar Of Defense; The Europeanization Of The Alliance

David G. Haglund
Robbin Laird
Reviewed by By Gregory F. Treverton
Winter 1991/92
Print Email
Login or Register to leave a comment.

Sign-up for free weekly updates from ForeignAffairs.com.
David G. Haglund
Westview Press
1991
213 pp.
$35.00
Robbin Laird
Westview Press
1991
143 pp.
$27.50

Two studies by specialists. Haglund, a good Canadian scholar, argues that a "Carolingian" core of France and Germany has been hard to swallow for those excluded-Britain in particular-or seemed unnecessary in the burst of enthusiasm for pan-European arrangements. His argument puts a finger on the lack of serious west European cooperation in security matters-a lack encouraged by American policy and that now seems distressingly evident in the Yugoslav crisis. Laird's book is a wide-ranging collection of essays by an American who knows Europe well and who systematically interviews European officials and observers.

Related

Essay, Special 1991
The New Europe
Gregory F. Treverton

Assesses (1) progress in the evolution of a European security identity, with particular reference to the EC's handling of the Yugoslav crisis (2) how US foreign policy should adjust itself thereto. "The starting point for American policy should be an end to ambivalence over the Europeans building some defense co-operation of their own", and the USA should recognize that "NATO will not continue to serve as the cornerstone for an American political role in Europe".

Read
Essay, Special 1989
The Defense Debate
Gregory F. Treverton

US public expectations of a 'peace dividend' from the collapse of the socialist bloc are unrealistic. Structural properties of US defence policy-making, and the non-existence of any strategic vision not predicated on the monolithic Soviet threat, mean that "for the next several years the 'peace dividend' will be much smaller than enthusiasts hope, and earning it will require departures from customary congressional habits". Offers advice on a strategy for reducing US defence expenditure (1) avoid a return to the 'hollow army' by shifting towards reserve or 'round-out' units (2) cut US forces in Europe in the light of CFE results, not in advance of them (3) defer various high-price equipment programmes, while preserving R&D budgets (4) using arms control to cut what the USA "can safely do without".

Read
Essay, Summer 1979
Europe and America: Nuclear Weapons and the "Gray Area"
Gregory F. Treverton

At the fringes of public attention to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), the United States and its European allies are considering changes in NATO nuclear arrangements that bear on two decades of Alliance practice. The issue is what to do about the nuclear threat to Western Europe, and to NATO's deterrent, posed by Soviet systems targeted on Western Europe-the SS-20 mobile missile and other Soviet weapons in the "gray area" between the strategic and the tactical. Those weapons, coupled with strategic parity between the United States and the Soviet Union, have sharpened a long-standing European concern about the commitment of the American central nuclear deterrent to Europe's defense. This issue will rank behind only the dollar on the agenda of U.S. relations with Europe in the several years ahead.

Read