US Pivot to Asia leaves Europe fumbling. Answer could be bigger role for NATO

17 May 2013

Rome:

The US pivot to Asia has left Europe fumbling in the dark for a vision of its role in the world, a symposium Thursday May 16 at Rome’s Institute of International Relations was told. Instead of a coordinated EU strategy, there were “twenty-seven different views about what kind of global actor Europe should be,” Yale’s Prof. Emeritus Jolyon Howorth said. Such disarray was all the more serious given the relative decline of the United States and the rise of China, India, Brazil and other emerging powers—a major global power shift.

“With a single exception—the handover from the British Empire to the United States at some point in the early twentieth century—such transitions in history have always been violent,” Prof. Howorth said, endorsing Robert Kupchan’s (from the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations) vision of “no one’s world”. In this view, the current liberal, rules-based world order, rooted in national democracies and the rule of law, won’t survive the West’s decline. Instead, a handful of more or less equal powers will pursue their own interests with little agreement on, or regard for, the global common good. Without a dominant power or group of powers, the future will be one of conflict rather than consensus. As Howorth put it, it’s a vision of a “tense, semi-sort-of [sic] anarchy.”

A long-time supporter of Europe’s Common Defence and Security Policy (CDSP), Prof. Howorth believes European leaders are unready to deal with the changes that lie ahead. Although US foreign policy circles are alive with discussion about the future of the international system, on the other side of the Atlantic, silence reigns. “This debate is simply not happening in Europe,” he said.

The Arab Spring exemplified the EU’s lack of a “grand strategy”—and the means for pursuing one. Libya was just the neighbourhood humanitarian crisis Europe had been preparing for since the breakup of Yugoslavia twenty years ago. But it caught European leaders napping and showed how differently they perceived the Continent’s strategic interests. While Britain and France wrapped themselves in NATO’s banner to topple Ghaddafi, Germany’s traditional pacifism meant it stayed out. And US assistance was crucial, Washington leading “from behind” in name only. The lesson was clear: on strategy, Europe was divided and those countries that wanted to act remained dependent on US muscle.

Because of this, the shift of the United States’ strategic focus to Asia will affect Europe more than it realizes. According to Howorth, Washington is now saying to Europe: “If it’s a crisis in your backyard, it’s up to you to fix it.” Moreover, a new generation of American civilian and military leaders, with little memory of Cold-War solidary in the North Atlantic, is asking: “Why should the United States help Europe? How is the EU relevant to US strategic interests?”

Europe’s fundamental lack of strategic ambition is to blame. Despite years of hype, the CSDP effectively remains a dead letter. Europe lacks a power other than the United States that can galvanize the Continent strategically; and because European governments cling to defence and foreign policy as precious attributes of national sovereignty (“the last bastions of Westphalia”), the EU can’t develop a common strategic vision of its own. “If a grand strategy is defined as the calculated relationship between means and large ends,” Howorth said, “then the EU doesn’t talk about large ends.” There’s even disagreement about defence as a means—a fact reflected in twenty-seven different national white papers. (Last week, France published its latest.)

Despite the euro crisis, Europe’s isn’t a problem of money. Collectively, EU states spend an annual defence budget of around US$200bn—the same amount, astonishingly, as the US defence budget before 9/11. Whereas with that sum the United States, in Howorth’s words, “ran the world”, the EU can’t even run its own neighbourhood.

Yet all of Europe’s borders are areas of current or potential conflict: from the Arctic, whose energy resources global warming are opening up for commercial exploitation, to the Baltic, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova, where Russia remains as much a frustrated regional hegemon as it does across the Black Sea in Georgia and the Caucasus, and so on through the Middle East (Syria, Iran) and North Africa, where the Arab Spring has set in motion major political changes from Egypt to the Atlantic.

But with the CSDP moribund and its relationship to NATO “dysfunctional”, how should EU leaders go about protecting the Continent’s long-term security and prosperity? The more US eyes turn to the Pacific, the less they’ll be able to turn to Washington for an answer to that question.

To overcome Europe’s lack of strategic unity, Howorth thinks EU leaders should gradually merge the CSDP with NATO, an alliance still in search of a cause. Such “progressive fusion” would mean letting Europeans take more responsibility in NATO, not just “burden-sharing” but leadership—even over American soldiers. Rather than looking overseas for the alliance’s future (“NATO abroad”), NATO could remain focused on securing peace and democracy in Europe. And the better European leaders got at thinking, and acting, strategically, the easier the United States could quietly “tip-toe out the back door to Asia.”

This is controversial. Fearful of losing control of the alliance, Washington has traditionally resisted handing Europeans a greater say. According to Howorth, however, US policymakers are increasingly open to just such a scenario. The real question is: are Europeans ready for regional leadership—or despite frequent protestations to the contrary, do they secretly wish to free ride on Uncle Sam for ever?

On the other hand, if the US is “pivoting” to Asia, perhaps Europe should think of doing the same? I hope to write my next post on Europe and Asia.