NATO: the Practice and Politics of Transformation

NATO: the practice and politics of transformation

PAUL CORNISH

NATO is dying—again Of all the difficult years NATO has endured over the past decade or so, 2003 must surely rate among the most testing. The political and military campaign against Saddam Hussein’s regime exposed to public view deep and seemingly unbridgeable divisions between the United States and some European allies, and within Europe. The United Nations and the European Union were both severely mauled in the process, while NATO came close to collapse. At an early stage in the Iraq conflict, Turkey’s request to its NATO partners for air defence, early warning and chemical defence support was formally rejected by Belgium, France and Germany on the grounds that to support Turkey would prejudge the outcome of discussions in the UN Security Council. With the alliance thus prevented from assisting in the defence of the only Atlantic Treaty signatory sharing a border with Iraq, NATO’s credibility hung in the balance. Accusa- tions of treachery and worse flew back and forth across the Atlantic. The Bush administration was accused of wanting, at best, to turn what had been a strong and succcessful security organization into an instrument of US foreign policy; a ‘toolbox’ of biddable allies whose uncritical political support and antiquated military capability would be available to the US as it saw fit. At worst, Washington was charged with having organized an elaborate conspiracy to demonstrate NATO’s uselessness, and thereby to discredit the last remaining obstacle to a unilateralist foreign policy unfettered by whining allies. For their part, many in the United States were surprised and dismayed by the French government’s open advocacy of of balance-of-power thinking had proceeded from the assumption that containment, balancing and bandwagoning were all possible responses to an adversary’s power, or to a manifest threat; they were not policies to be contemplated in respect of friends and allies. In some quarters of the Bush administration, the impression set in that it was in fact the French whose goal was to destroy NATO—an impression reinforced by France’s involvement in the unfortunate European security ‘mini-summit’ with Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg in late April.

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Experts on both sides of the Atlantic vied for the Pulitzer Prize for pessimism. In the spring 2003 edition of NATO Review the French strategic commentator François Heisbourg sensed a general loss of unity and purpose in NATO, ‘so great has been the growth of transatlantic disaffection’. Responding to Heis- bourg, Steve Larabee of the RAND Corporation in Washington lamented the ‘lack of a shared consensus in the United States and much of Europe on how to address the new strategic threats and challenges that the Alliance faces. Without such a consensus, it will be hard for NATO to use the military forces at its disposal effectively.’ Even within NATO, where there has not been much of a tradition of open and candid comment during awkward moments in US–European relations, one senior official wrote in summer 2003 that ‘the last months have not been kind to the transatlantic relationship’ and admitted that disagreements over Iraq threatened to ‘overwhelm’ NATO.1 But the winner was undoubtedly the foreign editor of The Times, for her doom-laden response to the mini- summit of 29 April: ‘This time it is not an exaggeration to talk about the death of Nato. What we are watching is a slow death, but the plan put forward by France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg is a heavy blow.’2 Yet the past twelve months have also been an extraordinarily active and, arguably, successful time for this middle-aged yet sprightly alliance. In terms of membership, following agreement in November 2002, the programme to admit seven new members (Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia) to the alliance continues on schedule. The March 2003 agreement on the ‘Berlin Plus’ arrangement, whereby the EU is granted access to NATO equipment and planning assets, promises to yield the long-awaited settlement of the complex debate about Europe’s security institutions. Operationally, NATO contributed significantly to the US-led campaign in Afghanistan—with basing and overflight rights, intelligence-sharing, and the deployment of special forces from several European NATO members—and in August 2003 assumed direct command of the International Security and Assistance Force. The alliance has also discussed the broadening of its functional remit to include counterterrorism, counterpro- liferation of weapons of mass destruction and expeditionary combat operations. There have even been suggestions that NATO should branch out into ‘soft power’ activities such as post-conflict nation-building. To keep pace with this broadening agenda, NATO has devised a detailed programme of political and military transformation. The November 2002 summit meeting in Prague was originally intended to be a celebration of the latest round of NATO enlargement. Instead, in an effort to respond to the changed strategic environment after 9/11, the meeting was presented as NATO’s ‘transformation summit’. The transformation programme is ambitious. In mid- June 2003 NATO defence ministers agreed a radical simplification of the alliance’s vast headquarters structure as part of a move away from an organization still geared essentially to territorial defence to one designed to carry out expeditionary

1 M. Rühle, ‘NATO after Prague: learning the lessons of 9/11’, Parameters, 33: 2, Summer 2003, p. 89. 2 ‘How old Europe’s gang of four ambushed NATO’, The Times, 30 April 2003.

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operations by ‘joint’ forces (i.e. navy, army and air force acting closely together). The number of high-level headquarters (strategic and operational) is being reduced from 20 to 12, with the alliance’s Atlantic Command, based in Norfolk, Virginia, becoming Allied Command Transformation, designed to be the ‘forcing agent’ for the reinvention of the alliance. Prague also saw the commitment to field a new NATO Response Force (NRF): a body of around 20,000 troops available at short notice for deployment around the world across the full spectrum of military operations. Agreement was also reached on a new, simplified plan for improving military capability and acquisitions: the Prague Capabilities Commitment (PCC), intended to replace the complex and largely ineffectual Defence Capabilities Initiative of April 1999. These and many other aspects of NATO’s transformation agenda—a new strategic concept for defence against terrorism; a deployable nuclear, biological and chemical analytical laboratory and event response team; a disease surveil- lance system; an improved operational lessons-learned system; a trimmed-down committee structure—all indicate an organization far from willing to accept retirement, and far from willing to be overwhelmed by the undoubted crisis in Euro-Atlantic security politics. NATO and its supporting governments have sensed a moment of great opportunity, for which they have been hoping for several years and which they will be unlikely to see again, to structure the transatlantic security debate once and for all in NATO’s favour, to show that a transformed NATO can meet the challenges of twenty-first-century security, and to prove NATO to be both militarily and politically indispensable. But for all the energy and optimism of NATO’s transformation agenda, it is far from clear that this impressive range of operational and organizational improvements will act as a catalyst to ameliorate relations between the United States and several of its European allies, and between some European governments. Yet without improvement in those relationships at the highest level, the NRF and PCC, and even the counterterrorism strategic concept, will be unable to fulfil their promise. As well as engaging in ‘bottom-up’ or ‘inside-out’ transformation, NATO must also be re-energized ‘top-down’, with Bush, Blair, Chirac, Schröder and other European leaders all giving substance to the vision of a new, transformed NATO. This is a tall order, for three reasons: the transatlantic relationship has descended into a battle between caricatures; there is a lack of consensus on the threat and what to do about it; and there is an unwillingness in Europe to provide adequate resources for defence and security.

Transatlantic caricatures US and European values and visions for the twenty-first-century international order are less than fully compatible; there cannot even be said to be a settled, transatlantic consensus on what it means in national and international politics to be part of ‘the West’, let alone on the price, qualifications and obligations of membership. Most accounts agree that US–European relations generally, and

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particularly in the area of defence and security cooperation, were significantly affected by the dispute over the recourse to force against Iraq in 2003. But opinions are divided as to the depth of any disagreement and the scope for recovery. For some, the crisis was so deep that NATO and the EU were feared to have been irreparably damaged. Others argued that the damage was severe, but that the two organizations could nevertheless overcome divisions among member governments and would in time proceed with ‘business as usual’. Indeed, even by summer 2003 there were already indications that bureaucratic momentum and the instinct for organizational self-preservation within NATO and the EU, coupled with the acceptance among key governments that the dispute had got out of hand, were beginning to mask the divisions revealed over Iraq. Another group of critics, however, argued that ‘business as usual’ was precisely the problem, and that the deep disagreements over Iraq paradoxically represented an opportunity to strengthen NATO, the EU and the US– European relationship, by finally confronting and rectifying deep-seated strategic differences which had been festering since the end of the Cold War. US perceptions of the loyalty and capability of several of its European allies reached a low point over Iraq, with impressions of the EU as a strategic actor often far from favourable. In early 2003 one US commentator privately described the EU as ‘a dung heap, upon which a cock occasionally crows’. The EU’s policy response to 9/11 was widely seen as risible: attempts to devise a new definition of terrorism, and agreement on a new EU-wide arrest warrant. When France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg held their mini-summit in late April, betrayal was added to buffoonery in the US perception of those governments’ behaviour. For its harshest critics in the United States, the EU’s rhetoric of hard power was revealed after 9/11 to be an insubstantial, dishonest fantasy, entirely unsupported by military capability and the will to act. As disagreements over Iraq reached their deepest, internet discussion groups became preoccupied with ‘stomping’, ‘bashing’ and even poisoning ‘frogs’ (i.e. the sup- posedly treacherous French). Other comment was somewhat more reasoned, although barely less pointed. In the April 2002 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Walter Russell Mead of the New York Council on Foreign Relations claimed that Americans (particularly populist, nationalist, Jacksonian Americans) ‘just don’t trust Europe’s political judgment. Appeasement is its second nature. Europeans have never met a ruler—Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Qaddafi, Kho- meini, Saddam Hussein—they didn’t think could be softened up by concessions.’ These critics, and even those more moderate US commentators who consider that the vilification of Europe has gone too far and become gratuitously destructive, await convincing answers to three main questions: Are European governments prepared to join the United States in the fight against terrorism and related threats? Can European governments agree a joint policy for the use of armed force? Can Europeans generate military capability by increasing defence spending, or by spending more wisely, in order to come closer to matching US military capability?

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Europe has its own spectrum of opinion. Perturbed Atlanticists argue that if there has been a breakdown in US–European relations, it can in part be attri- buted to the dismissive tone adopted by Washington towards its European allies in the aftermath of 9/11, and as military operations in Afghanistan developed. Self-confident Europeanists note that the credibility of the EU is not, and has never been, solely a function of its military capability; as far as the broad relationship with the US is concerned, in terms of trade, foreign aid and even culture, the EU and its member states are extremely significant actors and are unlikely to be ignored or marginalized by the US, however acerbic the rhetoric has become. Less moderate voices are concerned that the United States’ engage- ment in the international system appears increasingly to be driven by a renaissance of US exceptionalism and a sense of manifest destiny—the ‘City on a Hill’—and question whether the US sets the best example in maintaining, exporting and protecting western values. Sections of the US public and the Bush administration might well be convinced that the United States is at war with the perpetrators of 9/11, but European critics see US foreign and security policy becoming increasingly self-righteous, strident and insensitive, prone to imperial- ism and neo-conservative crusades, and certain to create more enemies than friends: ‘Over-militaristic and hyper-unilateralist, the United States has some- how become a destabilising factor in traditional European security thinking.’3 The Iraq conflict in 2003 has become the core of the complaint against the United States, which is increasingly perceived to be an unsophisticated political bully, prone to use military force to achieve its national ends, drawing upon its unrivalled wealth and prowess in military and communications technology. At the far end of the spectrum of opinion, for the least moderate critics of the US stance after 9/11, Bush has become at best the greatest current threat to world peace, and at worst (along with UK Prime Minister Tony Blair) a terrorist, or a war criminal, or both. For most observers and participants, discussion of US–European security and defence relations takes place somewhere between the extreme positions just described. The problem, however, is that when relations become strained, discussion becomes dominated by caricatures on each side, which serve only to make agreement and progress more difficult to achieve: the French are ‘frogs’; Bush is an intellectually challenged cowboy; neo-conservatives eat only raw meat; Blair is a poodle; US troops are ‘ninja-turtles’; and so on. In July 2002, Robert Kagan’s otherwise thoughtful and provocative commentary on US– European relations offered the observation that ‘on major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.’4 During summer 2003, in the critical weeks after the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, ‘Mars and Venus’ duly became the dominant oppositional image, reducing the Euro-Atlantic security debate to a struggle between cartoon

3 N. Gnesotto, ‘ESDP: the way forward’, Military Technology, Dec. 2002, p. 17. 4 R. Kagan, ‘Power and interest’, Policy Review 113, June–July 2002. See also R. Kagan, Paradise and power: America and Europe in the new world order (London: Atlantic Books, 2003).

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images of Americans and Europeans. Thus, for many Europeans, Americans are perceived (and resented) as both arrogant and powerful: convinced of the cultural and political superiority of the United States, Americans have a mission to engage in and democratize the world (by force, if necessary) in order to make it safe for McDonald’s. From a popular American perspective, the cartoon ‘euro-weenie’ is temperamentally inclined to conciliation and to a belief in the equivalence of different cultural and political systems: more convinced of the value of ‘soft power’ routes to stability and prosperity, appeasement-oriented Europeans would be willing to use military force but only grudgingly, and only after having exhausted all methods of non-military conflict prevention. It is not immediately obvious that formal agreement within NATO on the organization of its response force, and other aspects of the alliance’s transformation programme, will overcome this widespread tendency to resort to caricatures at moments of stress in US–European relations.

Threat and response Threat can be defined as the sum of an adversary’s intentions and capabilities, together with one’s own vulnerabilities. Taking this simple definition, it could reasonably be argued that international terrorists equipped with chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear (CBRN) weapons constitute a serious threat to all western societies. In policy terms, western vulnerability to CBRN and other terrorist attack seems almost complete; physical vulnerability of national infrastructure combines with a psychological sense of vulnerability on the part of the public. Indeed, all western societies can be said to be structurally vulnerable: a term which not only describes the range of opportunities for terrorist attackers, but also summarizes the common security challenge. Yet if the West is generally and structural vulnerable, it is plain that this common threat has not so far brought about a unified western response. During the Cold War, western solidarity was often explained in terms of the common, external and unifying threat posed by the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Treaty Organization. There are, certainly, indications that a common western threat analysis has begun to emerge since 9/11; compare the Bush administration’s February 2003 National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, and Javier Solana’s June 2003 A Secure Europe in a Better World. Nevertheless, mutually acknowledged threats from international terrorism, weapons proliferation, organized crime and so forth have not so far had the consolidating effect seen during the Cold War. In part, this is because the threat to the West is itself not monolithic, but comprises many disparate and disconnected phenomena. In part also, there is room for disagreement among western governments as to whether the terrorist/CBRN threat has been given greater priority than other challenges such as environmental security, crime and migration, which might be more keenly felt in Europe than in the United States. But the clearest divisions emerge over the response to the proposed terrorist/CBRN weapons nexus, and whether western governments should act

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in a partnership of equals, or expect to be led by the United States. The Bush administration is widely regarded in Europe as preoccupied with the idea of eliminating vulnerability, willing to tolerate infringements of civil rights and liberties if necessary, and prepared to interdict threats before they materialize. Europeans, on the other hand, are seen to be more tolerant (or even complacent) regarding the risk of a terrorist attack, and more concerned that any countermeasures should not be so authoritarian and repressive as to undermine the essence of life in a western liberal democracy. These differences of approach could fatally undermine the possibility of US–European military cooperation. European allies might be uneasy with a US desire to use NATO’s new response force to eliminate terrorist threats at source. In the US, on the other hand, European defence and military initiatives will be seen as a distrac- tion from the main effort, offering little of substance in the fight against terrorism, and barely able even to meet peripheral tasks such as non-combatant evacuation. At the heart of this debate lies the question of pre-emption. It is widely accepted that while preventive military intervention against a potential threat could not be justified, pre-emptive action against an explicit and im- minent military threat would be justifiable as anticipatory self-defence. The difficulty, however, is that in both politics and practice the distinction between prevention and pre-emption is not clear. For that reason, many in Europe suspect that the US has broadened the definition of pre-emption to include prevention, as part of the so-called ‘global war on terrorism’, and are unwilling to countenance involvement in operations of that sort. European thinking is also influenced by the idea that responses to threats are responses that are already too late; many Europeans would prefer full-scope conflict prevention—rather than threat prevention—in key regions, using a range of multinational diplomatic, political and economic measures, with military action as the very last resort rather than an early preference. European suspicion of US motives in this regard would impede the development of a common response to the terrorism/ CBRN weapons nexus, whether or not that nexus was perceived to be a common threat. And from the US perspective, European unwillingness to act pre-emptively could mean that EU military initiatives will not be taken seriously by the US, particularly when access to US assets is sought through the ‘Berlin Plus’ arrangement—a key component of NATO’s transformation agenda. It is also clear that an entirely different assessment of threat and response has been made in some quarters in Europe; one which, if allowed to consolidate, could strip all meaning from the idea of a security and defence alliance between the United States and Europe. For some Europeans, 9/11 represented an opportunity to rebalance the transatlantic partnership: European powers would combine to offset and restrain US hegemonic potential, while an enlightened US would accept the need to be so restrained. From the US perspective, however, the prospect of being balanced by partners and allies seems unwelcome and unnecessary, if not simply offensive. For many in the US administration, power balancing should be a response to an external threat, rather than a feature

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of a partnership or an alliance. In that case, the question to ask is whether the strategic partnership between the US and Europe is to be driven by the identi- fication, deterrence and defeat of external threats, or whether the common cause which unites European allies is little more than a caucus dedicated to preventing US leadership. If the latter, then NATO’s transformation agenda is doomed to fail.

Resources The US–European alliance has been preoccupied with issues of resources and burden-sharing since the foundation of NATO in 1949. In stark terms, although European members of NATO provided troops and facilities for the common defence, and although war with the Soviet Union would probably have begun on European soil, there was a widespread perception in the United States (and even in Europe) that European allies were free-riders on the security benefits of the US strategic deterrent and the US military presence in Europe. As a result, there were frequent and often bitter disagreements about burden-sharing throughout the Cold War. Yet it always proved possible—because it was necessary—to accommodate such disagreements in the face of the perceived Soviet threat. This uneasy compromise began to fall apart as the Cold War came to an end in the late 1980s, with critics in the United States voicing their suspicions that the European habit of free-riding would be both difficult to dislodge and impossible to accept in the post-Soviet era. There is no doubt that, in terms of both economics and personnel, European states enjoy more than adequate resources upon which to build security and defence cooperation, if they choose to do so. What proved far less abundant during the 1990s, however, was agreement among European governments to realize achievable efficiencies in defence industrial and procurement matters, and in military interoperability. To a large degree, this reluctance to collaborate industrially and operationally ‘as Europe’ reflects visceral objections to what is perceived by some to be an unwelcome expansion of the EU’s agenda, requir- ing the ‘surrender’ of the final bastion of state sovereignty to ‘Brussels’. In Britain, the Blair government has been an enthusiastic, but also cautious supporter of European defence collaboration, insisting that it remain intergovernmental in character and do nothing to duplicate or undermine NATO. Other governments have argued for different permutations of integrationism, intergovern- mentalism, Europeanism and Atlanticism. Another, more prosaic explanation could be that European governments have simply lost interest in defence spending. After all, if European defence spending is the equivalent of around fifty per cent of the US defence budget, yet produces, arguably, no more than about ten per cent of deployable capability when compared to US armed forces, then on current standards a huge increase in European spending would produce only marginal benefits. What’s the point? With so many, fundamentally different approaches on offer, it is no surprise that there has not so far been the political

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Table 1: NATO Europe and US defence expenditure, 1985–2001

1985 2000 2001 US$ma % GDP US$m % GDP US$m % GDP

Belgium 6,223 3.0 3,212 1.4 3,017 1.3 Czech Republic n/a min/a 1,148 2.3 1,167 2.2 Denmark 3,161 2.2 2,395 1.5 2,409 1.5 France 49,378 4.0 34,053 2.6 32,909 2.6 Germany 53,303 3.2 27,924 1.5 26,902 1.5 Greece 3,521 7.0 5,528 4.9 5,517 4.8 Hungary 3,588 7.2 805 1.7 909 1.8 Iceland n/amimin/a n/amimin/a n/amimin/a Italy 25,974 2.3 22,488 2.1 20,966 2.0 Luxembourg 96 0.9 129 0.7 145 0.8 Netherlands 8,991 3.1 6,027 1.6 6,257 1.7 Norway 3,129 3.1 2,923 1.8 2,967 1.8 Poland 8,706 8.1 3,092 2.0 3,408 2.0 Portugal 1,853 3.1 2,221 2.1 2,226 2.0 Spain 11,390 2.4 7,063 1.2 6,938 1.2 Turkey 3,470 4.5 9,994 5.0 7,219 5.0 United Kingdom 48,196 5.2 35,655 2.5 34,714 2.5 United States 390,290 6.5 304,136 3.1 322,365 3.2

a Figures in constant 2000 US dollars. Source: Military Balance 2002–2003 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2003).

will to devote a sufficient proportion of Europe’s vast collective GDP to ensuring that European forces have the military equipment needed to meet the security challenges of the early twenty-first century, and to achieving reasonable levels of compatibility with their US colleagues. Table 1 illustrates the downward trend of defence financing among most of NATO’s European members, and shows the different trajectory in US defence spending. Clearly, the available resource base (economic and personnel) for Europe’s contribution to the transformation of NATO is politically constrained. The impli- cations of Europe’s unwillingness to spend more—or more wisely—on defence are clearest where the NATO Response Force is concerned. An on-call force of around 20,000 declared troops could actually require at least 60,000 to be available (20,000 in training, 20,000 deployed and 20,000 on post-deployment recovery). According to Barry Posen, average European defence spending is equivalent to about $80,000 (£50,000) per soldier per year, as compared to the US $200,000. The British, Posen argues, spend about $155,000 per soldier per year. Given that the British ‘produce combat units with which the US feels

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comfortable’, the British level of expenditure can be used to calculate the cost of bringing 60,000 troops up to a standard acceptable to the United States; the sum is a daunting $4.5 billion.5 The costs of the PCC should also be considered. By one estimate, the cost of running both PCC and NRF could be as much as US$15 billion over five years, with one-third allocated to training costs and two-thirds to equipment procurement.6 Disagreements over burden-sharing and resource provision have been a hardy perennial in US–European security relations, yet strategic necessity meant that those disagreements always proved manageable. Now, more than at any time since the end of the Cold War, disagreements over defence spending threaten to occupy the vacuum at the heart of the alliance left by the collapse of NATO’s historical adversary. The costs of NATO’s transformation agenda are unlikely to be met from petty cash, however they are to be calculated. The question is, therefore, whether the transformation agenda will re-energize the politics at the heart of the alliance, making NATO a purposive political–military alliance once again, or simply add yet more weight to an already intolerable, unequally distributed burden.

Conclusion: let’s hear it for ‘Berlin Plus’ The NATO-is-dying thesis is nothing new, and has been part of the general clutter of the US–European security and defence debate for several years. For two reasons, however, that debate might now have reached the final, decisive phase, where NATO’s survival really does hang in the balance. First, for the optimists, NATO’s enlargement timetable, its operational commitments and its transformation agenda all describe a patient whose vital signs are picking up just as the medical team is preparing to remove the plug on the life-support system. In other words, a hushed and respectful conversation about a moribund alliance is no longer appropriate; a recovering NATO urgently demands a reinvigorated transatlantic politics. It remains to be seen whether US and European governments can meet that challenge. Second, from a more pessimistic perspective, the US government appears to be much more than disappointed and irritated by some of its European allies; it appears to feel betrayed. In the US view, Europe’s commitment to a strategic partnership with the United States is more in question now than at any point since the end of the Cold War. For many in Europe, no doubt, the United States has consistently failed to demonstrate that it deserves the trust and allegiance of its European allies. But if either side brings the security and defence relationship to an end, and if NATO’s apparent recovery is ignored, this parting of the ways will see the United States pursuing increasingly unilateralist foreign, security and defence policies, and will occur at

5 B. Posen, ‘Europe cannot advance on two fronts’, Financial Times, 25 April 2003. 6 J. M. Calha, ‘Reform of NATO command structure and the NATO Response Force’, NATO Parliamentary Assembly Draft Report, 53 DSCTC, 23 April 2002.

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a moment when Europe is politically, organizationally and militarily incapable of offering a viable alternative to NATO. NATO’s transformation agenda alone will not be sufficient to ensure the alliance’s survival as the West’s main political–military security organization. As well as the commendable ‘bottom-up’ practical reorganization of the alliance, a ‘top-down’ reinvigoration of US–European security and defence relations by governments is also required. The Bush administration must acknowledge that NATO offers a vital link to much-needed allies. It must also acknowledge that alliance brings constraints, as well as benefits, and that its European allies might have a vision for their own security and defence which is not necessarily inimical to good relations with the United States. In Europe, the challenge is to ensure that medium- and long-term ambitions for European defence capabilities and policies are not pursued at the expense of what is currently available to meet security threats—an improved, more capable Euro-Atlantic partnership. What would be fatal to this partnership would be to seek to bridge the gaps caused by the Iraq crisis but then to define success as a return to ‘business as usual’, to the unproductive, tit-for-tat rhetoric of the 1990s. There are, encouragingly, some indications that 2004 could see a general improvement in the atmosphere. The next phase of NATO’s enlargement, together with the planned expansion of the EU, will mean that by mid-2004 NATO will have eight either recently joined or new members (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), which will also be new members of the EU. The dynamics of NATO–EU and US– European relations will no doubt be influenced by the presence in the debate of so many European powers for whom the vitality of NATO and the defence and security connection with the United States will not be negotiable. That said, by late December 2003 there were signs that the EU’s so-called neutral states (Austria, Finland, Ireland and Sweden) would be just as adamant in their view that the EU should not move too close to NATO. Nevertheless, there will be other opportunities in 2004 for a reinvigoration of US–European security relations. As both NATO and the EU continue with the projected expansion of their operational portfolio during 2004, the need for more and closer practical cooperation between the two organizations will become increasingly apparent. At the strategic level, acceptance by EU governments of Javier Solana’s strategic concept (in its original June 2003 form, and not some watered-down version), would at long last mean that both EU and NATO could talk in broadly compatible terms about security threats and the use of armed force, and could even come to agree on a joint strategic vision. Politically, an apparently deepening sense in the United States that the final breakdown of the US–European relationship would be a disastrous consequence of the Iraq crisis echoes a similar perception in many European governments. In this regard, the centenary of the 1904 Anglo-French entente cordiale offers a timely opportunity for the two main rivals in the struggle for Europe’s strategic destiny to offer publicly some semblance of unity and shared vision.

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The greatest opportunity of all is that the ‘Berlin Plus’ arrangement, by which the EU can in certain circumstances have access to NATO planning and military assets, is now ready to be exploited. The arrangement was used for the first time in March 2003 when NATO’s Operation Allied Harmony in Mace- donia was taken over by the EU, and renamed Operation Concordia. Berlin Plus should also provide the framework for the more much ambitious proposal for the EU to take over NATO’s military operation in Bosnia (SFOR) in 2004. The full potential of ‘Berlin Plus’ will never be realized, however, if officials and commentators in Washington and London continue to argue for a clear choice to be made between either a transformed NATO or an EU defence capability, and remain unable to accept minor concessions to the European defence project, such as those made by the British government during the EU foreign ministers’ meeting in Naples in late November 2003. These concessions give substance to the Blair government’s claim that EU military operations must be taken seriously, provided they do not challenge NATO’s primacy; it is difficult to see how the Bush administration could argue against this position, just as it is difficult to see how any European government could offer a substantial alternative to it. The Naples concessions also, more importantly, serve as a face-saving offering—to the French and German governments in particular—that will be necessary in order to secure the bigger prize of a functioning ‘Berlin Plus’. For their part, European governments can no longer make the mistake of pursuing the aspiration of a European defence capability at the expense of what is currently on offer, in the form of a transforming and increasingly accessible NATO. Just as Atlanticists must accept that ‘Berlin Plus’, if implemented intelligently and flexibly, offers the only means to secure NATO’s future at the heart of the US–European security debate, so Europeanists and integrationists must accept that the vision of a strategic-level European security and defence policy and capability can begin to acquire substance only through the NATO– EU arrangement. In time—say, ten or fifteen years—it might be reasonable to talk meaningfully of a choice between NATO and the EU as providers of security and defence in and for Europe. But at present, the notion that the EU offers an alternative strategic vision and military capability has no basis in reality. The EU is not yet a credible strategic alternative to NATO, and the only means by which it could become such an alternative is, paradoxically, by exploiting the ‘Berlin Plus’ arrangement to the full. In order to do that, EU governments must take steps to improve Europe’s deployable military capability. By doing so, not only will the US–European security relationship receive a much-needed vote of confidence, but non-NATO EU military operations will become more credible. In the longer term, ‘Berlin Plus’ could work against itself, as European governments move closer to having a real debate between strategic alternatives (NATO, a militarily credible EU, or some more formalized relationship between the two). But that would be an interesting and useful debate, and infinitely preferable to one driven by fantasies and caricatures.

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