By Brian Stewart
Thursday, July 14 2022
As Ukrainian cities and towns continue to be leveled by Russian airpower and
artillery fire, it seems a strange time to cast doubt on the value of American
hegemony that has kept Europe at peace for so long. It is not, after all, a
coincidence that at the precise moment American preeminence is beginning to fade,
vast menaces are surging to fill the void. What’s more, the American
military-industrial complex decried for so long has been a decisive force in
this conflict, providing the principal hardware for Ukraine to hold out against
the Russian onslaught, and even allowing it to inflict staggering losses on
Russia’s armed forces.
And yet, since Vladimir Putin launched his war of
conquest in Ukraine this past winter, a growing number of Americans have begun
to question the value of their country’s global primacy. As this terrible
conflict has raged, opponents of American power have identified an opportunity
to curtail the superpower’s international responsibilities and retrench while
self-proclaimed realists have begun calling on America to refocus its gaze on the
deteriorating strategic situation in the Asia-Pacific. In short, the desire to
shed American responsibility for Europe even at the risk of enfeebling NATO is
no longer confined to the university campus or the feverish imagination of
Donald Trump.
The latest example of this mindset has appeared in
the New York Times. Writing from Brussels, Emma Ashford of the
Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council expresses
the palpable American dissatisfaction with Europe’s abiding military weakness
and its strategic dependency on the United States. In “Europe Has an America
Problem,” Ashford
argues that the United States “can’t oversee Europe forever.” According
to this view, its own domestic problems and the threat of a rising China are
nearly insuperable challenges that demand all of the nation’s attention and
resources. America is therefore no longer suited to the role it has played
since the end of World War Two as the guarantor of European security. The
continued assertion of American power on the continent is, Ashford writes,
“ultimately a losing proposition.”
What makes this argument so strange is that America’s
forward deployment in Europe has traditionally been a winning proposition.
For nearly eight decades, the United States has extended a credible security
guarantee to Europe, not out of misplaced altruism but out of enlightened
self-interest. After failing to prevent the rise of aggressive dictatorships on
two separate occasions in the 20th century, Washington resolved not to make the
same mistake again.
After World War Two, the United States resisted domestic
pressures to stand down its armed forces and instead kept them stationed on
European soil to deter a hostile power from attempting to dominate the
continent by force. The first great power to meet this description was the
Soviet Union. In the resulting twilight struggle, America practiced a patient
strategy of containment—incurring the risk of a nuclear attack on its own
homeland in the process—that not only defended Europe but also laid the
foundations for an unprecedented degree of peace and integration that defines
the continent today. Postwar US foreign policy was not fated to succeed, but it
has done so. The nearly continuous violent rivalry and conflict that wracked
Europe for centuries yielded to an environment of growing economic exchange and
political cohesion.
This hard-won historical progress is now imperiled by
Russia’s naked aggression in its near abroad. Although Russia’s apologists
refuse to acknowledge it, Ukraine marks the front lines of world freedom. Those
lines, however, can only be maintained with military strength and political
will. Putin’s attempted annexation of Ukraine threatens the European order that
arose from the ashes of World War Two. Even beyond Europe, Putin’s undisguised
ambition to cobble together a new Russian empire by force constitutes a direct
challenge to the US-led global order and the liberal principles on which it is
based.
America’s capacious military umbrella has been a boon to
free nations on both sides of the Atlantic. Europe and the United States have
prospered more from this arrangement than any other that would have obtained in
a world deprived of American strength and leadership. By means of its postwar
military strength and global activism, the United States has averted the kind
of cataclysmic conflict that tends to flare up in international politics. (The
fact that the term “postwar” refers to such a long-ago war is itself proof of
concept.)
Setting this remarkable achievement to one side, Ashford
and her fellow realists would have America rest on its laurels. They cheer the
re-invigoration of the NATO alliance occasioned by Russia’s invasion and
believe it can now thrive bereft of robust American leadership. I struggle to
see what could justify such optimism. Only three years ago, with fresh memories
of the difficult and aborted intervention in Libya, few quarreled with
President Emmanuel Macron’s declaration that NATO was “brain-dead.” But in
addition to strategic incoherence at the top, feeble defense capabilities
across Europe hobble the military alliance. Today, prompted by Putin’s vicious
war, some European states have begun, tentatively, to invest more in their own
defense. This is most visible in Germany, which has pledged to spend 100
billion euros ($106 billion) more on defense over the next few years.
But separately and together, European states remain
ill-suited to discharge this heavy responsibility. Ashford seems to recognize
this dismal fact. Acknowledging (though perhaps overstating) Europe’s
diminishing “free-rider problem,” she points out that it still has a
“collective-action problem.” Notwithstanding marginal changes in its defense
posture, Europe will remain dependent on American security guarantees for the
foreseeable future. Ashford rightly observes that “the individual interests of
the European Union’s 27 members make it difficult to forge a common course of
action.” This painful deficiency extends across multiple realms, but it is
especially acute in military and defense policy, where European states remain
split over their threat assessments and the legitimacy of using armed force to
defend the peace.
“One might think that a major geopolitical shock like the
war in Ukraine would have allowed for a Europe-wide reckoning,” Ashford writes,
before referencing the deep divisions that continue to plague the continent and
undermine its self-defense. But who really expected that Europeans would be
shaken loose from their postmodern view that force is unnecessary and
counterproductive in international relations? Who expects that anything short
of an existential menace—and perhaps not even that—would bring European publics
or even heads of state to accept the harsh reality of international life and
begin to rearm, spiritually and materially?
Ashford seeks to scare the Europeans out of their
complacency by pointing them to the non-trivial possibility that Trump returns
to the White House and makes good on his threat of withdrawing the United
States from NATO. She points Americans to the “growing consensus” among experts
on the need to focus America’s comprehensive power on the People’s Republic of
China. The conclusion is plain: the trans-Atlantic alliance has outlived its
purpose and must be left to die on the vine.
Many realists agree with Ashford that the United States
“can’t oversee Europe forever.” But forever is a long time. Let’s not get ahead
of ourselves. Whatever challenges it faces, the United States is not a
superpower in the throes of irrevocable decline. It retains the capacity to
defend the liberal order on both sides of Eurasia. At this hour, Ukraine is
being subjected to a war of aggression that threatens the European order root
and branch. The friends of freedom should not countenance peace until Putin’s
Russia is taught a lesson that neither it nor Xi’s China will soon forget. Left
to its own devices, the largest powers in Europe show every sign of being
prepared to sacrifice Ukraine on the altar of a new Russian empire. Americans
must resist that surrender.
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