GMF - The German Marshall Fund of the United States - Strengthening Transatlantic Cooperation

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that meteorological metaphors in political commentaries are to be abhorred; and yet they continue to infest editorials on the Transatlantic Relationship. But what can one commentator do against the weather? Fact is, this weekend’s usually snow- and icebound Conference for Security Policy, the strategic community’s Davos, took place amid unmistakeable signs of thaw.

And the 400 experts assembled in Munich were clearly determined to root for the trend. Donald Rumsfeld, with just a tiny sadistic glint in his eye, joked that references to the Old vs. New Europe divide were so… Old Rumsfeld. Senator John McCain praised Europeans for their diplomatic efforts in Ukraine and Iran. Only Germany’s chancellor Gerhard Schröder, in a tragically bungled attempt to contribute to the general bonhomie, nearly made the transatlantic thermometer drop back to Freeze.

He had meant well, of course. The Schröder speech – read by defence minister Peter Struck because the chancellor was bedridden with a bad cold – was one long declaration of goodwill and support for the Alliance. Yet it also contained this fateful sentence: „NATO is no longer the primary venue where transatlantic partners discuss and coordinate their strategies“. And it went on to suggest the creation of a high-level panel of experts – along the lines of the one which recently reported on the future of the UN – to examine the institutions and structures underpinning the US-European relationship and to offer wide-ranging recommendations for reform. The NATO Secretary-General’s jaw dropped, Rummy remarked, Well, how do you feel now, Jaap? and this year’s Munich Scandal was born.

To be fair, the chancellor’s remarks – which he has since made a point of reiterating, undeterred by the barrage of criticism which followed his speech – are no more than an accurate statement of fact. NATO stopped being the West’s prime forum of strategic consultation some years ago. The diplomatic struggle over the war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the debate over how to deal with Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the impending conflict over the EU’s plans to lift its weapons embargo against China: none of these were or are taken to the North Atlantic Council as a matter of course. And why not give a group of independent experts the liberty of going back to the drawing board to design the architecture of a Western Alliance for the 21st century, and see what they come up with?

How could such a benign proposal backfire so badly? The speech was no masterpiece, but then the Munich Conference is something of a secret competition for Most Turgid Transatlantic Prose.

The least Schröder’s senior foreign policy advisors could have done, however, was to insert language to the effect that actually shutting down NATO headquarters in Brussels and Mons was not going to be an option. Perhaps they might have recalled the tense negotiations over the 1999 Strategic Concept, or the 2002 NATO Response Force. Or taken into consideration the all-round rawness of feeling within the Alliance after the vicious clashes over Iraq in 2003, so alien in tone to the cozy gentlemen’s club that the North Atlantic Council used to be.

They might have paused for thought before proposing that „the governments of the EU and America“ should appoint a jury to sit over NATO’s fate, given that Norway, Iceland and Canada have not yet intimated a desire for membership of the European Union. Consultation with a couple of allies beforehand might have been worthwhile.

And Struck’s pointedly listless delivery of the text already suggested what later proved to be indeed the case: The foreign and defence ministries had not been given advance notice of the text – unlike the Munich daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, which ran the news on Friday night, during the Conference’s opening dinner. Finally, the Senior German Official who hurriedly rounded up journalists on Saturday afternoon for some belated damage containment, plaintively said that those who thought the speech was ambiguous were „evil-minded“.

It was déjà vu all over again: At the 2003 Munich meeting, Struck and his French colleague Michèle Alliot-Marie learned from a German magazine that the chancellor and President Chirac had just floated the idea of sending UN peacekeeping troops to Iraq in order to preempt an American-led intervention. That, of course, was not the way things turned out; and a similar fate probably awaits this latest offering by Schröder’s hapless geostrategists. (If German diplomacy can rise to such dizzying amateurishness for purposes this banal, the mind boggles at the thought of what the impending final round of Berlin’s rather more controversial campaign for a Permanent Seat on the UN Security Council might be like.)

Too bad, really. Because the questions raised by Schröder are worth debating calmly and seriously.

True, NATO and its member states have already made heroic efforts to adapt the Alliance to changing times. They have embraced new members; and decided to address new threats and meet them where they arise (instead of waiting until they materialize on their doorsteps with a bang). They have radically restructured the military organization of the Alliance to make it more effective, more flexible and more responsive. Both the present Secretary-General and his predecessor, Lord Robertson, have struggled valiantly to prune and slash the headquarter’s byzantine bureaucracy.

Relations with the EU, once non-existent, have improved to the point of NATO handing over its stabilization mission in Bosnia to the Europeans. At the Prague Summit of 2002, the organization adapted its remit to include military operations against terrorism. And perhaps most importantly, the alliance which once seemed to be headed for joblessness has taken on a number of new and ever more challenging missions: in Afghanistan, in the Mediterranean and in Iraq.

Yet – as NATO officials know full well – all these changes have brought enormous centrifugal forces to bear on the Alliance. Supporting the modernization and democratization of new members‘ hide-bound Cold War forces is in itself a Herculean task. The military are deeply unenthusiastic about the „War on Terrorism“, which they rightly see as as more effectively dealt with by civilian and police authorities; the contribution of the military is unlikely ever to be more than marginal.

NATO’s top military commander, General Jones, is still far from satisfied with the few common resources at his disposal, as he made clear in an interview at Munich: „The way in which the alliance’s peacekeeping missions are financed is better suited for the more static defence and reactice alliance we had in the 20th century“. The chronic delays and difficulties in providing the missions for Afghanistan and Iraq with the necessary forces and matériel speak for themselves. And the complexity of nation-building efforts from the Balkans to Iraq demonstrates that military alliances may be good at fighting wars – but they need a lot of help in making peace.

All of this undermines the already brittle sense of political cohesion within the alliance. The transatlantic relationship has indeed become looser; differences of values and interests stand out far more sharply than before. But this is no more than a long overdue correction of a Cold War anomaly. Americans and Europeans may be less central to each other than before – but we are still each others‘ indispensable partners. Blunders like the Schröder Offensive in Munich aside, both sides’ behaviour in recent weeks shows that that has been understood. There is, clearly, a new pragmatism and willingness to work together.
Most remarkably, Washington seems to have decided to work with, rather than against, the European Union. Real and urgent challenges for both abound – in Iraq, the Middle East, Iran, Darfur and China, to name only a few. Yet, beyond all that, might it not be worthwhile to give some thought as well to the architecture of transatlantic cooperation? That, in the end, is all the German chancellor was trying to say.