Judah Grunstein
The Munich Security Conference, which just wrapped up Monday, is like the Davos of trans-Atlantic security policy, replete with hollow pronouncements, cost-free posturing and, of course, gossip. But every once in a while, amid the conference’s bromides, real news happens. In 2007, for instance, Russian President Vladimir Putin used his speech in Munich to publicly declare the return of Cold War-style geopolitical competition.
This year, too, something newsworthy happened at the conference, but newsworthy in the odd sense that something that has been obvious and apparent to everyone was suddenly acknowledged publicly. Like a couple that, after having slowly drifted apart over the years, wakes up one day to realize suddenly that even the pretense of love is gone, the U.S. and Europe discovered this past week in Munich that they’re just not into each other anymore.
For the past two years, this drift has been attributed to President Donald Trump’s disregard for the postwar pillars of U.S. foreign policy, and in particular his hostility toward multilateralism and security alliances. Trump certainly deserves most of the blame for the sudden decline in trans-Atlantic relations. Yet to diagnose what ails the partnership today is to confront the fact that both sides suffer from self-delusions that, if not dispelled, will further widen the divisions bedeviling the alliance.
For the U.S., the principal self-delusion involves the perception of NATO only as a burden, rather than as a force multiplier. There is no doubt that the security guarantees the U.S. offers its allies in Europe, as well as in Asia, exact high costs on American taxpayers. There is indeed a valid case to be made for a U.S. foreign policy of restraint that would reduce defense spending by making a forward-based security posture obsolete.
But the Trump administration is not making that case. Instead, in Iran and Venezuela, Trump and the hard-liners in his administration have made expansive claims that make it clear they, like previous administrations, see America’s interests as global in scope. In addition, the administration’s “maximum pressure” policies toward Tehran and Caracas amount to a coercive push for regime change. While Trump himself has repeatedly questioned the wisdom of U.S. military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, his advisers have somehow managed to get him to sign on to policies that make such interventions more likely in the future.
In such a context, partners and allies are no longer a drain but an asset. While the U.S. remains the world’s dominant military and economic power, it cannot single-handedly secure its desired outcomes. Vice President Mike Pence’s call for European countries to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, despite Iran being in full compliance with its terms, is a tacit acknowledgement of the value of European support for American objectives. The costs of NATO are inseparable from its benefits, and Washington can’t have one without the other.
The second delusion on the U.S. side, also illustrated by Pence’s tone-deaf speech in Munich, is the idea that U.S. leadership of the alliance means that Washington dictates policy and Europe falls in line accordingly. Even at the height of the Cold War, NATO was far from a monolithic institution, and achieving consensus required skilled diplomacy. The alliance’s post-Cold War expansion and the disappearance of any existential threat to Europe have exacerbated these internal divergences and divisions over threat perceptions and priorities. Past U.S. administrations have recognized the inherent paradox at the heart of NATO, and most alliances for that matter: The dominant power does not always get its way. America needs Europe to accomplish its objectives, and that gives the Europeans leverage in the alliance’s internal debates.
Europe seems stuck between a past that is receding and a future that remains out of reach, with no realistic plan for the present.
On the European side, there are three prominent self-delusions that contribute to and exacerbate the current situation. The first is the idea that there is something unprecedented about a U.S. administration whose policies diverge from Europe’s preferences. To be sure, Trump’s repudiation of the alliance’s sacrosanct position in America’s global security posture, as well as of the community of values it represents, is unprecedented. But from divisions over the U.S. war in Vietnam, to the Reagan-era controversy over the deployment of medium-range nuclear-armed missiles in Europe, to the bitter fallout from the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, NATO solidarity has been battered on many occasions in the past. European policymakers are, by necessity, perfectly familiar with the American political system and understand the wide range of policy shifts it can generate. They should not be surprised by an administration that downgrades the alliance’s importance or even one that treats its European partners with contempt, as both scenarios have occurred in the very recent past.
The second delusion afflicting the Europeans is their apparent blindness to or disregard for the underlying factors driving America’s new turn inward. To the extent that Trump represents not just a change in tone or emphasis, but a paradigm shift in America’s engagement with the world, this too should not have come as a surprise. There is admittedly an internal contradiction in the Trump administration’s approach. On the one hand, Trump—with the backing of a war-weary American populace—is seeking a disengagement from America’s security commitments abroad. But on the other, hard-liners in the White House and the Pentagon are pushing confrontational policies on Iran and Venezuela, as well as the strategic competition announced with Russia and China. But in many ways, Trump represents continuity with the Obama administration’s efforts to rein in America’s global security commitments, albeit with no regard for the consequences of that retrenchment. There is no reason to assume his successor, whether in two years or six, will dramatically alter course.
Europeans should have seen this coming, and some did. That leads to their third delusion, which has to do with where they go from here. In Munich, in addition to nostalgia for the status quo ante, there was apparently much talk about the need to formulate an independent strategic vision for a new era of geopolitical competition, one in which the trans-Atlantic alliance can no longer be taken for granted. This is nothing new. For the past decade, advocates of a strategically independent Europe have pushed for enhanced defense cooperation within the European Union as an antidote to dependence on the United States. That effort has gained momentum since Trump was elected, with recent advances including the EU’s joint security program, known in Brussels as the Permanent Structured Cooperation, or PESCO. But these are baby steps toward an aspirational future that is hard to reconcile with the reality of a Europe that is simply unable to formulate a consensus on core security concerns in its near abroad, to say nothing of geostrategic competition with China. Europe seems stuck between a past that is receding and a future that remains out of reach, with no realistic plan for the present.
Combined, these delusions leave NATO in a pathetic state, but one that is surprisingly resilient. U.S. policymakers have long mastered the art of herding cats required for leading the alliance. Their European counterparts have likewise internalized a sense of moral superiority to help soothe the painful humiliation of strategic dependence on Washington. The one wild card in this equation, of course, is Trump. The damage he could still do to the alliance is real, even if the reasons that motivate him are imagined.
Judah Grunstein is the editor-in-chief of World Politics Review. His WPR column appears every Wednesday.
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