A New Alliance with Europe?

National Review Online
Wednesday, April 8, 2009

President Obama surely returned from his Eurasian trip with the uncomfortable feeling that he had really been on two quite different tours — one a triumph, the other a series of missed opportunities. The triumph was the public aspect of his visits to London, Strasbourg, Prague, Istanbul, and Baghdad. Where security permitted and the European version of the Nutroots Left was kept at bay, he was greeted by diverse crowds of cheering people—eager young Europeans, curious Turks, and proud American soldiers. Both the summits and the “bilaterals” ended in either formal agreement or cordial handshakes. He received rock-star treatment even from his fellow leaders — one admitted off the record that “we all want to be photographed with him.” And the traveling Washington press corps was fairly adulatory despite having to report Obama’s missed political opportunities.

Obama himself seemed to realize this gloomier reality. He prudently downplayed both expectations and results. He said mildly of the G20 summit in London: “I think it went okay.” In fact, the G20 had rejected his main policy proposal, for a collective international stimulus. We think the G20 summit went okay precisely for that reason — and also because it rejected French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s silly proposal for an unaccountable “global financial regulator.” But the effect of the London summit’s rejecting the main proposals of both America and Europe, though it lifted the markets temporarily, was to leave an uneasy sense that the financial-cum-economic crisis is still rumbling ominously along under the surface. More still needed to be done to restore confidence in the economic future.

Yet as summit succeeded summit, the president did progressively less okay. The central issue at the Strasbourg summit of NATO was Afghanistan. All 26 NATO countries have signed on to the Afghan mission as vital. As yet only Canada, Britain, and the U.S. have significant numbers of fighting troops in the country — yet the president had to mime gratitude for a European promise of an extra 5,000 troops. None of them will be combat troops, and some will be doing merely temporary duty. And the average burden of European defense spending is a mere 1 percent of GDP. What Obama welcomed through gritted teeth in Strasbourg was a mixture of pacifism and free-riding from most European allies. If this continues unabated, it will inevitably weaken military and diplomatic ties across the Atlantic — adding strategic fears to economic nervousness. Very much less than okay.

Obama’s presence at the Prague summit of the U.S. and the European Union was apparently intended to remove all doubt that America wants a strong, integrated EU to partner with the U.S. in global affairs. That wish depends, however, on Europe’s reaching agreement with itself on the main issues. It soon became clear that no such agreement existed on the two central issues that determine all other matters — how to deal with Turkey and Russia.

On Russia, Europe is divided between a western half that wants secure Russian energy supplies and a post-Soviet east that wants a secure independence for countries such as Ukraine and Georgia. On whether to grant Turkey full EU membership, Europe is divided between (a) France and Germany, which fear “free movement of labor” for 70 million Turkish Muslims and (b) Britain and the EU Commission, which fear that a European “No” would drive Turkey away from the West and into Islamist adventures.

Obama leans towards France and Germany on the Russia question—he wants to reset Russo-American relations. He supports Britain on EU Turkish membership. His call in Prague to admit Turkey in order to “anchor” it in Europe (and, sotto voce, to halt any potential drift to Islamism by this key country) was itself anchored in strategic realities. But it was immediately rejected by Sarkozy.

That left Obama in a quandary—on Turkey, Russia, and everything else. Because he is uncomfortable with the frank exercise of American leadership, he can do little about these growing problems except make somewhat pleading speeches on them. Thus, he repeated his support for Turkey-in-Europe when he arrived in Istanbul and he called for an end to nuclear proliferation while still in Prague.

As events demonstrated with embarrassing immediacy, however, his eloquent words made little impact either on Sarkozy or on Kim Jong-il. So Europe’s unsolved problems — Turkey, Ukraine, Georgia, Russia’s growing assertiveness, continued financial nervousness — were just as serious when Obama returned to Washington as they had been when he left. The public razzmattazz concealed the fact that he had not done even slightly okay.

This was not a personal failure. The blunt truth — which the entire U.S. liberal foreign-policy establishment cannot face — is that Europe is incapable of solving these problems on its own. It is divided too evenly on the Russian and Turkish questions. Even in the face of the current fashion for anti-Americanism, U.S. leadership will be required to cut Europe’s many Gordian Knots. But how?

Our colleague John O’Sullivan reminds us reminds us in Canada’s Globe and Mail that, in a similar moment of Continental paralysis in the 1950s, British foreign secretary Anthony Eden hit upon the idea (in his bath, it was said) of using the Western European Union, a modest institution neglected after NATO’s birth, to bring Bonn into the Western security system over French objections to German rearmament. That led in time to full German participation in a revived Europe, to the Treaty of Rome, and to the long postwar economic boom founded on a secure Western alliance.

Is there an equivalent in today’s world to the WEU of the 1950s? Perhaps there is: In 2007, President Bush, Chancellor Angela Merkel, and EU Commission president Manuel Barroso agreed on small steps to create a North Atlantic economic community. That grand title concealed an exiguous reality — an agreement to smooth over regulatory disputes between America and Europe.

Suppose, however, that this modest reality were to be expanded into a full-fledged economic union uniting the U.S. and the EU but also admitting those European countries not in the EU — not only Norway and Switzerland but also Turkey, Ukraine, and Georgia. Might that not begin to solve almost all the otherwise intractable problems outlined above?

Consider its potential advantages:

It would not offer “free movement of labor” (i.e. open immigration), which frightens France and Germany. So it would solve their Turkey problem.

But while it gave the Turks less than “free movement of labor,” it would also give them (and Georgia, and Ukraine) membership of the largest free-trade area in the world — and perhaps some degree of immigration preference. Surely that would be ample compensation for any hurt Muslim feelings.

Unlike the EU, it would pose no threat to the sovereignty of any member state. Yet it would provide an early forum for the U.S. and the EU to settle their regulatory wars (which the U.S. is currently losing) when they are still at the level of skirmishes.

It would not pose any military threat to Russia — and might in time entice a Russia that had finally shed its nostalgia for empire into the institutions of Western governance.

It would open up all kinds of fresh political possibilities for a paralyzed and stagnant Western Europe — the chance for Britain to leave the EU while remaining within the NAEC, and the corresponding opportunity for France and Germany to push ahead to a closer political union, also within NAEC, without the British getting in the way.

Above all, just as the Marshall Plan and NATO provided the economic and security underpinnings of the long postwar Western prosperity, so an NAEC might provide the springboard of stability and confidence for an economic revival of both Europe and America.
Sure, such an American initiative would invite controversy, charges of “arrogance,” and the certainty of opposition. It might fail. But that kind of risk is the difference between making history and doing okay.