Europe is about to create a unified military force. Done wrong, it could strain transatlantic relations and weaken European defense.
Philip H. Gordon is Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies and Director of the Center on the United States and France at the Brookings Institution. He served as Director for European Affairs at the U.S. National Security Council from 1998 to 1999.
MAKING EUROPEAN DEFENSE WORK
At the end of this year, Europe is scheduled to take its first serious steps toward creating a credible unified military force. The clock began ticking at a December 1999 summit in Helsinki, Finland, where the leaders of the European Union (EU) announced their intention to create a rapid reaction force able to act autonomously, send up to 60,000 troops abroad within two months, and sustain them for at least a year. They also announced plans to create a new Political and Security Committee, a Military Staff able to advise EU leaders, and a Military Committee of defense chiefs modeled on NATO's. Coming after decades of failed attempts to build a meaningful European military capability, the Helsinki declaration was widely heralded as a sign of Europe's new willingness to take more responsibility for its own defense and perhaps even project power independently. The new structures are scheduled to be in place by the end of this year.
Apart from the hoopla surrounding it, this latest initiative seems more serious than its many predecessors, for three reasons. First, the United Kingdom, whose forces are necessary to any credible European military, is engaged wholeheartedly for the first time. Second, the Kosovo conflict brought home to Europeans just how militarily dependent on Washington they are and will remain unless big changes are made. And third, the Helsinki declaration is not a call to revive the eternally moribund Western European Union (WEU) -- Europe's ostensible defense arm -- but a plan to transfer responsibility for defense and security to the EU, an organization backed by real political will and momentum.
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Over the full range of contemporary foreign affairs, American policy toward Western Europe has been marked by durability and rare continuity. The change of neither Presidents, Secretaries of State nor political parties has altered the lines of basic policy. The Government marches with American public opinion, for that ubiquitous man in the street still feels deeply that Western Europe is vital to the United States.
The decision of Turkish president Turgut Özal, to join the anti-Iraq coalition, was a political gamble, but is likely to produce long-term benefits to outweigh the substantial short-term costs of lost trade, diminished popularity at home and increased terrorism -- enhanced international respect, economic and military assistance, and improved chances of admission to EC membership. "Turkey has earned the right to join the EC".
The history of the Atlantic Alliance is a history of crises. But we must distinguish between the routine difficulties engendered by Western Europe's dependence on the United States for its security, as well as by the economic interdependence of the allies, and major breakdowns or misunderstandings which reveal not simply an inevitable divergence of interests but dramatically different views of the world and priorities. At the present time, complaints from West European leaders about the effects of high American interest rates on their economies, or about President Reagan's skeptical approach to North-South economic issues, belong in the first category. The current controversy in Europe over nuclear weapons belongs in the second, and now confronts the Alliance with one of its most dangerous tests.
