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Why American Hegemony is Here to Stay
John M. Owen*
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The growing tendency of the USA to impose its will unilaterally
is the natural result of its superior military power.
To make the USA more responsive to European preferences,
the EU would have to enhance its own military might. However,
Europeans will prefer to avoid the costs of doing so,
because their security is not threatened by a powerful
USA which shares European liberal values.
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It is
inevitable that allies be dissatisfied with one another.
Sovereign states become allies by trading autonomy
for security; they are perpetually tempted to cheat
their allies by giving up less autonomy, i.e., acting
unilaterally. Glenn Snyder distinguishes two types
of unilateral behavior within alliances, namely, entrapment
and abandonment.[1] In the early days
of the Cold War, some Americans feared that Europeans
would for a third time draw them into a massive foreign
war; all through the struggle with the Soviet Union,
other Americans feared that Europeans might abandon
them for neutrality. Europeans, meanwhile, feared
early on that the U.S. nuclear umbrella might spring
a leak—that Americans might not sacrifice New York
for Berlin. Ironically, by the 1980s many Europeans
feared that Washington was too ready to risk Berlin,
New York, and the entire world in order to vanquish
the U.S.S.R
_____________________________________________________________
Sovereign allies in an anarchical system have
incentives to betray and
exploit one another, and America’s
unprecedented military power
exacerbates these incentives.
_____________________________________________________________
Power disparities within an alliance magnify the
risks of abandonment and entrapment, so an alliance
as lopsided as NATO has always felt these problems
acutely. During the Cold War, America needed Europe
less than Europe needed America. And America could
stop the Europeans from fighting a war, as in the
Suez in 1956, while the Europeans could not stop
America, as in Vietnam after circa 1965. Once the
Soviet threat vanished in the late 1980s Europeans
cut military spending proportionally more than the
United States, so that today NATO is more unbalanced
than ever. The statistics and anecdotes indicating
U.S. military primacy today need no recounting here.
Suffice it to say that Europeans are keenly aware
that the United States needs their military contributions
less than ever, and that it is more likely than
ever to act without taking into account their points
of view.
The tensions between Europe and the United States,
then, are partly structural: sovereign allies in
an anarchical system have incentives to betray and
exploit one another, and America’s unprecedented
military power exacerbates these incentives. Unilateralism
is a function of power: America acts on its own
because it can; Europe does not because it cannot.[2] But unilateralism is a function
also of the degree of discord in states’ preferences.
America acts unilaterally because it disagrees with
Europe about the legitimate and prudent state action.
In particular, most Europeans have a vision for
eventual global collective security under the auspices
of the United Nations. Most Americans do not.
As many observers have pointed out, although America
and Europe share a liberal political culture that
values the autonomy of the individual, they have long
diverged over the correct strategies to reach liberal
ends.[3] To oversimplify, Europeans tend to believe that
social pathologies such as aggression are fundamentally
caused by deprivation and insecurity, whereas Americans
tend to attribute aggression to character flaws.[4] Domestically, Europeans use the benevolent state
to enrich and reassure the deprived; Americans tend
to rely more on markets, believing that a guaranteed
income only reinforces bad character. In foreign
policy, Europe has come to de-emphasize military force,
state sovereignty, and unilateral action and to favor
instead diplomacy, compromise, and multilateralism—that
is, collective security under the United Nations.
The lesson learned by most European elites from the
Second World War (with some exceptions, particularly
in Great Britain) was that the rule of law must replace
the state of nature in international relations. The
lesson learned by most American elites from the same
war was that sometimes compromise and cooperation
must give way to military force, that some actors
are incorrigibly aggressive, and that appeasing such
actors only encourages them.
Europe’s
own successes at multilateralism and integration give
Europeans good reason to want to support and strengthen
the UN. Western Europe, the birthplace of the sovereign
states system, the fountainhead of imperialism for
five centuries, the cockpit of the horrific wars of
the twentieth century, has progressively been replacing
the rule of the strongest with the rule of law. Most
strikingly, the Federal Republic of Germany, a country
whose size and location tend to generate insecurity
in itself and its neighbors, bound itself so tightly
to the European Union that German reunification in
1990 did not make Germany’s neighbors feel appreciably
less secure. Americans do not doubt this European
achievement, but tend to emphasize that it was allowed
by U.S. protection from Soviet attack and German recidivism;
that is, military power was a necessary part of the
story. Many Americans also doubt that Europe’s recent
happy experiences are viable for most of the rest
of the world; Europe may have launched into postmodernity,
but the rest of the world remains modern or pre-modern.[5]
_____________________________________________________________
That Europe and America have liberalism in
common reduces the potential for U.S. unilateralism.
_____________________________________________________________
This ideological difference between Europe and America
has been present for a while, perhaps since the nineteenth
century, when socialism took hold in Europe but not
in the United States. But three recent events have
combined to amplify its importance in transatlantic
relations. First, the end of the Cold War bolstered
Europe’s expectation that its way was the wave of
the future, that history was moving in the direction
of collective security. For Europeans, the end of
the struggle against totalitarianism came through
the gradual, patient engagement of communist regimes,
in confidence-building measures culminating in agreements
with the Gorbachev government. Nineteen eighty-nine
led them to believe that the sort of integration that
had taken place in Europe could take place throughout
the world. The age of unilateralism must be drawing
to a close. Europe’s conviction that military might
matters less and less is seen in the sharp declines
in Euruopean military spending in the 1990s. For Americans, by contrast, the Cold War
ended because the West determinedly followed the strategy
of containment; some Americans go further and argue
that Ronald Reagan’s assertive policies bankrupted
the Soviet Union.
Second, European expectations of evolution toward
global collective security have collided with the
presidency of George W. Bush. The Clinton administration
was certainly accused of unilateralism, particularly
for its insistence on maintaining sanctions against
Iraq and punishing that country with air strikes when
it violated UN Security Council resolutions. (Here
again, Britain, whose policy was the same as America’s,
was an exception to the European rule.) Yet Clinton
did support international treaties at least in principle,
signaling Europeans and the world that the United
States would continue to bind itself to international
cooperation. By contrast, the Bush administration
has made clear that it was not interested in binding
agreements: it withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile
Treaty, Kyoto, and the International Criminal Court,
and is poised to withdraw from other treaties as well.
For at least a half-century Europeans have thought
of Americans as well-intentioned but simplistic, badly
in need of European guidance. Having a Texan in the
White House who seems to disdain European advice raises
in them the fear that the United States will initiate
wars that are not only needless but will jeopardize
Europe’s vision of a global multilateral order.
Third, and most important, the terrorist attacks
of September 11, 2001, gave the United States a new
primary enemy, one so dangerous that its defeat had
to subordinate all other foreign policy goals. The
Bush administration has announced an unprecedented
policy of pre-emptive force against probable terrorists
and states that harbor them. As America’s improved
relations with Russia and Pakistan demonstrate, the
promotion of democracy and free trade is now instrumental
to subduing Islamism, just as during the Cold War
all other goals were subordinate to containing communism.
But Islamism is different from communism: it cannot
be established in post-Christian Europe, notwithstanding
the fantasies of the clerics of Cairo and Riyadh.
The Islamist threat seems rather to unify the Muslim
world under Islamism and make it into a global power.
Terrorism is a strategy toward that end: it is supposed
to intimidate and divide the United States from its
allies, and perhaps to prod America into ill-advised
wars, which in turn would further unify Muslims against
it. The temptation facing Europeans, occasionally
acknowledged, is to let the United States fight the
battle against Islamism on its own. After all, although
most Europeans genuinely sympathized with America
on September 11, it was in fact America, not Europe,
that was attacked on that day, America that is the
Great Satan for Islamists. If Islamists are rational,
they should prefer to leave Europe alone so as to
isolate the United States. And Washington will surely
try to suppress Islamism in the Muslim world with
or without European help.
Moreover, although few Europeans would desire a unified,
Islamist Muslim world stretching from Morocco to Indonesia,
because Europeans are more likely to believe that
diplomacy is superior to force they are somewhat less
troubled by the prospect of such a world. Surely
Islamists have interests and can, through patient
engagement and reassurance, come to moderate their
behavior and join the international community.
At the time of this writing, the Iraqi question is
especially acute. The Bush administration, or at
least some of its officials, has signaled repeatedly
an intention to invade Iraq and replace Saddam Hussein.
Most Europeans oppose such an attack as counterproductive
and in any case irrelevant to the war on terrorism.
Washington has demonstrated no direct connection between
Hussein and September 11. The real problem with Hussein,
it says, is his historical commitment to acquire and
use weapons of mass destruction. Europeans reply
that they abhor Hussein equally well, but that an
attack on Iraq would further kindle Muslim wrath against
the West and would require postwar reconstruction
on a scale the Americans would be unwilling to support.
Better to engage Iraqi society by lifting sanctions
and thereby removing the external threat that Hussein
uses to bolster his power. For Europe, the American
cowboys simply cannot see this; for Americans, Europeans
are following in the tradition of Neville Chamberlain,
with predictable results.
America’s response to 9/11, then, jeopardizes
the vision for global order that is profoundly important
to most European elites. The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung
suggests three basic responses for Europe. The “modest
realist” option is to continue the status quo, in which
Europe “tries to situate itself as advantageously as possible,”
by implication acquiescing to U.S. leadership in the war
on terrorism. The “ambitious realist” option is to increase
European military strength so as to become a superpower
itself and gain a potential veto of U.S. military actions.
The “idealist” option is to build a “world order that
is in line with the fundamental principles of the United
Nations,” i.e., global collective security or Wilsonianism.
As ideal types, these three options do seem exhaustive
if not mutually exclusive. Before considering each in
turn, I consider briefly the assumption that Europe is
or can be an actor in international politico-military
affairs.
Costs of Unified Foreign Policy
The three options all presuppose a united European
foreign security policy, which itself is problematic
given the rudimentary and decentralized state of the
EU’s mechanisms for external relations. The issue of
costs and benefits is complex, because the very unit
incurring the costs and benefits—European states, or
Europe itself?—is at issue. Still, we must note in
passing that a unified European foreign policy would
not only be require extensive and difficult restructuring
of the EU’s machinery, but (like other components of
European integration) would impose opportunity costs
on member states. In particular, in its strong form
it would deny individual European states the right to
cultivate their own relations with non-European states,
relations whose special benefits include leverage over
other European states. The most obvious loss would
be to Great Britain, which has used its post-1941 “special
relationship” with the United States to great advantage.
Nor is it clear how separate British and French seats
on the Permanent Five of the UN Security Council could
any more be justified; united Europe would probably
have to settle for one seat. As discussed below, further
costs (as well as benefits) would accrue to European
states should unified Europe become a superpower. That
said, let us stipulate a united, coherent European policy.Which
will it most likely pursue?
The idealist or collective security option is most consistent
with European identity today. Above I described what
I see as the fundamental European approach to societal
problems, including those of international society. This
approach, of course, is consistent with a long tradition,
stretching from Woodrow Wilson back to Bentham, Kant,
the French physiocrats, and others, that sought to replace
power politics with law.[6]
Under global collective security, individual
states or coalitions cede the right to use force to the
international community, i.e., the United Nations. The
UN judges what constitutes violations of international
law and authorizes whatever sanctions it deems appropriate
in response, including force. Inasmuch as under traditional
public international law states were the subjects, collective
security originally meant the international community
could authorize states to punish one state for aggression
against another. But in recent years international law
has come to take individual persons as subjects; thus
collective security today implies more expansive rights
and duties for the UN. [7] Human rights violations, for example,
would be under the purview of the UN; the UN could then
authorize military intervention against governments that
violate human rights within their own borders.
_____________________________________________________________
The idealist option is self-defeating. Implementing
it would require an increase in European military
power; but that increase would effectively lead Europe
to undermine multilateralism
_____________________________________________________________
This strong view of collective security insists that
states not only cite international law when using force,
but that they be constrained by international law.
When the United States uses force, as in Iraq since
1991, it invariably claims authority under UN Security
Council resolutions or the UN Charter. But America
is much more prone to forgo seeking specific Security
Council authorization for each use of force than Europe
would like. Europe suspects that the United States
is not in the least constrained by the UN, but rather
uses the UN to cover uses of force that it (America)
has already decided upon. >As stated above, the end
of the Cold War bolstered Europe’s belief that multilateralism
was the wave of the future. The idealist option calls
on Europe to push this wave along. Europeans imposed
the sovereign state upon the world; now shall they not
help the world to transcend it?
It is difficult to see how they could do so, at least
if American unilateralism is as serious an obstacle
as many Europeans believe. How is America to become
multilateralist? The identity of U.S. leaders matters;
Bill Clinton was more multilateralist than is George
Bush. But the Clinton administration could act unilaterally
as well. Clinton only agreed to use force in Bosnia
and in Kosovo when convinced that it served U.S. interests;
he continued (along with the British) sanctions and
occasional air strikes against Iraq over the protests
of most of the world. Even multilateralists with power
often act like unilateralists (even if they do not talk
like them). As argued above, power tends to breed unilateral
behavior. Indeed, historically states have sought power
precisely to free themselves from external restraint.
If that is so, then for Europe to make the world more
like the EU, it would have to increase its own relative
military power. It would then be able to raise the
costs to the United States of unilateral action. America
would become more dependent upon Europe’s military might
within NATO, as it was dependent on European conventional
deterrence during the Cold War. Dependence confers
leverage. If Europe had more military power today,
the United States might not have had to develop its
air- and sealift capacity or its precision-guided munitions
to the point where America can credibly threaten to
invade Iraq by itself. The United States would be forced,
as it were, toward multilateralism.[8]
The enduring centrality of power in
international affairs, then, makes the idealist option
alone impractical, and in fact points in the direction
of the ambitious realist option, viz. Europe’s attainment
of superpower status.
The Ambitious Realist Option
The idealist and the ambitious realist options, however,
are contradictory. The former denies that military
power matters, while the latter asserts that military
power matters a great deal. In principle, Europe’s
quest for superpower status would demonstrate that a
state has to go its own way in international politics,
and that guns still help it to do so. In practice,
it is highly doubtful that a superpower Europe would
be immune to unilateralist temptations. Such a Europe
would by definition have an independent nuclear arsenal
and the ability to project force externally. Force
projection would require military cooperation with various
(weaker) non-European countries, hence friendly governments
in those countries, hence the exercise of some influence
in them, hence competition with the United States and
any other superpowers that arose. Such competition
would necessitate more unilateral action: Europe would
often find that its interests demanded acting contrary
to the interests of the United States and its subordinate
states.
Such is not to say that a European superpower would
abandon the liberal foreign policy preferences of today’s
Europe, including the promotion of democracy and human
rights, or indeed withdraw from international institutions.
But picture a superpower Europe that wanted to intervene
against, say, an African dictatorship that was persecuting
a minority ethnic group. Suppose that China and Russia,
determined to safeguard the principle of state sovereignty,
blocked the UN Security Council from passing a resolution
authorizing military intervention in the African state.
Europe would be sorely tempted to bypass UN authorization
and intervene directly because it could do so.
Consider that European governments (along with the United
States) bombed Kosovo and Serbia proper in 1999 despite
the absence of direct Security Council authorization,
to the condemnation of many around the world who cared
about international law.[9]
Given the ability and the cause, Europeans are as capable
as Americans of bending UN rules.
Thus the idealist option is self-defeating. Implementing
it would require an increase in European military power;
but that increase would effectively lead Europe to undermine
multilateralism. But perhaps the price would be acceptable
given Europe’s resulting ability to constrain the United
States. How would transatlantic relations change if
both Europe and America were superpowers? Among international
relations (IR) theorists, realists would expect that
Europe and America not only would become rivals for
influence in the rest of the world, but might become
enemies if power politics so required it. Liberal IR
theorists, who emphasize the role of common norms and
institutions, would grant that European-American cooperation
would become more difficult—states’ interests never
completely harmonize under anarchy—but would expect
no enmity.
Consistent with the assumption of this essay that ideas
and norms matter as well as material power, let us assume
that liberal theorists are correct. The most obvious
area of European-U.S. tension today would be the Middle
East. Europeans tend to hold Israel more responsible
for the continuing brutal Israeli-Palestinian conflict;
Americans tend to blame the Palestinians and their supporters
in Iran and the Arab world. Today, Europe’s main source
of leverage over the conflict is the financial aid it
provides to the Palestinian National Authority. A superpower
Europe, however, would be able in principle to intervene
militarily. Even if liberal IR theory is correct, that
ability would render America less able to shape events
in the Middle East. The EU would at least be able to
insist upon an equal role in mediating between the sides,
and all else being equal, any outcome should be more
consistent with European preferences. So with Iraq
and other potential targets in the U.S. war on terrorism:
superpower Europe would be able at least to lower the
probability of U.S. attacks to which it strongly objected.
Such a world doubtless sounds tempting to many Europeans.
Yet superpower status would impose some high costs upon
Europe. As Europeans well remember from their centuries
of imperialism, the means used to maintain influence
in weaker countries kindle the wrath of the weak. By
virtue of its very power, Europe might become a target
not only of relatively small terrorist incidents, as
it has been for decades, but of catastrophic terrorism
that demands a forceful response and hence the same
sort of unilateralism that America practices today.
_____________________________________________________________
Given the ability and the cause, Europeans are
as capable as Americans of bending UN rules.
_____________________________________________________________
Arming to superpower level would also cost a great deal
of money. As some members of the U.S. Congress never
tire of noting, NATO membership has allowed European
states to spend far less to defend themselves. Even
France and Britain, the most muscular of Western Europe’s
powers, spend at most only two-thirds the proportion
of national income on their militaries as does the United
States. Since the Cold War ended, military spending
in most European countries has flattened or declined.
Depending on how income is measured, the EU’s gross
product is either equal to or greater than that of the
United States, so the EU has the potential to match
U.S. military spending. Inasmuch as Europe has invested
far less than the United States in offensive technology
in recent years, however, it would take steep rises
in spending for Europe to catch up. In any case, it
is clear that European governments find it extremely
difficult to raise military spending. Their electorates
are accustomed not only to thinking of their societies
as peaceful, but also to the benefits that come from
investing relatively more in the civilian economy.
In a time when most European states are trying to reduce
the government’s share of the economy, increasing military
spending would be more difficult than ever. It is telling
that even far-right parties in Europe do not emphasize
national military power.
Becoming a superpower would impose other opportunity
costs on Europe. To disentangle these, we consider
the European status quo, which is more or less the modest
realist option.
The Modest
Realist Option
A full consideration of the U.S.-European relationship
requires that we look not only to military relations but
also to economic and cultural relations. For the sake
of convenience I shall use the term hegemony to
capture the fullness of U.S. primacy over Europe. Without
engaging in a critical study of the thought of Gramsci,
I shall simply define hegemony as leadership that involves
the setting of rules and agendas and the shaping of preferences.
A hegemon gets its way less by physical coercion than
by using its power to set up conditions under which subordinate
states want to do what will serve its interests. By becoming
a superpower, Europe would throw off U.S. hegemony. What
benefits would it thereby forgo?
In the 1990s a number of prominent American realists
predicted that, following the collapse of the Soviet Union,
Europe (or Germany) would indeed become a superpower.[10]
Critics have responded that the opportunity costs to Europe
would be too high. Under the status quo, Europe enjoys
efficient solutions to public goods problems, including
the pre-eminent goods of security and economic openness;
the solutions are made efficient by U.S. hegemony. Like
a global version of Bismarck’s Germany, the United States
has made itself indispensable to order in most regions
of the globe; most countries have a strong interest in
keeping America a global power.[11]
International cooperation is possible absent a hegemon,
but it is more difficult.[12] America, moreover,
has bound itself by various international institutions,
rendering its behavior more predictable over time. These
institutions, moreover, pay increasing returns to their
members, making defection more and more costly over time.[13] The United States has tolerated
in Europe a great deal of institutional diversity, including
more socialism than it practices itself. It has encouraged
European integration and made it more feasible by dampening
fears of a Soviet invasion and of German recidivism.
_____________________________________________________________
Under the status quo, Europe
enjoys efficient solutions to public goods problems, including
the pre-eminent goods of security and economic openness;
the solutions are made efficient by U.S. hegemony. Most
countries have a strong interest in keeping America a
global power
_____________________________________________________________
But the causes of European submission to U.S. hegemony
are deeper, precisely because it is American hegemony,
not simply domination, that is at issue. If it were enough
that the United States is a benign superpower, then why
do not all of the world’s countries want to join the U.S.-sponsored
order? Those who accept American hegemony, however grudgingly,
tend to be liberals; those who are actually trying to overturn
it, such as Islamists or communist reactionaries in China
and Russia, tend to be anti-liberals.[14]
A hegemon is able to maintain its position because its subordinate
states agree with it on the fundamental ends of society.
That is why the United States promoted liberal democracy
in West Germany and Italy (and Japan).[15]
It also is why the Soviet Union imposed Marxist-Leninist
regimes upon the European states it liberated in the 1940s,
and used force to preserve them in 1953, 1956, and 1968.
For that matter, it is why Europeans worry inordinately
about signs of illiberalism in the United States: they
fear what America would do if it ceased to be liberal.[16]
European acquiescence to U.S. hegemony, then, is partly
a product of the liberal principles that Europeans and Americans
share. It is not only that the United States has born many
of the costs of collective action to solve international
public goods problems such as the gains from free trade
or international security. It is that Europeans and Americans
agree that the pursuit of wealth and security are
international public goods problems. Traditional diplomacy
saw these pursuits as zero-sum games: your gain is my loss,
and vice versa. Liberals reject this Hobbesian account
of world politics. Liberalism asserts a stable and prosperous
international order is best built on societies that are
open, democratic, and tolerant.[17]
That Europe and America have liberalism in common reduces
the potential for U.S. unilateralism. The extensive overlap
in preferences between the two means that very often what
the United States wants is what Europe wants; Washington
trusts its allies, consults them, and modifies its actions
more than it would if they did not share fundamental political
values.
Even though the United States is acting more and more unilaterally,
the above list of goods that U.S. hegemony continues to
provide Europe is still impressive. These are goods about
which Europe and the United States continue to agree. So
long as that is the case—so long as Europe and America remain
fundamentally liberal—the probable opportunity costs to
Europe of becoming a superpower appear too high. But it
does not follow that Europe should continue pursuing the
modest realist option, acquiescing to the status quo. A
realist option between modesty and ambition is possible.
Europe Should
v. Europe Will
Asking what Europe ought to do involves moral beliefs
and judgments, so let me state the most important of these.
First, it seems to me that the postwar European response
to U.S. hegemony that I have described has been substantially
correct: the order underwritten by U.S. power has been
better for Europe than the viable alternatives. That
is because I believe liberalism is the most legitimate
system available. Second, I believe that Islamist terrorism
is a threat to Europe as well as the United States. Insofar
as attacks such as those of 9/11 terrorize any liberal-democratic
society, they enhance the credibility of Islamism in the
Muslim world and jeopardize the prospects for liberal
democracy there, and hence Europe’s vision for world order.
Thus even if al-Qaeda never attacks European targes, Europe
has a strong interest in defeating it. Third, I accept
the liberal axiom that in politics, no one is infallible;
the right policy is most likely to emerge from full and
free discussion. Thus the war on terrorism, and many
international outcomes, will be more just and efficient
on balance if the United States takes European preferences
seriously.
Regardless of whose liberalism, Europe’s or America’s,
is better, Europeans have experiences with terrorism and
with Islam that provide them with a certain insights that
Americans should heed. Although the men who murdered
more than 3,000 people on September 11, 2001 were not
poor, Islamism and anti-Westernism do have great appeal
among the Muslim poor; Europeans are readier to recognize
this. Europe have shown more interest than America in
rebuilding post-Taliban Afghanistan. How can Europe come
to exercise more influence over the United States in the
war on terrorism?
_____________________________________________________________
The United States is disinclined to listen to Europe precisely
because Europe has so little military power
_____________________________________________________________
Above we saw that U.S. unilateralism is a function both
of U.S. relative power and of the divergence of U.S. and
European preferences. It is doubtful that Europe can
move American preferences very close to its own; the two
competing liberal cultures are too entrenched. I also
have argued that Europe would do well not to attempt to
become a superpower.
What Europe can do is to alter the balance of transatlantic
power more modestly. The United States is disinclined
to listen to Europe precisely because Europe has so little
military power. In purely operational terms, the U.S.
military has almost no need for NATO, apart from the special
forces of certain member states. It may have been rational
for Europe to weaken itself militarily in the 1990s, but
European weakness has provoked American contempt. After
9/11, when military action matters more, that contempt
helps neither Europe nor the United States.
Europe, then, should build enough airlift, sealift, bombing,
and missile capacity—and enough unity in foreign policy—that
it could not only intervene without U.S. help in humanitarian
crises within Europe, but could also project some amount
of force outside of Europe. Such a military buildup does
not imply an EU force independent of NATO and hence of
a U.S. veto. Rather, it means a return to the situation
in the Cold War, when the United States depended more
on European force and thus had to take European preferences
more into account. To the extent that Europe rearmed,
the United States would have to consider tailoring its
forces to those of Europe for the sake of efficiency.
As it did so, European leverage over Washington would
increase.
It is worth noting that the United States would be pleased
should Europe rearm to some extent, so long as Europe
does not build a military force independent of NATO.
For most of the Cold War U.S. administrations and members
of Congress were convinced that wealthy European governments
were not assuming their fair share of the burden of deterring
a Soviet attack. In the 1990s Washington was dismayed
at Europe’s inability to end atrocities in the former
Yugoslavia. As a presidential candidate in 2000, George
W. Bush and his foreign-policy advisors made clear their
desire to decrease U.S. commitments in Europe, implying
that Europeans should rearm and take care of their own
problems.
So much for what Europe ought to do. In my view, Europe
is unlikely to do what it ought because states build armaments
in response to threats to security. America’s military
predominance and unilateralism do not threaten European
security; there is no danger whatsoever that the
United States will attack Western Europe, precisely because
it already enjoys hegemony there. Some sort of shock
to European security, such as withdrawal of U.S. commitments
or terrorism on the scale of 9/11, would be required to
make increases in military spending acceptable to European
publics. Neither shock appears likely at present.
It seems, then, that Europe is not only stuck with America,
but is stuck with a level of U.S. unilateralism that offends
and alarms it. This equilibrium is frustrating to all
concerned, but it is stable precisely because of the enduring
liberal bond between Europe and the United States, a bond
that endures despite the left-right transatlantic divide.
Europeans and Americans shed much blood in the Second
World War to build that bond, and in subsequent decades
risked a world to keep and strengthen it. Americans and
Europeans alike need to remember why their forerunners
paid such a price: they knew what the alternatives
to liberalism were. After September 11, remembering becomes
a bit easier.
[16] For more see John M. Owen, “Transnational
Liberalism and U.S. Primacy,” International Security
26, no. 3 (Winter 2001/2002), 117-52; and idem, “The
Foreign Imposition of Domestic Institutions,” International
Organization 56, no. 2 (Spring 2002), 375-409.
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John M. Owen *1962;
Professor of Politics, Woodrow Wilson Department
of Government and Foreign Affairs, University
of Virginia, Charlotteville;
jmo4n@j.mail.virginia.edu
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