F OCUS - American Foreign Service Association

F O C U S
Many Americans might recall
“freedom fries” and Bush administration
anger at France’s opposition
to the invasion of Iraq, but far fewer
remember former President Jacques
Chirac’s commitment of combat
troops to Afghanistan following the
9/11 attacks. That presence has
been reinforced under Pres. Sarkozy,
despite the highest number of
French combat casualties since
Lebanon in 1983.
As one of Europe’s most important military powers,
what France does regarding NATO greatly influences the
Alliance’s European members. As NATO looks beyond
its eastward expansion and undertakes more missions outside
its traditional area, the French dimension will gain in
importance.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO engagement
with Eastern Europe has led it to admit many former
Warsaw Pact members into its ranks. Future expansion
rounds are proving more problematic, however. The gap
between the United States and several European allies on
this issue, already evident at the Bucharest Summit in
April 2008, widened after fighting broke out between
Russia and Georgia last August. In December, then-Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice and her fellow foreign
ministers put a Band-Aid on the divisions, using a facesaving
construct to temporize on membership plans for
two countries, Ukraine and Georgia, which Russia does
not want to see join NATO.
Meanwhile, NATO has also been mindful of its southern
flank. Before stepping down in 1995, former Secretary-General
Willy Claes, who started NATO’s Mediterranean
Dialogue, warned about the dangers posed by Islamic
fundamentalism. The Alliance has maintained the
dialogue and added countries to its list of Mediterranean
interlocutors, but it remains largely a forum for dialogue.
Apart from the odd op-ed calling for Israeli or Moroccan
membership in the Europe-based organizations,
there appears to be little support in Europe for dialogue
to lead to accession. The European Union has its own
Euro-Mediterranean Partnership; indeed, Pres. Sarkozy
launched his 2008 E.U. presidency with a Paris summit
proposing a “Union for the Mediterranean,” an idea the
European Parliament recently embraced as a worthy
forum for conflict resolution.
Almost every NATO
summit of the past
20 years has generated
op-eds proclaiming
“The End of NATO.”
For E.U. countries, the conceptual
linkage (there is no formal one)
between a country’s joining NATO
and its accession to the European
Union is another area of concern.
Turkey, originally brought into
NATO to help shore up the southeastern
flank against the USSR, has
been knocking on the E.U. door for
many years, watching increasingly
impatiently as several former Warsaw
Pact states have joined both organizations. Such proliferating
expansion has caused considerable “enlargement
fatigue” to set in. Within E.U. circles, the “widening” versus
“deepening” theological debates ebb and flow, as they
do at NATO.
The U.S.-E.U. Equation
At a January European Parliament “Study Day” on
E.U.-U.S. collaboration after the election of President
Barack Obama, Ronald Asmus, a Clinton administration
deputy assistant secretary of State for European affairs
who is now executive director of the German Marshall
Fund’s Brussels office, addressed the changes in American
attitudes toward engagement with Europe. “Before,
the U.S. wish list for Europe consisted of 70 percent
NATO content and 30 percent E.U.,” said Asmus. “Now
the proportions are reversed.”
In an Obama administration that has so far stressed
American “smart power” over repeated recourse to military
engagement with the world, the menu of topics to
share with the European Union is richer than that which
can be tackled in the NATO framework. Climate change,
energy security, population and financial flows — all issues
with “national security” implications, though out of
place in a defense alliance — are natural topics in an enhanced
European Union-United States dialogue.
Presidents Obama and Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel
appear to agree on this wider definition of mutual security.
We are likely to hear repeated references to the notion of
“complementarity” — the European term indicating comparative
advantage in the appropriate institutional domain.
To each its own: NATO for the 30 percent that is
defense, and enhanced E.U.-U.S. coordination for that
wider variety of transatlantic and global questions that
constitute the remaining 70 percent.
In the “variable geometry” of European Union institu-
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