The Transatlantic Academy recently released the collaborative report I have worked on with five European and American colleagues over the course of this year. I contributed mostly on the security and global commons section. The report can be downloaded for free by following this link:
http://www.transatlanticacademy.org/sites/default/files/publications/GlobalShift%20TA%202011%20Collaborative%20Report.pdf
While the report provides an excellent overview , it does of course present some of the symptoms encountered when six people of diverse backgrounds work on a vast topic, all under the framework of a relatively brief report.I do not agree necessarily with everything but I believe that it is well worth reading, not least because it presents the China debate from a genuinely transatlantic perspective, which is both rare and valuable.
One of the key recommendations of the report is to develop an effective division of labor in-between Europe and the US in security matters. Below I have added a copy of the brief presentation I made today during our closing conference. I look forward to your feedback, particularly from my friends that have a far greater grasp of European defense matters and geostrategy.
What role for Europe under a new Division of Labor?
I’d like to thank you all for being here for the final panel of our closing conference, as well as Steve for bringing me into the Academy. Bringing Europeans and Americans together to work on such an important theme is a challenging task. Writing the report and coming to a consensus on certain issues wasn’t always an easy task either, but I have thoroughly enjoyed my time here at the Academy with my friends and colleagues. One of the chapters which required the greatest degree of reflection was that dealing with security.
For indeed, as we enter an Asia-Pacific Century, and the world’s center of gravity shifts from West to East, it can sometimes appear challenging to perceive a real convergence of interests in-between Europe and the US east of Suez. The US has security commitments in Asia that Europe does not share, and this disconnect seems to be enhanced by the fact that the US’s attention is increasingly being drawn towards Asia. This is reflected officially through documents such as the latest Quadrennial Defense Review, which calls for a gradual transfer of at least 60% of all military assets to Asia, and on a tactical level with the revamping of US bases in places such as Guam, and the crafting of a new force doctrine, the AirSea Battle Concept, designed to offset China’s growing anti-access challenge. In Washington, there is increasingly the feeling that over the past decade; the US has been overweighted in Europe and the Middle East, and underweighted in Asia, due in part to the continued traction exerted by the bloody land-locked mass counter-insurgency campaigns in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq.
We recognize that in the future Europe and the US will have to enact an effective division of labor in order to allow the transatlantic community to remain a united, effective and credible actor on the rapidly morphing world stage. How should this translate itself on the ground? We argue that Europe will be compelled to take primary responsibility in its Eastern periphery and Southern neighborhood. This implies the emergence of a genuine European strategic culture, which looks outwards rather than inwards, that lets its vision stretch out to the waters of the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, and not solely to the continental landmass formed by the Eastern and Central European hinterlands.
This is not a call for regional isolationism, however, or for a complete US disinvestment from the wider European neighborhood. We recognize that the US will not be willing, nor will it be able to extricate itself from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict any time soon. What’s more, the recent events that continue to convulse the Arab world mean that the US will have no choice but to continue to focus a degree of its attention on the greater Middle East. Nevertheless, one does wonder however, whether as China continues its naval buildup and sends ripples of unease across the waters of the South and East China Seas , the US will be able-or willing-to continue to maintain the entire Sixth Fleet, comprised of more 40 ships, 175 aircraft and 21,000 servicemen and women, in the Mediterranean.
Although Europe will be called upon to become the prime security and stability provider in its region while the US focuses its attention on Asia, there will be a central region where both poles of the transatlantic alliance overlap and continue to work side by side. The Indian Ocean was famously designated as the center-stage of the XXIst century by Robert Kaplan, largely due to its reemergence as a major hub of maritime trade, but also as a backdrop for the nascent great power rivalry emerging in-between India and China. I would argue that the Indian Ocean Region will also become the locus of transatlantic cooperation. Both NATO and the EU currently have naval taskforces operating in the Gulf of Aden and off the Horn of Africa, engaging in an effort to combat piracy and protect merchant shipping. France is an Indian Ocean power, with a permanent naval presence in Djibouti and Reunion, and lays claim to large swathes of offshore territory. France’s decision to open a new base in Abu Dhabi in 2009 also points to an area of US-EU cooperation: the Persian Gulf. Both Europe and the US rely on the security of the merchant shipping transiting via the Strait of Hormuz, and both Europe and the US share concerns over the instability, fits of bellicosity, and nuclear ambitions of the Iranian regime. So while we argue for an effective division of labor, this is something that goes far beyond the traditional and somewhat limited debate over burden sharing, which is both reductive and not always constructive. Indeed, the question is not so much one of expenditure, but more one of insufficient coordination. After all the European nations combined spend more than 300 billion dollars on defense. The problem as Tomas Valasek of the Centre for European Reform has aptly phrased, is the “great contrast between the cooperative way in which European nations fight wars, and the insular manner in which they prepare for them.” More needs to be done in terms of force pooling. Sporadic efforts by various nations , such as the joint Uk-Netherlands amphibious unit , provide useful benchmarks for future multinational European battlegroups. But that alone will not suffice. Without a thorough attempt to give birth to a common European strategic culture, these measures will prove to be little more than cosmetic. France and Germany failed to make use of their combined brigade in Afghanistan in large part because they could not come to an accord over the caveats under which their troops could be deployed. Our report calls therefore for the transatlantic community to not only bear witness to the rapidly morphing geopolitical landscape of the XXIst century but also to act upon it, and in so doing, avoid becoming simply a vaporous concept filled with nostalgia but devoid of meaning. In short, the transatlantic community will fade into irrelevance without a renewed effort to achieve some sort of a viable European defense capability.
The revival and strengthening of the Franco-British entente via the signing of two historic defense treaties in November 2010 does appear to be a step in the right direction, but it does also raise the concern of the emergence of a two-tiers security community in Europe, with those with an “extrovert strategic culture” such as Britain and France cooperating, and those with a more “introvert strategic culture”, such as Germany, drifting off to the sidelines, and in so doing, floating on the edge of geopolitical irrelevance. Although our recent visit to the German MOD did not really give us much cause for optimism, we do hope that over time, the Franco-British entente can be opened up incrementally to countries such as Spain , Italy and Germany. On a more concrete level, we suggest that some of France and Britain’s overseas bases, in Gibraltar, Abu Dhabi, and Cyprus be opened up to other European nations in exchange for European funding for their upkeep and potential expansion. While the idea may not appeal at first glance to some European nations, a chain of interconnected joint European Commands stretching from the Western Mediterranean to the Gulf of Aden would provide Europe with a far greater degree of operational and logistical flexibility in the event of another Libya campaign for example, or in the event of a major humanitarian crisis. We completed this report a few weeks before the initiation of the Libya campaign, and I remember wishing that the report had been published then rather than later. Libya is an interesting test case. Whether it will be heralded as the birth cry of an effective division of labor, or merely as the foreshadowing of an increasingly cavernous intra-European chasm in terms of security matters remains, however, to be seen. Charles De Gaulle once famously said that no European Statesman would unify Europe, and that only the Chinese could. Let us hope that he is both right and wrong, and that the rise of China will compel Europe to better find its voice, and its calling, in this new world. Thank you.
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