The Foreign Service Journal, April 2009

20 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / A P R I L 2 0 0 9 Many Americans might recall “freedom fries” and Bush adminis- tration 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. Sar- kozy, 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 out- side 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-Sec- retary of State Condoleezza Rice and her fellow foreign ministers put a Band-Aid on the divisions, using a face- saving 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 south- ern flank. Before stepping down in 1995, former Secre- tary-General Willy Claes, who started NATO’s Mediter- ranean Dialogue, warned about the dangers posed by Is- lamic 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 Moroc- can 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. For E.U. countries, the concep- tual 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 south- eastern flank against the USSR, has been knocking on the E.U. door for many years, watching increasingly impatiently as several former War- saw Pact states have joined both organizations. Such pro- liferating expansion has caused considerable “enlargement fatigue” to set in. Within E.U. circles, the “widening” ver- sus “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 Ameri- can 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 mili- tary 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 is- sues with “national security” implications, though out of place in a defense alliance — are natural topics in an en- hanced 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 com- parative advantage in the appropriate institutional do- main. 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- F O C U S Almost every NATO summit of the past 20 years has generated op-eds proclaiming “The End of NATO.”