Europe's Defense Challenge: Reinventing the Atlantic Alliance

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Reports of NATO's demise are as premature as ever. While analysts continue to brood over how it can survive in the absence of a manifest threat, NATO is not only surviving, but growing and reinventing itself with a newfound vigor. But like all processes of growth and adaptation, this one is not without its share of pain. Today's distinctive challenges -- peaceful enlargement, policy toward Russia, containing ethnic and terrorist violence -- demand a solid transatlantic community and a NATO that can get up and go. As NATO stretches to meet these challenges, it is rediscovering some of the deepest strains within the Atlantic defense community. While it may not be the easiest time to overcome those contradictions, it is high time to try.

The Clinton administration is rightly credited with a more open and inventive U.S. approach to power-sharing and burden-sharing in the North Atlantic alliance. Recent accomplishments include the NATO summit declaration in January 1994, which launched the idea of joint task forces that could be "loaned" out for European-led operations; the Dayton accords on the former Yugoslavia, which restored the allies' unity of political as well as military purpose; and the Berlin NATO ministerial meeting of June 1996, which thrashed out guidelines not just for the joint task forces, but for a reformed NATO structure with clearer European elements.

But in both its deeper sentiments and day-to-day reactions, the U.S. establishment still projects confusion about what it wants out of Europe. On the one hand, there is an American hunger not so much for burden-sharing as burden-shedding. This impulse can translate into an insistence that the Europeans must look after themselves "ready or not," and an implication that Washington will not care how they do it. On the other hand, there is the U.S. insistence not just on leadership but on control of any shared enterprise, which perhaps helps explain why American commentators sometimes treat independent European defense and diplomatic efforts as a threat to be mocked out of existence.

In the broader foreign policy field, Americans criticize Europe's failure to speak with a single voice, and have difficulty taking that voice seriously when it comes from a small state or the European Commission. Washington is still more comfortable doing old-style political deals with the biggest Europeans -- and, not surprisingly, so are the biggest Europeans.