Security and Power in the Transatlantic Relationship
By Dr. Jackson Janes

What is the definition of global security in the 21st century and what role can the European Union play in contributing to maintained security?

The problem in defining global security is the fact that the world is full of imbalances and asymmetries. The forces of globalization are pulling the countries and populations ever closer together, yet those same forces are generating centrifugal forces within and among nations as they try to adapt. In the past ten years, we have seen many painful illustrations of the dark side of a globalizing world in the Balkans, Africa, and Asia, from extreme poverty to ethnic tensions. Other regions, on the other hand, and especially the EU, are successful examples of globalization.

But let's look at the global picture: The next two decades will see the emergence of China and India as major powers with economic growth, military capabilities, and enormous populations with skilled labor forces, and each will impact the global economy. Other regions such as South America can also generate powerful players like Brazil, while in Africa or parts of the Middle East, nations may fall even further behind in the wake of more ethnic or religious strife, diseases and poverty. In the 20th century we fought states that were too threatening; in this century we are facing states that are too weak - failing states as we call them - that become havens for those seeking to take advantage of these weaknesses.

Conflicts over energy supplies, nationalist tensions, and separatist movements spawning terrorism will continue to evolve, creating more vulnerability and demands for protection and security measures among, and within, states and regions. The struggle for secure energy resources will be a major concern for all of the leading states and will impact the foreign policies of each.

All of these developments will demand a rethinking of our definition of security. Just as we no longer speak of the East-West divide in Europe, which once ran right outside this hotel, our approach to concepts such as the Third World, the North-South Divide, and other alignments from the Cold War period are now becoming obsolete. Concepts such as national sovereignty are also in transition due to the increasing bonds of globalization, sometimes freely chosen and other times forced by the economic and technological developments reshaping our choices, and by new forms of vulnerabilities. Non-state actors, such as global companies and NGOs or al-Qaeda and organized crime, become increasingly important, for better and too often for worse. (1)

The tools with which we have managed our foreign policies, including the international institutions created after World War II such as the UN, the World Bank, and the IMF, will all be challenged to adapt to the new parameters of security, which will require enormous investments in economic, political and social development in regions of the world serving as incubators for terrorism and resentment. The twenty-first century will rearrange the cast of political actors on the world stage.

I have been asked to address the transatlantic link in this context and to see how the "West" can be understood in this future.

Let me start by stating that for the foreseeable future, the United States will remain the most powerful player given its predominance in so many areas. But American leadership will be increasingly challenged from many sides. (2)

With an economy that is vulnerable to fluctuations in a globalized world, with a high level of dependence on foreign oil, and with challenges on a range of issues dealing with environmental policies, trade, and social concerns, the U.S. will need to pursue its security interests by making sure that it can manage conflict as well as cooperation and deal with threats within a complicated web of interdependence. That is a challenge to both U.S. foreign policy as well as to the domestic debate about priorities.

At the moment, the transatlantic links are the strongest the U.S. has within this web. They make up more than half of worldwide trade and investments to the tune of 2.5 trillion dollars. With a total of almost 800 million consumers shared across the Atlantic, there is literally much at stake in maintaining a secure relationship, allowing for the inevitable conflicts and competition we will see within this web. (3)

But the economic interdependence does not necessarily translate directly into a sense of political interdependence. This is in part due to the fact that it is increasingly difficult to separate domestic from foreign policy when it comes to the security issues we face today. For that reason, if the perception of security differs between the respective domestic debates on either side of the Atlantic, there is fertile ground for friction.

This was clearly demonstrated after September 11 as the U.S. quickly accepted the notion of being in a state of war, while the Europeans on the whole perceived the terrorist threats as dangers but not as an object toward which you could declare war but rather as means chosen by groups to achieve their goals. While there was an agreement on the dangers, there was less of a consensus on how to proceed against them.

he Bush administration's understanding of what security means was most clearly outlined in the National Security Strategy (NSS) in the fall of 2002. (4) While the language, which most Europeans focused on, spoke of American power beyond challenge, and preemptive and preventive actions against threats, the main thrust of the document was to present a vision of the world shaped by free markets, human rights, the rule of law and democracy as the formula to rid the world of the roots of terrorism with the added dimension of a military response to terrorist organizations.

While Afghanistan was the first test case for the Bush administration, Iraq was a quick second. It is perhaps important to recall that Iraq was not a new issue but one that had been smoldering since the first Gulf War in 1991. And it figured within a much larger picture of finding the road to peace between Israel and the Palestinians and within the greater Middle East - the road to peace in the Middle East runs through Baghdad - as well as dealing with Iran's nuclear ambitions and securing stability in an oil rich region, on which both the U.S. and Europe are highly dependent.

The conflict with Europe that emerged over Washington's decision to remove Saddam Hussein was at one level less about whether to get rid of Hussein but rather about the best means to do it. The European preference for diplomacy, sanctions, engagement and dialogue contrasted with the Bush approach to cutting through the problem with a sharp knife and opening up the possibilities of change, risking both better and worse scenarios. While many of the transatlantic arguments over the past decades have been about means rather than ends, the serious clash over the means to deal with Saddam Hussein seem to represent a breakdown in consensus on what constitutes agreed principles to respond to threats. Whether this was an exception - there had been a transatlantic consensus on dealing with the conflict in the Balkans even without a UN mandate for example - depends on whether we can find a process to respond to the many future threats.

The challenge today for transatlantic relations is to understand that our mutual security is threatened primarily by factors outside the framework of US-EU relations. And it is the particular region of the Middle East that holds the most dangers and also causes the most arguments across the Atlantic as to how to deal with that danger.

One should recall that this is not a new development. Both sides of the Atlantic have argued with each other for more than half a century over how to deal with this volatile region. The conflicts between Churchill and Roosevelt in dealing with Arabia at the end of World War II, the Suez crisis in the Fifties, and other instances are examples of that.

Parallel to the sharper focus on the Middle East, there is also the loss of the centrality of Europe as a geopolitical concern for the U.S. The East-West conflict was focused right here in Berlin where the exposure to threats was most visible at the Berlin Wall. Today's conflicts are elsewhere and it is the United States that feels the same vulnerability that was felt in Germany for so many years during the Cold War. Since September 11, the U.S. sees itself as the primary target of terrorist threats, which lies at the heart of the Bush White House strategy to respond. (5)

The organizing principles we used for the Cold War are not going to transfer to the situation in Iraq, where we are not talking primarily about standing armies on either side of a very visible line, but rather a very tangled web of contradictions and conflicts constantly in flux. And no other region in the world is going to demand the attention of President Bush during the next four years as will the Middle East.

In essence, the main goals of the United States in the region have remained constant for decades: securing stability and security for Israel, maintaining the flow of oil for the health of the world's economy, and keeping access to the main players in the region such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. More recently, President Bush has added the goal of making a Palestinian state possible. That will take an enormous investment in multiple dimensions.

The next steps in the post-Arafat Palestine have already been taken with the recent elections. The EU has the capability of helping development toward economic and political transformation not only there, but throughout the region. This is an area in which illiteracy is rampant, poverty rates are high, and education and the media are not free. The economic situation of the members of the Arab League is below that of some of the poorer members of the EU. Helping the almost three hundred million people in the region - growing exponentially each year - to secure their own future is not only important for the Arabs, it is of strategic interest to Europe and the U.S. It is also vital that the leaders of the Arab states themselves assume responsibility for their own development.

With regard to Iran, the effort to secure nuclear weapons is a catalyst for danger in the region, be it through the risks of accidents or through escalation. Here a coordinated effort is critical; British, French and German initiatives must convince the Iranians that striving for nuclear weapons is not worth the consequences. That objective, however, may not be possible, even if there is a regime change in Tehran.

During the past twenty-five years, the U.S. has been unwilling to engage Tehran directly but now is the time when European diplomacy, U.S. capabilities, and UN Security Council sanctions - mixing a good cop and bad cop set of relations - are required to try and avoid a major escalation and further proliferation of nuclear weapons in this volatile region. The experience with Gaddafi was perhaps instructive. Finding the right mix of American and European capabilities, pressures and influence, carrots and sticks, is critical in this situation.

Yet again we have to balance the fact that the nuclear threat runs parallel to concerns about human rights abuse, support for terrorists groups, the despair of the increasing numbers of young people without jobs, and the dangers of militant Islamic groups. Just as we cannot see the entire Middle East region through the single lens of Iraq, we need to see the entire region through multiple lenses of concerns we share.

Any discussion about the need for a military attack on Iran along the lines of the Iraq experience is, in my view, unrealistic despite arguments in Washington that such plans are being made. One needs to understand that the failure to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is making some proponents of using military means against Iran very anxious to gain unquestionable evidence that the Iranians are pursuing a nuclear weapon if world opinion is to be supportive of a firm stance toward Tehran. And there are many exile groups lobbying for the restoration of the monarchy. My reading of the current state of play in Washington is that the threat of military action remains just that. The Iranians may decide to treat that as bluff and even expedite efforts to secure nuclear weapons. Yet it is important to grasp the fact that there is a very intense focus in Washington on using all efforts to create the basis for change in the region. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made it clear in her recent testimony before the Senate that this administration sees itself confronted with the same type of commitment to this effort as was made by those after World War II to the East-West conflict with the Soviet Union.(6)

With regard to Iraq, the U.S. and Europe need to focus on what they are going to do to maintain any momentum toward the next phase of securing Iraq's progress toward developing itself. Who should do what toward that end generates the same discussion over means and ends.

There are many other test cases for European-US cooperation: Ukraine, the Balkans, Afghanistan where there are clearly common sets of goals to maintain stability and security. Furthermore we have to continue to explore how we can deal with issues such as the pandemic of HIV, access to clean water not available to millions of people in Africa, and adequate food. As Timothy Garton Ash tells us, it is sobering to remember that "on September 11, 2001, the [same] day just over 3,000 people were killed in the al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington, some 30,000 children died around the world from preventable disease. And the next day. And the day after that. And every day of the year." (7)

Looking at how the European and American publics reacted in unison to the tragic disaster in Southeast Asia during the past few weeks, it is striking how much synergy and common goals were pursued in such a short period of time.

The next few months will offer a very intensive opportunity for a transatlantic dialogue with President Bush making three trips between now and June. During the last three years, the White House has done a very poor job of explaining how and why we need to change our way of thinking about security in the 21st century. Bush may have changed the status quo as we knew it in the 20th century, but the White House did not sufficiently explain how and why we need to change our way of thinking about security in the 21st century. At the same time, Europeans have been slow in generating their own security dialogue and policies and will continue to struggle with the forming of a European Security and Defense policy, for good reasons as well as bad.

In the next few years, events we can anticipate, and those we cannot, will offer a number of opportunities to find practical steps to deal with the dangers we face. However, just as we need to revise our thinking shaped by the experiences in the Cold War, we also need to revise our understanding of our goals and our self-perceptions. What will be the content of the West as a basis for that understanding? Where do we draw our borders in defining who we are? That will require a new definition of what we are or should be, rather than of what we are not.

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Footnotes:
(1) See "The Partnership Principle - New Forms of Governance in the 21st Century," edited by Susan Stern & Elisabeth Seligmann, Alfred Herrhausen Society for International Dialogue, Archetype Publications, London, UK, 2004 and 21st Sinclair House Debate, "Beyond the State? - Foreign Policy by Companies and NGOs," Herbert-Quandt-Stiftung, August 2004
(2) See Niall Ferguson, "Colossus - The Price of America's Empire," 2004, The Penguin Press, New York, NY and Thomas P.M. Barnett, "The Pentagon's New Map - War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century," G.P. Putnam & Sons, New York, NY, 2004
(3) See Dan Hamilton and Joseph Quinlan, "Partners in Prosperity: The Changing Geography of the Transatlantic Economy," Center for Transatlantic Relations, Johns Hopkins University/SAIS, 2004
(4) See the "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America," The White House, September 2002 here
(5) See David Frum and Richard Perle, "An End to Evil," Random House, New York, NY, 2003 and "The 9/11 Commission Report," W.W. Norton, New York, USA
(6) See the Opening Statement by Dr. Condoleezza Rice before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, January 18, 2005 here and the full transcript of the hearing as published in the New York Times on January 18, 2005 here
(7) Timothy Garton Ash, "Free World," Random House, New York, 2004, page 150

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For the German version that appeared in "integration," please click here.

This essay appeared in the June 16, 2005 AICGS Advisor.