Germany’s Recession vs. America’s: Doing Worse, but Feeling Better. By Douglas J. Elliott, Fellow, Economic Studies, Initiative on Business and Public Policy
The Brookings Institution, Jul 28, 2009
The world recession that began in the U.S. is hitting Germany much harder than us, due to a collapse in world trade that has damaged an economy that Germans constantly refer to as “the World Export Champion.” Their economy will have shrunk by about 8% by the time it bottoms, whereas America’s GDP should fall less than 4% from its peak. Intriguingly, the German public and elites feel much better about their situation than Americans do about ours. The key question is whether this represents: a justified faith in a system that works well for them; government measures that delay the pain; German complacency; or some combination of these factors.
I spent a week in Germany recently meeting with dozens of policymakers, academics, journalists, and policy analysts, as a guest of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation[1], a German public policy institute. The overwhelming impression I received was of a fundamental disconnect between the horrible recession and the calmness with which the Germans were facing it. This paper will briefly explore that disconnect, but is not intended as an overall criticism of Germany and its economy. An American observer should be humble indeed in these times about giving economic advice to other countries. However, it still seems to me that the extraordinary recent decline of the German economy should foster more serious questioning than has occurred to date. There seem to be three principal factors behind the phlegmatic German reactions.
First, the public has yet to feel the pain directly and is unlikely to do so until after the Federal elections on September 27th that will determine the make-up of the new parliament. Government programs are providing major subsidies to keep redundant employees on the payroll, at substantially reduced hours. This still has some cost for businesses, but they generally do not want to lay off significant numbers of employees prior to the elections, both out of a desire to support the more business-friendly parties and because they would not wish to be singled out by the politicians in the frenzy of a close election campaign. The clear consensus of those with whom we spoke was that there would be a massive spike in unemployment starting in the Fall.
I was told that a private poll found that only 6% of respondents had felt a significant direct effect from the recession. Another 20-30% had close friends or relatives who were affected, which still left a clear majority who just were not seeing the impact. In fact, about a third of respondents did not think they would ever see significant harm to themselves or others close to them from the recession. In addition to the delayed reaction caused by the temporary unemployment measures, the level of anxiety is almost certainly reduced by Germany’s generous social safety net, which provides a considerable degree of cushioning for those who do end up unemployed.
These polling figures contrast sharply with those for American attitudes. Here, fear is widespread, in part because unemployment has risen sharply already and is poised to go higher still. We have also been struck by the housing crisis that affects tens of millions of Americans directly or indirectly and which does not plague Germany. (Germany had a massive construction bubble after Reunification. The bursting of that bubble played a major role in preventing them from following in the over-optimistic path of the U.S., the U.K., and Spain in recent times.)
Second, Germans have great faith in their overall economic model. There is a very widespread belief, across the great middle ground of the political landscape, that their “social market” system is right for Germany. The term is amorphous, but refers to a consensus approach in which business is allowed to operate in a fundamentally capitalist manner, but with high levels of taxes/social contributions and a number of operating limitations. These limitations include such things as restricted opening hours for shops and a requirement that many corporate decisions are approved by a Supervisory Board that includes union representation.
Equally importantly, Germany is justifiably proud of its prowess in exports, particularly industrial machinery and automobiles. Somewhere between 40% and 50% of Germany’s GDP comes from exports, depending on when and how you measure it. This is more than three times that of the U.S., although it is important to note that Germany is a considerably smaller country and is closely integrated with its European neighbors, who are the largest importers of German products. (If the U.S. counted sales from the Northeast to California as exports, our figure would be sharply higher than it is.) Germans view their trade surplus as a sign of virtue and the source of overseas investments that will carry the country through a future in which their aging population cuts back on output and necessarily lives more on the fruits of past labor.
Third, Germans are somewhat puzzled when pushed by outsiders to make changes to their overall model. They believe it has worked extremely well for them and consequently were resistant in the past to all but the most compelling changes when foreigners were lecturing them about rigidities in their system, even though those foreigners were then enjoying better growth and lower unemployment than Germany. Now that it appears to Germans that the advice was coming from people who have massively messed up their own systems, they are even less inclined to change. In addition, I believe that there is a sense of resignation about being able to change very much while staying consistent with the social market approach and the reality of their business systems.
The largest vulnerability of the German economy is their heavy reliance on exports. However, there is great resistance to changing this. Germans often seem to interpret the suggestion to do so as a call to do a worse job of exporting, which would indeed be a mistake. The real advice is to free up their service sector more and to reduce the disincentives to consume. If domestic consumption and the service sector grew, Germans would become less dependent on the success of their manufacturing exports.
It seems ironic to an American that Germans, generally so careful, would build an economy so exposed to a single factor. There appears to be an almost unconscious belief that since the world crisis was not their fault, there is no need to change their model. However, this ignores the likelihood that other major countries will have problems in the future. Germany will remain exposed to the mistakes of others as long as exports dominate their economy. Even a great German driver in one of their best cars is exposed to the risks posed by drunk drivers on the road, which is one reason for the many safety features built into their autos.
In sum, the German views can be over-simplified, indeed caricatured, as follows. The U.S. and the U.K. created a catastrophe in the financial system, leading to a severe recession in those countries, which then spread around the world. The global recession created an “export shock” for Germany as world trade fell by about a quarter. The effects of that one-time shock should stabilize soon, allowing Germany to find its feet and then shift to growth, albeit slow growth. The economy will be 8% smaller at the bottom, but the basic German model of export orientation and a social market will remain intact and provide a good future. It makes sense for Germany to make a few changes around the edges, such as somewhat tougher financial regulation, but there is no need to pursue anything more sweeping.
To an American ear, it sounds unreasonable to be so little inclined to examine your core assumptions at a time when your economy is suffering twice as badly as the supposedly severely mismanaged U.S. economy and your experience is significantly worse than anything since the trauma of World War II and the immediate post-war period. It does not make it any more understandable that the only other major economy suffering so badly is Japan, which has been struggling for many years to find its way economically.
Of course, the Germans could be right in their two core premises: (a) the German way of doing things provides them the right balance of security and growth over the long haul and (b) the export shock will pass soon and they will be able to gradually move back to their pre-crisis growth rates. Only time will tell.
However, if I were a betting man, I would put my money on a significantly less complacent Germany in six months to a year. By that point, the Germans are likely to have discontinued their expensive labor subsidies, given their horror of budget deficits. That horror is exemplified by a recent constitutional amendment to phase them out over time. Unemployment will have shot up by at least a million people, largely undoing one of the proud achievements of the current government in bringing unemployment down from about 5 million to well under 4 million. This unemployment shock should bring home the magnitude of the crisis to most Germans, even with the strong safety net available to protect the unemployed. All of this will be worse still if, as I fear, the rest of the world does not resume its imports of German cars and machinery as quickly as is hoped. A slowdown in consumption could hold auto purchases down more than expected and it is likely that parts of the world over-invested in industrial machinery in the recent past and will take some time to resume buying in volume.
The German economy has done extremely well in some respects, particularly in exports, and the Germans have shown an admirable thrift. However, all economic models should be re-examined periodically and a period of extreme stress such as today seems an especially good time to review one’s assumptions.
[1] The Konrad Adenaeur Foundation is closely associated with the Christian Democratic Union, the party of Chancellor Angela Merkel. However, I do not believe this created a significant bias in the messages that we heard. The meetings included a wide range of people in and out of politics and the views expressed about the economy were consistent with media accounts of German views
Showing posts with label europe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label europe. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Germany and the U.K. resist France and the U.S. on green tariffs
Resisting Green Tariffs. WSJ Editorial
Germany and the U.K. resist France and the U.S. on green tariffs.
WSJ, Jul 28, 2009
One of the most dangerous but least reported undercurrents of the global-warming movement is trade protectionism. Now some politicians in Europe are beginning to push back, and we’re delighted to see it.
A carbon tariff has been popular on the intellectual left for some time, as a way to sell heavy new energy taxes to Western voters worried that their jobs will get shipped to countries that don’t also punish carbon use. The U.S. House of Representatives wrote a tariff provision into its recent cap-and-tax bill, rolling over the muted objections of President Obama. Coming from the world’s largest economy and ostensible free-trade leader, the bill is an invitation to the world’s protectionists to camouflage their self-interest in claims of green virtue.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy—a mercantalist in the best of times—escalated the threat last month by suggesting import duties to “level the playing field” with countries that oppose binding greenhouse-gas targets at December’s United Nations climate talks in Copenhagen. Just what a world trying to rebound from recession needs: beggar-thy-neighbor environmentalism.
Now other leaders are beginning to recognize and speak up about the peril. With typical British understatement, U.K. Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Miliband said Saturday his government was “skeptical” about the French proposal for carbon tariffs. Germany’s Deputy Environment Minister Matthias Machnig was even more forthright on Friday, branding the exercise as “eco-imperialism” for attempting to punish countries that don’t follow these green dictates. “We are closing our markets for their products, and I don’t think this is a very helpful signal for the international negotiations,” he added. Both statements are notable coming as they do from parties on the political left.
Berlin’s criticism is especially important. Germany has been at the forefront of Europe’s eco-movement from the start, enriching the French language with such words as “le Waldsterben,” a German compound meaning “forest death.” The idea of the man-made destruction of Europe’s trees was the great green scare of the 1970s and 1980s. The forests are still with us, and scientists now believe that the tree decline was as much due to natural phenomena as to “acid rain.” That episode is a lesson in the need for skepticism about proposals that would do tangible economic harm in the heat of environmental manias.
A climate tariff would be damaging even on its own green terms. To the extent it reduced global trade, carbon protectionism would slow the rise in income that we know from the last half century has been crucial to antipollution progress. The richer people are, the more of their income they are willing to devote to cleaner air and water. Several hundred million people have risen from poverty in the last generation thanks to expanding trade, and the world doesn’t need a reversal thanks to old-fashioned protectionism dressed in green drag.
Germany and the U.K. resist France and the U.S. on green tariffs.
WSJ, Jul 28, 2009
One of the most dangerous but least reported undercurrents of the global-warming movement is trade protectionism. Now some politicians in Europe are beginning to push back, and we’re delighted to see it.
A carbon tariff has been popular on the intellectual left for some time, as a way to sell heavy new energy taxes to Western voters worried that their jobs will get shipped to countries that don’t also punish carbon use. The U.S. House of Representatives wrote a tariff provision into its recent cap-and-tax bill, rolling over the muted objections of President Obama. Coming from the world’s largest economy and ostensible free-trade leader, the bill is an invitation to the world’s protectionists to camouflage their self-interest in claims of green virtue.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy—a mercantalist in the best of times—escalated the threat last month by suggesting import duties to “level the playing field” with countries that oppose binding greenhouse-gas targets at December’s United Nations climate talks in Copenhagen. Just what a world trying to rebound from recession needs: beggar-thy-neighbor environmentalism.
Now other leaders are beginning to recognize and speak up about the peril. With typical British understatement, U.K. Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Miliband said Saturday his government was “skeptical” about the French proposal for carbon tariffs. Germany’s Deputy Environment Minister Matthias Machnig was even more forthright on Friday, branding the exercise as “eco-imperialism” for attempting to punish countries that don’t follow these green dictates. “We are closing our markets for their products, and I don’t think this is a very helpful signal for the international negotiations,” he added. Both statements are notable coming as they do from parties on the political left.
Berlin’s criticism is especially important. Germany has been at the forefront of Europe’s eco-movement from the start, enriching the French language with such words as “le Waldsterben,” a German compound meaning “forest death.” The idea of the man-made destruction of Europe’s trees was the great green scare of the 1970s and 1980s. The forests are still with us, and scientists now believe that the tree decline was as much due to natural phenomena as to “acid rain.” That episode is a lesson in the need for skepticism about proposals that would do tangible economic harm in the heat of environmental manias.
A climate tariff would be damaging even on its own green terms. To the extent it reduced global trade, carbon protectionism would slow the rise in income that we know from the last half century has been crucial to antipollution progress. The richer people are, the more of their income they are willing to devote to cleaner air and water. Several hundred million people have risen from poverty in the last generation thanks to expanding trade, and the world doesn’t need a reversal thanks to old-fashioned protectionism dressed in green drag.
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
The economic reality of climate-change policy is sinking in at last in Europe
European Hot Air. WSJ Editorial
The economic reality of climate-change policy is sinking in at last.
WSJ, Jul 08, 2009
Climate change is set to figure prominently in this week's Group of Eight summit in Italy, but take any pronouncements about greenhouse-gas emissions targets with a grain of salt. While leaders may still think it's good politics to sing from the green hymnal, other realities are finally starting to sink in, especially in Old Europe. To wit: Restrictions on greenhouse-gas emissions involve huge costs for uncertain gains and are just what economies in recession don't need.
Concerns about high costs and lost jobs have already threatened carbon-emissions control plans in Australia and New Zealand, and to make sure cap-and-trade would pass in the U.S. House of Representatives, supporters had to push through the legislation before anyone could read it. The fraying of the anti-carbon consensus in Western Europe is especially striking. Polls consistently show that voters in most Western European countries support attempts to ameliorate climate change, at least in the abstract. The EU implemented a cap-and-trade Emissions Trading Scheme in 2005.
But that enthusiasm may be reaching its limit. Governments in industry-heavy countries are now less willing to sacrifice jobs for cooler temperatures. Germany's generally environmentalist Chancellor Angela Merkel insisted on exemptions for her country's industry from December's EU climate package, which pledged to reduce carbon emissions by 20% below 1990 levels by 2020. Germany also plans to build several dozen coal-fired power plants in the next few years.
Italy insisted on a clause in the December climate deal that requires the EU to renegotiate its climate policy after the United Nations summit in Copenhagen later this year. That amounts to a veto since China and India aren't expected to sign up for aggressive emissions targets; any renegotiated EU deal is likely to contain even more loopholes and exemptions to keep from denting European competitiveness.
Just as telling, Europe has been at best half-hearted in meeting its emissions-reduction targets under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. To the extent Europe appears on track to meet its targets, it's largely because warmer weather and higher market prices for energy have driven consumption down.
Credit a deteriorating economy for this about-face. Businesses and unions finally are starting to speak out against intrusive and expensive emissions regulations. In December, Phillipe Varin, chief executive of Corus, Europe's second-largest steel producer, told the London Independent that the cost of carbon credits and new technologies needed to reduce emissions would destroy European steel production, forcing manufacturing overseas.
Jaroslaw Grzesik, deputy head of energy at Poland's Solidarity trade union said last month that the union estimated the EU's climate policy would cost 800,000 European jobs. Before the December negotiations, the London-based think tank Open Europe estimated the EU climate package would cost governments, businesses and householders in the EU-25 more than €73 billion ($102 billion) a year until 2020. No wonder leaders decided to water it down.
Meanwhile, the supposed economic benefits of climate-change amelioration are evaporating. In Germany, government subsidies for installing solar panels -- and, it was presumed, thereby creating domestic manufacturing jobs -- backfired when it turned out that it was cheaper to make solar panels in China. A recent paper by Gabriel Calzada Álvarez, an economics professor at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, said that since Spain starting investing in "green jobs" policies in 2000, the country has lost 110,500 jobs in other parts of the economy. That amounts to 2.2 jobs lost for every new "green job" created.
This has politicians worried. They might have been willing to sacrifice a few jobs when they signed Kyoto in 1997. But economic times were flush then. Now a global slowdown is forcing a rethink on whether emissions control is worth the cost. With the scientific debate about the causes, effects and solutions of climate change growing more vigorous, that's a question worth asking.
Despite all the backtracking in practice, climate rhetoric is still alive and well. Sweden, which assumed the EU presidency last week, promises more action on emissions control. Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy and other leaders continue to talk a good game. Mr. Brown has even proposed a $100 billion-a-year fund to help countries like China and India clean up their emissions acts. Good luck getting that passed in the current fiscal and economic environment.
In other words, Western European leaders are the latest to discover that climate-change talk is cheap, but carbon-emissions regulation is expensive. That might be bad news for green activists, but it's very good news for Europeans worried about their jobs and their economy.
The economic reality of climate-change policy is sinking in at last.
WSJ, Jul 08, 2009
Climate change is set to figure prominently in this week's Group of Eight summit in Italy, but take any pronouncements about greenhouse-gas emissions targets with a grain of salt. While leaders may still think it's good politics to sing from the green hymnal, other realities are finally starting to sink in, especially in Old Europe. To wit: Restrictions on greenhouse-gas emissions involve huge costs for uncertain gains and are just what economies in recession don't need.
Concerns about high costs and lost jobs have already threatened carbon-emissions control plans in Australia and New Zealand, and to make sure cap-and-trade would pass in the U.S. House of Representatives, supporters had to push through the legislation before anyone could read it. The fraying of the anti-carbon consensus in Western Europe is especially striking. Polls consistently show that voters in most Western European countries support attempts to ameliorate climate change, at least in the abstract. The EU implemented a cap-and-trade Emissions Trading Scheme in 2005.
But that enthusiasm may be reaching its limit. Governments in industry-heavy countries are now less willing to sacrifice jobs for cooler temperatures. Germany's generally environmentalist Chancellor Angela Merkel insisted on exemptions for her country's industry from December's EU climate package, which pledged to reduce carbon emissions by 20% below 1990 levels by 2020. Germany also plans to build several dozen coal-fired power plants in the next few years.
Italy insisted on a clause in the December climate deal that requires the EU to renegotiate its climate policy after the United Nations summit in Copenhagen later this year. That amounts to a veto since China and India aren't expected to sign up for aggressive emissions targets; any renegotiated EU deal is likely to contain even more loopholes and exemptions to keep from denting European competitiveness.
Just as telling, Europe has been at best half-hearted in meeting its emissions-reduction targets under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. To the extent Europe appears on track to meet its targets, it's largely because warmer weather and higher market prices for energy have driven consumption down.
Credit a deteriorating economy for this about-face. Businesses and unions finally are starting to speak out against intrusive and expensive emissions regulations. In December, Phillipe Varin, chief executive of Corus, Europe's second-largest steel producer, told the London Independent that the cost of carbon credits and new technologies needed to reduce emissions would destroy European steel production, forcing manufacturing overseas.
Jaroslaw Grzesik, deputy head of energy at Poland's Solidarity trade union said last month that the union estimated the EU's climate policy would cost 800,000 European jobs. Before the December negotiations, the London-based think tank Open Europe estimated the EU climate package would cost governments, businesses and householders in the EU-25 more than €73 billion ($102 billion) a year until 2020. No wonder leaders decided to water it down.
Meanwhile, the supposed economic benefits of climate-change amelioration are evaporating. In Germany, government subsidies for installing solar panels -- and, it was presumed, thereby creating domestic manufacturing jobs -- backfired when it turned out that it was cheaper to make solar panels in China. A recent paper by Gabriel Calzada Álvarez, an economics professor at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, said that since Spain starting investing in "green jobs" policies in 2000, the country has lost 110,500 jobs in other parts of the economy. That amounts to 2.2 jobs lost for every new "green job" created.
This has politicians worried. They might have been willing to sacrifice a few jobs when they signed Kyoto in 1997. But economic times were flush then. Now a global slowdown is forcing a rethink on whether emissions control is worth the cost. With the scientific debate about the causes, effects and solutions of climate change growing more vigorous, that's a question worth asking.
Despite all the backtracking in practice, climate rhetoric is still alive and well. Sweden, which assumed the EU presidency last week, promises more action on emissions control. Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy and other leaders continue to talk a good game. Mr. Brown has even proposed a $100 billion-a-year fund to help countries like China and India clean up their emissions acts. Good luck getting that passed in the current fiscal and economic environment.
In other words, Western European leaders are the latest to discover that climate-change talk is cheap, but carbon-emissions regulation is expensive. That might be bad news for green activists, but it's very good news for Europeans worried about their jobs and their economy.
Monday, July 6, 2009
The President's Mission to Moscow
The President's Mission to Moscow. By DAVID SATTER
Obama doesn't need to engage Russia's leaders. He needs to deter them.
The Wall Street Journal, Jul 06, 2009, p A13
Moscow
President Barack Obama arrives here today facing a dilemma of his own making. Having called for a "reset" in U.S.-Russian relations, the U.S. side is virtually obliged to make some new overtures. But Russia does not need to be engaged. It needs to be deterred.
The expectations that Mr. Obama has inspired are substantial. Both officials and ordinary citizens in Russia interpret the call for a reset as an admission of U.S. guilt for ignoring Russia's interests. Sergei Rybakov, the Russian deputy foreign minister, said that mutual trust was "lacking over the last several years." It was the task of the U.S. to show its good intentions with "concrete actions" because in Russia, the U.S. is "deeply distrusted."
Accepting the Russian view of reality on the issues that divide the U.S. and Russia, however, would be a grave mistake. Russia aspires to resurrect a version of the Soviet Union in which it projects power and dominates its neighbors. To encourage its ambitions in any way would be to undermine not only U.S. security but, in the long run, the security of Russia as well.
There are three important areas of conflict between the U.S. and Russia: NATO expansion, the U.S. missile shield in Eastern Europe and the Russian human rights situation. In each case, any reset should be on the Russian side.
The most urgent issue may be NATO expansion. There are serious indications that Russia is preparing for a second invasion of Georgia. The first Georgian war was accompanied by a burst of patriotism in Russia but didn't achieve its strategic objectives. Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili remains in power and Georgia remains a supply corridor to the West for energy from Central Asia and the Caspian Sea. Many Russian leaders want to finish the job. At a televised forum in December, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was asked about press reports that he had told French president Nicolas Sarkozy that Mr. Saakashvili should be "hung by his ba**s." He replied, "Why only by one part?"
Under these circumstances, the best protection for Georgia is NATO membership. According to Pavel Felgenhauer, a defense analyst with Novaya Gazeta, the decision to invade Georgia last August came in April after NATO failed to offer outright a Membership Action Plan to Georgia and Ukraine at its annual summit in Bucharest.
Russia will argue strenuously that Georgia, Ukraine and the other former Soviet republics are part of its sphere of "privileged interests." This is an issue on which Mr. Obama cannot give way. If the former Soviet republics are denied NATO membership at Russia's behest, they either will be turned into Russian satellites with manipulated elections and a controlled foreign policy or form a zone of instability along Russia's borders with unpredictable consequences for both Russia and the West.
Beside the issue of NATO expansion, Russia and the U.S. have a critical conflict over U.S. plans to install a missile shield in the Czech Republic and Poland. Not only have U.S. experts argued that the anti-missile system is not aimed at Russia but Russia's military experts agree. Nonetheless, the system is described by Russian leaders as a threat and denunciations of the missile shield are a staple of the anti-Western programming on Russian state television.
According to Mikhail Delyagin, who served as an adviser to former Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, the placement of rockets in Poland is unacceptable to Russia for emotional and symbolic reasons. "It shows that the U.S. is now the master in Eastern Europe," he said. Any decision to yield to Russian objections, however, would effectively divide NATO into countries that need Russian approval for deployments and those that do not. Even dubious Russian promises to help with Iran would not compensate for the damage done to the alliance by such a concession to Russian pretensions.
Finally, there is the conflict between Russia and the U.S. over human rights. The status of human rights is a universal concern but it also has strategic implications. A population that lacks democratic rights and is subject to constant anti-Western propaganda can easily be mobilized against the U.S.
By any measure, the state of human rights in Russia is unacceptable. Russia today lacks honest elections or a separation of powers. The regime allows a degree of freedom but the features of daily life include police torture, prisoner abuse, political control of the courts and, for democratic activists, the danger of being beaten or killed. The result is that fear has returned to Russia less than two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union.
The regime is also taking steps to curtail freedom of speech. Freedom of the press has long been restricted under Mr. Putin with censorship on state run television and pressure on newspapers through their owners, to exercise self censorship. Peaceful demonstrations have also been forcibly dispersed. In recent weeks, however, a bill has been introduced in the State Duma that would make it illegal to deny the role of the Soviet Union in the victory in World War II or the crimes of Hitler's cronies (but not the crimes of Stalin and his entourage). The punishment both for Russian citizens and for foreigners will be three to five years in prison.
In the run up to Mr. Obama's visit, Russian academics and self described realists in the U.S. have called for a "grand deal" in which the U.S. accedes to Russian demands in the former Soviet Union in return for Russian help on Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan. In the case of Iran, Russia, which has repeatedly thwarted tough United Nations resolutions on that country's nuclear energy program, is offering to assist in dealing with a problem that it helped to create.
Unfortunately such a deal, the only "reset" in which the Russians have shown any interest, would eliminate moral criteria from the U.S.-Russian relationship and deprive the U.S. of any basis for limiting Russia's demands in the future. Under those circumstances, Russia's appetite is likely to grow.
Mr. Obama may wish to improve the U.S.-Russia relationship but the problems in that relationship come not from our actions but from assumptions on the Russian side about the prerogatives of power that we cannot possibly accept. Instead of resetting relations, we may just have to content ourselves with resisting Russian pretensions until such time as the mentality that gives rise to them can be changed.
Mr. Satter is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He is writing a book on the Russian attitude to the Soviet past.
Obama doesn't need to engage Russia's leaders. He needs to deter them.
The Wall Street Journal, Jul 06, 2009, p A13
Moscow
President Barack Obama arrives here today facing a dilemma of his own making. Having called for a "reset" in U.S.-Russian relations, the U.S. side is virtually obliged to make some new overtures. But Russia does not need to be engaged. It needs to be deterred.
The expectations that Mr. Obama has inspired are substantial. Both officials and ordinary citizens in Russia interpret the call for a reset as an admission of U.S. guilt for ignoring Russia's interests. Sergei Rybakov, the Russian deputy foreign minister, said that mutual trust was "lacking over the last several years." It was the task of the U.S. to show its good intentions with "concrete actions" because in Russia, the U.S. is "deeply distrusted."
Accepting the Russian view of reality on the issues that divide the U.S. and Russia, however, would be a grave mistake. Russia aspires to resurrect a version of the Soviet Union in which it projects power and dominates its neighbors. To encourage its ambitions in any way would be to undermine not only U.S. security but, in the long run, the security of Russia as well.
There are three important areas of conflict between the U.S. and Russia: NATO expansion, the U.S. missile shield in Eastern Europe and the Russian human rights situation. In each case, any reset should be on the Russian side.
The most urgent issue may be NATO expansion. There are serious indications that Russia is preparing for a second invasion of Georgia. The first Georgian war was accompanied by a burst of patriotism in Russia but didn't achieve its strategic objectives. Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili remains in power and Georgia remains a supply corridor to the West for energy from Central Asia and the Caspian Sea. Many Russian leaders want to finish the job. At a televised forum in December, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was asked about press reports that he had told French president Nicolas Sarkozy that Mr. Saakashvili should be "hung by his ba**s." He replied, "Why only by one part?"
Under these circumstances, the best protection for Georgia is NATO membership. According to Pavel Felgenhauer, a defense analyst with Novaya Gazeta, the decision to invade Georgia last August came in April after NATO failed to offer outright a Membership Action Plan to Georgia and Ukraine at its annual summit in Bucharest.
Russia will argue strenuously that Georgia, Ukraine and the other former Soviet republics are part of its sphere of "privileged interests." This is an issue on which Mr. Obama cannot give way. If the former Soviet republics are denied NATO membership at Russia's behest, they either will be turned into Russian satellites with manipulated elections and a controlled foreign policy or form a zone of instability along Russia's borders with unpredictable consequences for both Russia and the West.
Beside the issue of NATO expansion, Russia and the U.S. have a critical conflict over U.S. plans to install a missile shield in the Czech Republic and Poland. Not only have U.S. experts argued that the anti-missile system is not aimed at Russia but Russia's military experts agree. Nonetheless, the system is described by Russian leaders as a threat and denunciations of the missile shield are a staple of the anti-Western programming on Russian state television.
According to Mikhail Delyagin, who served as an adviser to former Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, the placement of rockets in Poland is unacceptable to Russia for emotional and symbolic reasons. "It shows that the U.S. is now the master in Eastern Europe," he said. Any decision to yield to Russian objections, however, would effectively divide NATO into countries that need Russian approval for deployments and those that do not. Even dubious Russian promises to help with Iran would not compensate for the damage done to the alliance by such a concession to Russian pretensions.
Finally, there is the conflict between Russia and the U.S. over human rights. The status of human rights is a universal concern but it also has strategic implications. A population that lacks democratic rights and is subject to constant anti-Western propaganda can easily be mobilized against the U.S.
By any measure, the state of human rights in Russia is unacceptable. Russia today lacks honest elections or a separation of powers. The regime allows a degree of freedom but the features of daily life include police torture, prisoner abuse, political control of the courts and, for democratic activists, the danger of being beaten or killed. The result is that fear has returned to Russia less than two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union.
The regime is also taking steps to curtail freedom of speech. Freedom of the press has long been restricted under Mr. Putin with censorship on state run television and pressure on newspapers through their owners, to exercise self censorship. Peaceful demonstrations have also been forcibly dispersed. In recent weeks, however, a bill has been introduced in the State Duma that would make it illegal to deny the role of the Soviet Union in the victory in World War II or the crimes of Hitler's cronies (but not the crimes of Stalin and his entourage). The punishment both for Russian citizens and for foreigners will be three to five years in prison.
In the run up to Mr. Obama's visit, Russian academics and self described realists in the U.S. have called for a "grand deal" in which the U.S. accedes to Russian demands in the former Soviet Union in return for Russian help on Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan. In the case of Iran, Russia, which has repeatedly thwarted tough United Nations resolutions on that country's nuclear energy program, is offering to assist in dealing with a problem that it helped to create.
Unfortunately such a deal, the only "reset" in which the Russians have shown any interest, would eliminate moral criteria from the U.S.-Russian relationship and deprive the U.S. of any basis for limiting Russia's demands in the future. Under those circumstances, Russia's appetite is likely to grow.
Mr. Obama may wish to improve the U.S.-Russia relationship but the problems in that relationship come not from our actions but from assumptions on the Russian side about the prerogatives of power that we cannot possibly accept. Instead of resetting relations, we may just have to content ourselves with resisting Russian pretensions until such time as the mentality that gives rise to them can be changed.
Mr. Satter is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He is writing a book on the Russian attitude to the Soviet past.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Leonard: Why many MEPs don't believe in the European Union
Europe's Self-Hating Parliamentarians. By Mark Leonard
Why many MEPs don't believe in the European Union.
WSJ, Jun 09, 2009
The European Parliament is in the throes of an early midlife crisis. Although newspaper headlines are focused on the strong performance of center-right parties, the 2009 vote is more likely to be remembered for the election of so many self-hating parliamentarians.
A substantial minority of members (MEPs) see their role as reducing rather than expanding the European Union's power. This is a remarkable change for a body that fought tooth-and-nail to extend its authority every time a new EU treaty was negotiated.
The paradox of the European Parliament is that as its power has grown, the public's interest in its activities has declined. Each election has brought lower voter turnout than the one before. Even more brutal than this year's turnout: Many of parliament's new members don't believe that the body in which they sit should be allowed to exist.
Take the colorful Geert Wilders, whose anti-Islamic-immigrant party shot up to second place in the Netherlands with 17% of the vote after the Christian Democrats, who won 19.9%. He ran on a manifesto that included a pledge to abolish the European Parliament. In the United Kingdom, the two biggest parties were the Conservative Party (committed to abolishing the Lisbon Treaty) and the Independence Party (committed to getting Britain out of the EU). The British National Party picked up two seats with its pledge to "end the blood-sucking scam" of the EU.
In Austria, the xenophobic Freedom Party got 13% of the vote with a call to remove the EU from Austria's affairs. A party set up to protest against the abuses of the European Parliament managed to pick up 17.9% of the vote. Anti-European populists also picked up significant support in Hungary, Denmark, Slovakia and Finland.
This trend tells us a lot about the dynamics of the EU as a political system. From the beginning, European integration has been defined by two trends: technocracy and populism.
On the one hand, the EU is the ultimate technocratic project. The so-called Monnet approach -- named after the key architect of European integration, the French official Jean Monnet -- is designed to generate a consensus among European diplomats for limited projects of practical cross-border cooperation. Each of these projects should lead to further integration in various policy areas.
The success of the technocrats has been phenomenal. They created first a coal and steel community, then a customs union, then a single market and even a single currency.
It was the very success of the EU as a bureaucratic phenomenon that fueled a populist backlash. This first started as a localized phenomenon, with Margaret Thatcher famously demanding a refund for Britain in the 1980s. Now, it is a pan-European force. The populists come from the left and right, but their common complaint is that the EU is an elite conspiracy, a project to build "Europe against the people." In its place, they plan to mobilize the "people against Europe."
Though people in Brussels talk about technocracy and populism as opposites, in fact they are mutually reinforcing. The more EU leaders try to remove European integration from national politics, the more brittle the EU's legitimacy becomes, which in turn means that policy makers want to further evade public opinion. And the more technocratic the EU becomes, the stronger the calls for democracy and referendums, which in turn create a space for populist parties to emerge.
Since the moment that Jean Monnet turned his mind to uniting Europe, technocracy has been a cornerstone of the EU. Populism has now been sanctified as part of the EU's structure through the introduction of referendums and elections to the European Parliament.
If national and EU officials are going to avoid total gridlock going forward, they will need to deepen their understanding of the domestic politics of the 27 states of the EU and spend time analyzing and engaging public opinion.
In order for the EU to emerge from its midlife crisis, the next generation of EU technocrats will need to be populists as well.
Mr. Leonard is executive director of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Why many MEPs don't believe in the European Union.
WSJ, Jun 09, 2009
The European Parliament is in the throes of an early midlife crisis. Although newspaper headlines are focused on the strong performance of center-right parties, the 2009 vote is more likely to be remembered for the election of so many self-hating parliamentarians.
A substantial minority of members (MEPs) see their role as reducing rather than expanding the European Union's power. This is a remarkable change for a body that fought tooth-and-nail to extend its authority every time a new EU treaty was negotiated.
The paradox of the European Parliament is that as its power has grown, the public's interest in its activities has declined. Each election has brought lower voter turnout than the one before. Even more brutal than this year's turnout: Many of parliament's new members don't believe that the body in which they sit should be allowed to exist.
Take the colorful Geert Wilders, whose anti-Islamic-immigrant party shot up to second place in the Netherlands with 17% of the vote after the Christian Democrats, who won 19.9%. He ran on a manifesto that included a pledge to abolish the European Parliament. In the United Kingdom, the two biggest parties were the Conservative Party (committed to abolishing the Lisbon Treaty) and the Independence Party (committed to getting Britain out of the EU). The British National Party picked up two seats with its pledge to "end the blood-sucking scam" of the EU.
In Austria, the xenophobic Freedom Party got 13% of the vote with a call to remove the EU from Austria's affairs. A party set up to protest against the abuses of the European Parliament managed to pick up 17.9% of the vote. Anti-European populists also picked up significant support in Hungary, Denmark, Slovakia and Finland.
This trend tells us a lot about the dynamics of the EU as a political system. From the beginning, European integration has been defined by two trends: technocracy and populism.
On the one hand, the EU is the ultimate technocratic project. The so-called Monnet approach -- named after the key architect of European integration, the French official Jean Monnet -- is designed to generate a consensus among European diplomats for limited projects of practical cross-border cooperation. Each of these projects should lead to further integration in various policy areas.
The success of the technocrats has been phenomenal. They created first a coal and steel community, then a customs union, then a single market and even a single currency.
It was the very success of the EU as a bureaucratic phenomenon that fueled a populist backlash. This first started as a localized phenomenon, with Margaret Thatcher famously demanding a refund for Britain in the 1980s. Now, it is a pan-European force. The populists come from the left and right, but their common complaint is that the EU is an elite conspiracy, a project to build "Europe against the people." In its place, they plan to mobilize the "people against Europe."
Though people in Brussels talk about technocracy and populism as opposites, in fact they are mutually reinforcing. The more EU leaders try to remove European integration from national politics, the more brittle the EU's legitimacy becomes, which in turn means that policy makers want to further evade public opinion. And the more technocratic the EU becomes, the stronger the calls for democracy and referendums, which in turn create a space for populist parties to emerge.
Since the moment that Jean Monnet turned his mind to uniting Europe, technocracy has been a cornerstone of the EU. Populism has now been sanctified as part of the EU's structure through the introduction of referendums and elections to the European Parliament.
If national and EU officials are going to avoid total gridlock going forward, they will need to deepen their understanding of the domestic politics of the 27 states of the EU and spend time analyzing and engaging public opinion.
In order for the EU to emerge from its midlife crisis, the next generation of EU technocrats will need to be populists as well.
Mr. Leonard is executive director of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
The Geography of Recession
The Geography of Recession. By Peter Zeihan
Stratfor, June 2, 2009 1844 GMT
The global recession is the biggest development in the global system in the year to date. In the United States, it has become almost dogma that the recession is the worst since the Great Depression. But this is only one of a wealth of misperceptions about whom the downturn is hurting most, and why.
Let’s begin with some simple numbers.
As one can see in the chart, the U.S. recession at this point is only the worst since 1982, not the 1930s, and it pales in comparison to what is occurring in the rest of the world. (Figures for China have not been included, in part because of the unreliability of Chinese statistics, but also because the country’s financial system is so radically different from the rest of the world as to make such comparisons misleading. For more, read the China section below.)
But didn’t the recession begin in the United States? That it did, but the American system is far more stable, durable and flexible than most of the other global economies, in large part thanks to the country’s geography. To understand how place shapes economics, we need to take a giant step back from the gloom and doom of the current moment and examine the long-term picture of why different regions follow different economic paths.
The United States and the Free Market
The most important aspect of the United States is not simply its sheer size, but the size of its usable land. Russia and China may both be similar-sized in absolute terms, but the vast majority of Russian and Chinese land is useless for agriculture, habitation or development. In contrast, courtesy of the Midwest, the United States boasts the world’s largest contiguous mass of arable land — and that mass does not include the hardly inconsequential chunks of usable territory on both the West and East coasts.
Second is the American maritime transport system. The Mississippi River, linked as it is to the Red, Missouri, Ohio and Tennessee rivers, comprises the largest interconnected network of navigable rivers in the world. In the San Francisco Bay, Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound/New York Bay, the United States has three of the world’s largest and best natural harbors. The series of barrier islands a few miles off the shores of Texas and the East Coast form a water-based highway — an Intercoastal Waterway — that shields American coastal shipping from all but the worst that the elements can throw at ships and ports.
(click image)
The real beauty is that the two overlap with near perfect symmetry. The Intercoastal Waterway and most of the bays link up with agricultural regions and their own local river systems (such as the series of rivers that descend from the Appalachians to the East Coast), while the Greater Mississippi river network is the circulatory system of the Midwest. Even without the addition of canals, it is possible for ships to reach nearly any part of the Midwest from nearly any part of the Gulf or East coasts. The result is not just a massive ability to grow a massive amount of crops — and not just the ability to easily and cheaply move the crops to local, regional and global markets — but also the ability to use that same transport network for any other economic purpose without having to worry about food supplies.
The implications of such a confluence are deep and sustained. Where most countries need to scrape together capital to build roads and rail to establish the very foundation of an economy, transport capability, geography granted the United States a near-perfect system at no cost. That frees up U.S. capital for other pursuits and almost condemns the United States to be capital-rich. Any additional infrastructure the United States constructs is icing on the cake. (The cake itself is free — and, incidentally, the United States had so much free capital that it was able to go on to build one of the best road-and-rail networks anyway, resulting in even greater economic advantages over competitors.)
Third, geography has also ensured that the United States has very little local competition. To the north, Canada is both much colder and much more mountainous than the United States. Canada’s only navigable maritime network — the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway —is shared with the United States, and most of its usable land is hard by the American border. Often this makes it more economically advantageous for Canadian provinces to integrate with their neighbor to the south than with their co-nationals to the east and west.
Similarly, Mexico has only small chunks of land, separated by deserts and mountains, that are useful for much more than subsistence agriculture; most of Mexican territory is either too dry, too tropical or too mountainous. And Mexico completely lacks any meaningful river system for maritime transport. Add in a largely desert border, and Mexico as a country is not a meaningful threat to American security (which hardly means that there are not serious and ongoing concerns in the American-Mexican relationship).
With geography empowering the United States and hindering Canada and Mexico, the United States does not need to maintain a large standing military force to counter either. The Canadian border is almost completely unguarded, and the Mexican border is no more than a fence in most locations — a far cry from the sort of military standoffs that have marked more adversarial borders in human history. Not only are Canada and Mexico not major threats, but the U.S. transport network allows the United States the luxury of being able to quickly move a smaller force to deal with occasional problems rather than requiring it to station large static forces on its borders.
Like the transport network, this also helps the U.S. focus its resources on other things.
Taken together, the integrated transport network, large tracts of usable land and lack of a need for a standing military have one critical implication: The U.S. government tends to take a hands-off approach to economic management, because geography has not cursed the United States with any endemic problems. This may mean that the United States — and especially its government — comes across as disorganized, but it shifts massive amounts of labor and capital to the private sector, which for the most part allows resources to flow to wherever they will achieve the most efficient and productive results.
Laissez-faire capitalism has its flaws. Inequality and social stress are just two of many less-than-desirable side effects. The side effects most relevant to the current situation are, of course, the speculative bubbles that cause recessions when they pop. But in terms of long-term economic efficiency and growth, a free capital system is unrivaled. For the United States, the end result has proved clear: The United States has exited each decade since post-Civil War Reconstruction more powerful than it was when it entered it. While there are many forces in the modern world that threaten various aspects of U.S. economic standing, there is not one that actually threatens the U.S. base geographic advantages.
Is the United States in recession? Of course. Will it be forever? Of course not. So long as U.S. geographic advantages remain intact, it takes no small amount of paranoia and pessimism to envision anything but long-term economic expansion for such a chunk of territory. In fact, there are a number of factors hinting that the United States may even be on the cusp of recovery.
Russia and the State
If in economic terms the United States has everything going for it geographically, then Russia is just the opposite. The Russian steppe lies deep in the interior of the Eurasian landmass, and as such is subject to climatic conditions much more hostile to human habitation and agriculture than is the American Midwest. Even in those blessed good years when crops are abundant in Russia, it has no river network to allow for easy transport of products.
Russia has no good warm-water ports to facilitate international trade (and has spent much of its history seeking access to one). Russia does have long rivers, but they are not interconnected as the Mississippi is with its tributaries, instead flowing north to the Arctic Ocean, which can support no more than a token population. The one exception is the Volga, which is critical to Western Russian commerce but flows to the Caspian, a storm-wracked and landlocked sea whose delta freezes in the winter (along with the entire Volga itself). Developing such unforgiving lands requires a massive outlay of funds simply to build the road and rail networks necessary to achieve the most basic of economic development. The cost is so extreme that Russia’s first ever intercontinental road was not completed until the 21st century, and it is little more than a two-lane path for much of its length. Between the lack of ports and the relatively low population densities, little of Russia’s transport system beyond the St. Petersburg/Moscow corridor approaches anything that hints of economic rationality.
Russia also has no meaningful external borders. It sits on the eastern end of the North European Plain, which stretches all the way to Normandy, France, and Russia’s connections to the Asian steppe flow deep into China. Because Russia lacks a decent internal transport network that can rapidly move armies from place to place, geography forces Russia to defend itself following two strategies. First, it requires massive standing armies on all of its borders. Second, it dictates that Russia continually push its boundaries outward to buffer its core against external threats.
Both strategies compromise Russian economic development even further. The large standing armies are a continual drain on state coffers and the country’s labor pool; their cost was a critical economic factor in the Soviet fall. The expansionist strategy not only absorbs large populations that do not wish to be part of the Russian state and so must constantly be policed — the core rationale for Russia’s robust security services — but also inflates Russia’s infrastructure development costs by increasing the amount of relatively useless territory Moscow is responsible for.
Russia’s labor and capital resources are woefully inadequate to overcome the state’s needs and vulnerabilities, which are legion. These endemic problems force Russia toward central planning; the full harnessing of all economic resources available is required if Russia is to achieve even a modicum of security and stability. One of the many results of this is severe economic inefficiency and a general dearth of an internal consumer market. Because capital and other resources can be flung forcefully at problems, however, active management can achieve specific national goals more readily than a hands-off, American-style model. This often gives the impression of significant progress in areas the Kremlin chooses to highlight.
But such achievements are largely limited to wherever the state happens to be directing its attention. In all other sectors, the lack of attention results in atrophy or criminalization. This is particularly true in modern Russia, where the ruling elite comprises just a handful of people, starkly limiting the amount of planning and oversight possible. And unless management is perfect in perception and execution, any mistakes are quickly magnified into national catastrophes. It is therefore no surprise to STRATFOR that the Russian economy has now fallen the furthest of any major economy during the current recession.
China and Separatism
China also faces significant hurdles, albeit none as daunting as Russia’s challenges. China’s core is the farmland of the Yellow River basin in the north of the country, a river that is not readily navigable and is remarkably flood prone. Simply avoiding periodic starvation requires a high level of state planning and coordination. (Wrestling a large river is not the easiest thing one can do.) Additionally, the southern half of the country has a subtropical climate, riddling it with diseases that the southerners are resistant to but the northerners are not. This compromises the north’s political control of the south.
Central control is also threatened by China’s maritime geography. China boasts two other rivers, but they do not link to each other or the Yellow naturally. And China’s best ports are at the mouths of these two rivers: Shanghai at the mouth of the Yangtze and Hong Kong/Macau/Guangzhou at the mouth of the Pearl. The Yellow boasts no significant ocean port. The end result is that other regional centers can and do develop economic means independent of Beijing.
(click image)
With geography complicating northern rule and supporting southern economic independence, Beijing’s age-old problem has been trying to keep China in one piece. Beijing has to underwrite massive (and expensive) development programs to stitch the country together with a common infrastructure, the most visible of which is the Grand Canal that links the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. The cost of such linkages instantly guarantees that while China may have a shot at being unified, it will always be capital-poor.
Beijing also has to provide its autonomy-minded regions with an economic incentive to remain part of Greater China, and “simple” infrastructure will not cut it. Modern China has turned to a state-centered finance model for this. Under the model, all of the scarce capital that is available is funneled to the state, which divvies it out via a handful of large state banks. These state banks then grant loans to various firms and local governments at below the cost of raising the capital. This provides a powerful economic stimulus that achieves maximum employment and growth — think of what you could do with a near-endless supply of loans at below 0 percent interest — but comes at the cost of encouraging projects that are loss-making, as no one is ever called to account for failures. (They can just get a new loan.) The resultant growth is rapid, but it is also unsustainable. It is no wonder, then, that the central government has chosen to keep its $2 trillion of currency reserves in dollar-based assets; the rate of return is greater, the value holds over a long period, and Beijing doesn’t have to worry about the United States seceding.
Because the domestic market is considerably limited by the poor-capital nature of the country, most producers choose to tap export markets to generate income. In times of plenty this works fairly well, but when Chinese goods are not needed, the entire Chinese system can seize up. Lack of exports reduces capital availability, which constrains loan availability. This in turn not only damages the ability of firms to employ China’s legions of citizens, but it also removes the primary reason the disparate Chinese regions pay homage to Beijing. China’s geography hardwires in a series of economic challenges that weaken the coherence of the state and make China dependent upon uninterrupted access to foreign markets to maintain state unity. As a result, China has not been a unified entity for the vast majority of its history, but instead a cauldron of competing regions that cleave along many different fault lines: coastal versus interior, Han versus minority, north versus south.
China’s survival technique for the current recession is simple. Because exports, which account for roughly half of China’s economic activity, have sunk by half, Beijing is throwing the equivalent of the financial kitchen sink at the problem. China has force-fed more loans through the banks in the first four months of 2009 than it did in the entirety of 2008. The long-term result could well bury China beneath a mountain of bad loans — a similar strategy resulted in Japan’s 1991 crash, from which Tokyo has yet to recover. But for now it is holding the country together. The bottom line remains, however: China’s recovery is completely dependent upon external demand for its production, and the most it can do on its own is tread water.
Discordant Europe
Europe faces an imbroglio somewhat similar to China’s.
Europe has a number of rivers that are easily navigable, providing a wealth of trade and development opportunities. But none of them interlinks with the others, retarding political unification. Europe has even more good harbors than the United States, but they are not evenly spread throughout the Continent, making some states capital-rich and others capital-poor. Europe boasts one huge piece of arable land on the North European Plain, but it is long and thin, and so occupied by no fewer than seven distinct ethnic groups.
These groups have constantly struggled — as have the various groups up and down Europe’s seemingly endless list of river valleys — but none has been able to emerge dominant, due to the webwork of mountains and peninsulas that make it nigh impossible to fully root out any particular group. And Europe’s wealth of islands close to the Continent, with Great Britain being only the most obvious, guarantee constant intervention to ensure that mainland Europe never unifies under a single power.
Every part of Europe has a radically different geography than the other parts, and thus the economic models the Europeans have adopted have little in common. The United Kingdom, with few immediate security threats and decent rivers and ports, has an almost American-style laissez-faire system. France, with three unconnected rivers lying wholly in its own territory, is a somewhat self-contained world, making economic nationalism its credo. Not only do the rivers in Germany not connect, but Berlin has to share them with other states. The Jutland Peninsula interrupts the coastline of Germany, which finds its sea access limited by the Danes, the Swedes and the British. Germany must plan in great detail to maximize its resource use to build an infrastructure that can compensate for its geographic deficiencies and link together its good — but disparate — geographic blessings. The result is a state that somewhat favors free enterprise, but within the limits framed by national needs.
And the list of differences goes on: Spain has long coasts and is arid; Austria is landlocked and quite wet; most of Greece is almost too mountainous to build on; it doesn’t get flatter than the Netherlands; tiny Estonia faces frozen seas in the winter; mammoth Italy has never even seen an icebreaker. Even if there were a supranational authority in Europe that could tax or regulate the banking sector or plan transnational responses, the propriety of any singular policy would be questionable at best.
Such stark regional differences give rise to such variant policies that many European states have a severe (and understandable) trust deficit when it comes to any hint of anything supranational. We are not simply taking about the European Union here, but rather a general distrust of anything cross-border in nature. One of the many outcomes of this is a preference for using local banks rather than stock exchanges for raising capital. After all, local banks tend to use local capital and are subject to local regulations, while stock exchanges tend to be internationalized in all respects. Spain, Italy, Sweden, Greece and Austria get more than 90 percent of their financing from banks, the United Kingdom 84 percent and Germany 76 percent — while for the United States it is only 40 percent.
And this has proved unfortunate in the extreme for today’s Europe. The current recession has its roots in a financial crisis that has most dramatically impacted banks, and European banks have proved far from immune. Until Europe’s banks recover, Europe will remain mired in recession. And since there cannot be a Pan-European solution, Europe’s recession could well prove to be the worst of all this time around.
Stratfor, June 2, 2009 1844 GMT
The global recession is the biggest development in the global system in the year to date. In the United States, it has become almost dogma that the recession is the worst since the Great Depression. But this is only one of a wealth of misperceptions about whom the downturn is hurting most, and why.
Let’s begin with some simple numbers.
As one can see in the chart, the U.S. recession at this point is only the worst since 1982, not the 1930s, and it pales in comparison to what is occurring in the rest of the world. (Figures for China have not been included, in part because of the unreliability of Chinese statistics, but also because the country’s financial system is so radically different from the rest of the world as to make such comparisons misleading. For more, read the China section below.)
But didn’t the recession begin in the United States? That it did, but the American system is far more stable, durable and flexible than most of the other global economies, in large part thanks to the country’s geography. To understand how place shapes economics, we need to take a giant step back from the gloom and doom of the current moment and examine the long-term picture of why different regions follow different economic paths.
The United States and the Free Market
The most important aspect of the United States is not simply its sheer size, but the size of its usable land. Russia and China may both be similar-sized in absolute terms, but the vast majority of Russian and Chinese land is useless for agriculture, habitation or development. In contrast, courtesy of the Midwest, the United States boasts the world’s largest contiguous mass of arable land — and that mass does not include the hardly inconsequential chunks of usable territory on both the West and East coasts.
Second is the American maritime transport system. The Mississippi River, linked as it is to the Red, Missouri, Ohio and Tennessee rivers, comprises the largest interconnected network of navigable rivers in the world. In the San Francisco Bay, Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound/New York Bay, the United States has three of the world’s largest and best natural harbors. The series of barrier islands a few miles off the shores of Texas and the East Coast form a water-based highway — an Intercoastal Waterway — that shields American coastal shipping from all but the worst that the elements can throw at ships and ports.
(click image)
The real beauty is that the two overlap with near perfect symmetry. The Intercoastal Waterway and most of the bays link up with agricultural regions and their own local river systems (such as the series of rivers that descend from the Appalachians to the East Coast), while the Greater Mississippi river network is the circulatory system of the Midwest. Even without the addition of canals, it is possible for ships to reach nearly any part of the Midwest from nearly any part of the Gulf or East coasts. The result is not just a massive ability to grow a massive amount of crops — and not just the ability to easily and cheaply move the crops to local, regional and global markets — but also the ability to use that same transport network for any other economic purpose without having to worry about food supplies.
The implications of such a confluence are deep and sustained. Where most countries need to scrape together capital to build roads and rail to establish the very foundation of an economy, transport capability, geography granted the United States a near-perfect system at no cost. That frees up U.S. capital for other pursuits and almost condemns the United States to be capital-rich. Any additional infrastructure the United States constructs is icing on the cake. (The cake itself is free — and, incidentally, the United States had so much free capital that it was able to go on to build one of the best road-and-rail networks anyway, resulting in even greater economic advantages over competitors.)
Third, geography has also ensured that the United States has very little local competition. To the north, Canada is both much colder and much more mountainous than the United States. Canada’s only navigable maritime network — the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway —is shared with the United States, and most of its usable land is hard by the American border. Often this makes it more economically advantageous for Canadian provinces to integrate with their neighbor to the south than with their co-nationals to the east and west.
Similarly, Mexico has only small chunks of land, separated by deserts and mountains, that are useful for much more than subsistence agriculture; most of Mexican territory is either too dry, too tropical or too mountainous. And Mexico completely lacks any meaningful river system for maritime transport. Add in a largely desert border, and Mexico as a country is not a meaningful threat to American security (which hardly means that there are not serious and ongoing concerns in the American-Mexican relationship).
With geography empowering the United States and hindering Canada and Mexico, the United States does not need to maintain a large standing military force to counter either. The Canadian border is almost completely unguarded, and the Mexican border is no more than a fence in most locations — a far cry from the sort of military standoffs that have marked more adversarial borders in human history. Not only are Canada and Mexico not major threats, but the U.S. transport network allows the United States the luxury of being able to quickly move a smaller force to deal with occasional problems rather than requiring it to station large static forces on its borders.
Like the transport network, this also helps the U.S. focus its resources on other things.
Taken together, the integrated transport network, large tracts of usable land and lack of a need for a standing military have one critical implication: The U.S. government tends to take a hands-off approach to economic management, because geography has not cursed the United States with any endemic problems. This may mean that the United States — and especially its government — comes across as disorganized, but it shifts massive amounts of labor and capital to the private sector, which for the most part allows resources to flow to wherever they will achieve the most efficient and productive results.
Laissez-faire capitalism has its flaws. Inequality and social stress are just two of many less-than-desirable side effects. The side effects most relevant to the current situation are, of course, the speculative bubbles that cause recessions when they pop. But in terms of long-term economic efficiency and growth, a free capital system is unrivaled. For the United States, the end result has proved clear: The United States has exited each decade since post-Civil War Reconstruction more powerful than it was when it entered it. While there are many forces in the modern world that threaten various aspects of U.S. economic standing, there is not one that actually threatens the U.S. base geographic advantages.
Is the United States in recession? Of course. Will it be forever? Of course not. So long as U.S. geographic advantages remain intact, it takes no small amount of paranoia and pessimism to envision anything but long-term economic expansion for such a chunk of territory. In fact, there are a number of factors hinting that the United States may even be on the cusp of recovery.
Russia and the State
If in economic terms the United States has everything going for it geographically, then Russia is just the opposite. The Russian steppe lies deep in the interior of the Eurasian landmass, and as such is subject to climatic conditions much more hostile to human habitation and agriculture than is the American Midwest. Even in those blessed good years when crops are abundant in Russia, it has no river network to allow for easy transport of products.
Russia has no good warm-water ports to facilitate international trade (and has spent much of its history seeking access to one). Russia does have long rivers, but they are not interconnected as the Mississippi is with its tributaries, instead flowing north to the Arctic Ocean, which can support no more than a token population. The one exception is the Volga, which is critical to Western Russian commerce but flows to the Caspian, a storm-wracked and landlocked sea whose delta freezes in the winter (along with the entire Volga itself). Developing such unforgiving lands requires a massive outlay of funds simply to build the road and rail networks necessary to achieve the most basic of economic development. The cost is so extreme that Russia’s first ever intercontinental road was not completed until the 21st century, and it is little more than a two-lane path for much of its length. Between the lack of ports and the relatively low population densities, little of Russia’s transport system beyond the St. Petersburg/Moscow corridor approaches anything that hints of economic rationality.
Russia also has no meaningful external borders. It sits on the eastern end of the North European Plain, which stretches all the way to Normandy, France, and Russia’s connections to the Asian steppe flow deep into China. Because Russia lacks a decent internal transport network that can rapidly move armies from place to place, geography forces Russia to defend itself following two strategies. First, it requires massive standing armies on all of its borders. Second, it dictates that Russia continually push its boundaries outward to buffer its core against external threats.
Both strategies compromise Russian economic development even further. The large standing armies are a continual drain on state coffers and the country’s labor pool; their cost was a critical economic factor in the Soviet fall. The expansionist strategy not only absorbs large populations that do not wish to be part of the Russian state and so must constantly be policed — the core rationale for Russia’s robust security services — but also inflates Russia’s infrastructure development costs by increasing the amount of relatively useless territory Moscow is responsible for.
Russia’s labor and capital resources are woefully inadequate to overcome the state’s needs and vulnerabilities, which are legion. These endemic problems force Russia toward central planning; the full harnessing of all economic resources available is required if Russia is to achieve even a modicum of security and stability. One of the many results of this is severe economic inefficiency and a general dearth of an internal consumer market. Because capital and other resources can be flung forcefully at problems, however, active management can achieve specific national goals more readily than a hands-off, American-style model. This often gives the impression of significant progress in areas the Kremlin chooses to highlight.
But such achievements are largely limited to wherever the state happens to be directing its attention. In all other sectors, the lack of attention results in atrophy or criminalization. This is particularly true in modern Russia, where the ruling elite comprises just a handful of people, starkly limiting the amount of planning and oversight possible. And unless management is perfect in perception and execution, any mistakes are quickly magnified into national catastrophes. It is therefore no surprise to STRATFOR that the Russian economy has now fallen the furthest of any major economy during the current recession.
China and Separatism
China also faces significant hurdles, albeit none as daunting as Russia’s challenges. China’s core is the farmland of the Yellow River basin in the north of the country, a river that is not readily navigable and is remarkably flood prone. Simply avoiding periodic starvation requires a high level of state planning and coordination. (Wrestling a large river is not the easiest thing one can do.) Additionally, the southern half of the country has a subtropical climate, riddling it with diseases that the southerners are resistant to but the northerners are not. This compromises the north’s political control of the south.
Central control is also threatened by China’s maritime geography. China boasts two other rivers, but they do not link to each other or the Yellow naturally. And China’s best ports are at the mouths of these two rivers: Shanghai at the mouth of the Yangtze and Hong Kong/Macau/Guangzhou at the mouth of the Pearl. The Yellow boasts no significant ocean port. The end result is that other regional centers can and do develop economic means independent of Beijing.
(click image)
With geography complicating northern rule and supporting southern economic independence, Beijing’s age-old problem has been trying to keep China in one piece. Beijing has to underwrite massive (and expensive) development programs to stitch the country together with a common infrastructure, the most visible of which is the Grand Canal that links the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. The cost of such linkages instantly guarantees that while China may have a shot at being unified, it will always be capital-poor.
Beijing also has to provide its autonomy-minded regions with an economic incentive to remain part of Greater China, and “simple” infrastructure will not cut it. Modern China has turned to a state-centered finance model for this. Under the model, all of the scarce capital that is available is funneled to the state, which divvies it out via a handful of large state banks. These state banks then grant loans to various firms and local governments at below the cost of raising the capital. This provides a powerful economic stimulus that achieves maximum employment and growth — think of what you could do with a near-endless supply of loans at below 0 percent interest — but comes at the cost of encouraging projects that are loss-making, as no one is ever called to account for failures. (They can just get a new loan.) The resultant growth is rapid, but it is also unsustainable. It is no wonder, then, that the central government has chosen to keep its $2 trillion of currency reserves in dollar-based assets; the rate of return is greater, the value holds over a long period, and Beijing doesn’t have to worry about the United States seceding.
Because the domestic market is considerably limited by the poor-capital nature of the country, most producers choose to tap export markets to generate income. In times of plenty this works fairly well, but when Chinese goods are not needed, the entire Chinese system can seize up. Lack of exports reduces capital availability, which constrains loan availability. This in turn not only damages the ability of firms to employ China’s legions of citizens, but it also removes the primary reason the disparate Chinese regions pay homage to Beijing. China’s geography hardwires in a series of economic challenges that weaken the coherence of the state and make China dependent upon uninterrupted access to foreign markets to maintain state unity. As a result, China has not been a unified entity for the vast majority of its history, but instead a cauldron of competing regions that cleave along many different fault lines: coastal versus interior, Han versus minority, north versus south.
China’s survival technique for the current recession is simple. Because exports, which account for roughly half of China’s economic activity, have sunk by half, Beijing is throwing the equivalent of the financial kitchen sink at the problem. China has force-fed more loans through the banks in the first four months of 2009 than it did in the entirety of 2008. The long-term result could well bury China beneath a mountain of bad loans — a similar strategy resulted in Japan’s 1991 crash, from which Tokyo has yet to recover. But for now it is holding the country together. The bottom line remains, however: China’s recovery is completely dependent upon external demand for its production, and the most it can do on its own is tread water.
Discordant Europe
Europe faces an imbroglio somewhat similar to China’s.
Europe has a number of rivers that are easily navigable, providing a wealth of trade and development opportunities. But none of them interlinks with the others, retarding political unification. Europe has even more good harbors than the United States, but they are not evenly spread throughout the Continent, making some states capital-rich and others capital-poor. Europe boasts one huge piece of arable land on the North European Plain, but it is long and thin, and so occupied by no fewer than seven distinct ethnic groups.
These groups have constantly struggled — as have the various groups up and down Europe’s seemingly endless list of river valleys — but none has been able to emerge dominant, due to the webwork of mountains and peninsulas that make it nigh impossible to fully root out any particular group. And Europe’s wealth of islands close to the Continent, with Great Britain being only the most obvious, guarantee constant intervention to ensure that mainland Europe never unifies under a single power.
Every part of Europe has a radically different geography than the other parts, and thus the economic models the Europeans have adopted have little in common. The United Kingdom, with few immediate security threats and decent rivers and ports, has an almost American-style laissez-faire system. France, with three unconnected rivers lying wholly in its own territory, is a somewhat self-contained world, making economic nationalism its credo. Not only do the rivers in Germany not connect, but Berlin has to share them with other states. The Jutland Peninsula interrupts the coastline of Germany, which finds its sea access limited by the Danes, the Swedes and the British. Germany must plan in great detail to maximize its resource use to build an infrastructure that can compensate for its geographic deficiencies and link together its good — but disparate — geographic blessings. The result is a state that somewhat favors free enterprise, but within the limits framed by national needs.
And the list of differences goes on: Spain has long coasts and is arid; Austria is landlocked and quite wet; most of Greece is almost too mountainous to build on; it doesn’t get flatter than the Netherlands; tiny Estonia faces frozen seas in the winter; mammoth Italy has never even seen an icebreaker. Even if there were a supranational authority in Europe that could tax or regulate the banking sector or plan transnational responses, the propriety of any singular policy would be questionable at best.
Such stark regional differences give rise to such variant policies that many European states have a severe (and understandable) trust deficit when it comes to any hint of anything supranational. We are not simply taking about the European Union here, but rather a general distrust of anything cross-border in nature. One of the many outcomes of this is a preference for using local banks rather than stock exchanges for raising capital. After all, local banks tend to use local capital and are subject to local regulations, while stock exchanges tend to be internationalized in all respects. Spain, Italy, Sweden, Greece and Austria get more than 90 percent of their financing from banks, the United Kingdom 84 percent and Germany 76 percent — while for the United States it is only 40 percent.
And this has proved unfortunate in the extreme for today’s Europe. The current recession has its roots in a financial crisis that has most dramatically impacted banks, and European banks have proved far from immune. Until Europe’s banks recover, Europe will remain mired in recession. And since there cannot be a Pan-European solution, Europe’s recession could well prove to be the worst of all this time around.
Federal President's Visit to Germany: Mythologies of Dresden Must Be Rejected
President Obama's Visit to Germany: Mythologies of Dresden Must Be Rejected. By Ted R. Bromund
Heritage WebMemo #2460, May 28, 2009
On June 5, President Obama will visit the German city of Dresden. This visit will be intensely controversial. Dresden is most famous for the Anglo-American bombing raid against it on February 13, 1945. The Dresden raid did cause serious loss of life, but in the Second World War it was not unprecedented or unusual. The myths that have grown up about the raid were fostered by the Nazis and spread by post-war Soviet propaganda.
Because of this spurious symbolism, President Obama's decision to visit Dresden is ill-advised. During his visit, the President must absolutely reject any equation of the Western Allies and the Nazis. He must avoid accepting as true the claims of the Nazi and Soviet propagandists about the Dresden raid. Finally, he must stoutly defend the Anglo-American air campaign, which served vital military purposes and which led to the liberation of Western Europe from the Nazis in 1945, and, ultimately, of Eastern Europe from the Soviet Union in 1989.
The Raid on Dresden
On February 13, 1945, 1,100 British and American bombers attacked the city of Dresden, which lies south of Berlin. The bombers dropped a mix of high explosives and incendiary bombs, which created a firestorm that destroyed the center of the city. The number of casualties will never be known, but at the time Nazi authorities privately estimated that 25,000 people lost their lives. A 2004 study of the raid by British historian Frederick Taylor sets the toll at between 25,000 and 40,000 killed,[1] while in 2008 an authoritative commission of German historians estimated the likely toll at 18,000 and definitely no more than 25,000.[2]
The attack on Dresden was not unusual. In July 1943, a British raid on Hamburg created a similar firestorm that destroyed 56 percent of the city's dwellings and killed 40,000 people.[3] Both attacks were part of the Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign that was launched after U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943. That campaign followed the German bombing of Warsaw in September 1939 and Rotterdam in May 1940, the Nazi blitz against London in the summer and fall of 1940, the German destruction of Belgrade from the air in April 1941, and the British bombing campaign against Germany that began in May 1940 and intensified in 1942.
The raid on Dresden was made at the request of the Soviet Union, which wanted the city's railway junction destroyed to prevent the Germans from concentrating forces against advancing Soviet armies.[4] Dresden also contained over a hundred factories engaged in war-related work. As Taylor sums up, "Dresden was ranked high among the Reich's wartime industrial centers." This work included firms that made parts for torpedoes and machine guns.[5] Though Dresden was known as a cultural center, it was not, as later myth had it, a city of no military importance.
The Myths Surrounding Dresden
The Nazi regime, frustrated by its inability to stop the Anglo-American attacks, countered by waging a propaganda campaign against them. After the raid on Dresden, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, instead of downplaying it, decided to exaggerate the attack. He leaked falsified documents to the press that multiplied German casualties in the attack by 10: 25,000 became 250,000. He also played on Dresden's reputation by claiming that it was a city of cultural and artistic treasures only, not a center of war work.[6]
Goebbels's lies were widely accepted. As Taylor concludes, "The extent of the wide, long-lasting ripple of international outrage that followed the Dresden bombing represents, at least in part, Goebbels's final, dark masterpiece."[7]
After the war, Dresden was part of the Soviet zone of occupation and, later, East Germany. The Soviet and East German authorities used the Nazi myth of Dresden as part of their Cold War propaganda campaign against the U.S., Britain, and West Germany. By 1953, mass meetings in East Germany were being told that former Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower--by then, President of the United States--was personally responsible for the attack of the "Anglo-American Air Gangsters," a term invented by Goebbels. In 1954, the death toll for the raid was officially set by the Communist regime at "hundreds of thousands."[8]
This Nazi-inspired falsehood was widely accepted. It was repeated in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), which was informed by David Irving's The Destruction of Dresden (1963). In a 2000 libel trial in Britain, Irving was described by the judge as an "active Holocaust denier" who "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence."[9] Irving's treatment of the Dresden raid marked the beginning of an ideological assault on the morality of the war and of the Western Allies.
The Achievements of the Air Campaign
In reality, the raid on Dresden was part of the broader Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign. This campaign achieved five vital objectives that were central to the defeat of Nazi Germany.
First, from 1940 through 1942, it demonstrated that Britain retained the will to fight back. This was vital for British relations with the U.S. and, after June 1941, with the U.S.S.R.
Second, as eminent historian Richard J. Evans argues, the campaign "did even more than the defeats at Stalingrad and in North Africa to spread popular disillusion about the Nazi Party."[10]
Third, the campaign did immense damage to German war production: The Germans calculated in January 1945 that bombing had reduced their tank production by 25 percent.[11]
Fourth, the campaign compelled Germany to expend substantial resources on an air defense system, resources that could have been devoted to fighting the Western and Soviet armies. It also led Hitler to emphasize the development of the V-1 and V-2 rockets. Both were amazing technological achievements but military irrelevancies that consumed scarce resources.
Finally, the air campaign drew the German Luftwaffe away from the Eastern Front--so aiding the Soviet advance--and ultimately destroyed it in the West. Without this air superiority, the D-Day landings would not have been possible. It was those landings that liberated Western Europe from the Nazis and created a base of freedom that led to the collapse of Communist Eastern Europe in 1989. The air campaign did not win the war on its own, but its contributions were immense, and they did not end in 1945.
The Symbolism of Dresden and of Obama's Visit
But for many critics, the Dresden raid has come to symbolize the wrongs of the entire Anglo-American air war against Nazi Germany. For these critics, who are as strong on the far left as on the far right, the attack on Dresden was only the most egregious example of the Anglo-American conduct of that campaign, which they allege constituted a war crime.
The city of Dresden, thus, is the focal point of an effort to establish a degree of moral equivalence between the Western Allies and Nazi Germany and, more broadly, to discredit and criminalize U.S. and British foreign policy when--as in 2003 in the Iraq War--it moves in a direction the critics dislike.
This effort began with the Communist propaganda after 1945. As long as the Cold War lasted, it made little headway, but with the fall of the U.S.S.R. and the reunification of Germany, it grew in popularity. By 2002, with the publication of Jörg Friedrich's Der Brand, which subtly equates the air war on Germany with the Holocaust, the campaign had reached best-seller status.
The symbolism of Dresden, even if it is poorly grounded in the facts of history, is a reality: It stands in mythology for the supposed war crimes committed by the Americans and the British in their war against the Nazis and, by implication, for their supposed offenses since 1945. By choosing to visit Dresden, of all Germany's cities, President Obama will have this myth as his backdrop. He would have been better advised to avoid Dresden.
Obama's decision to visit the city raises the concern that he will use the opportunity to apologize for the Dresden raid. As that raid has come to symbolize the supposed evils of the entire air war, an apology for Dresden would have far reaching implications about the morality of the Second World War itself. It is particularly unfortunate that Obama will visit Dresden and the Buchenwald concentration camp on the same day. The fact that both the camp and Dresden have been deemed worthy of a presidential visit could be taken to imply the moral equivalence between them that revisionists like Friedrich have sought to create.
What Obama Must Do
The President must not fall for the Nazi- or Communist-inspired myths about Dresden, such as the number of people killed in the raid or the importance of the war-related work being done in the city.
He must also avoid giving any credence whatsoever to efforts to equate the Western Allies and the Nazis, or the air war and the Holocaust. Indeed, he should counter the unfortunate scheduling of his visit to the Buchenwald camp by making an explicit statement that Dresden was part of the broader Anglo-American air campaign against the Nazi regime and that this campaign was vital to the defeat of the Nazis and the victory of the West in 1945.
Finally, he should make the broader point that the lesson of the Second World War is not that there should never again be a war nor that pacifism is a moral choice. The lessons of that war are that evil is a reality, that appeasement is not a virtue, and that no war--even in pursuit of just ends like the defeat of Nazi Germany--can be won without difficult but necessary choices.
Ted R. Bromund, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, a division of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, at The Heritage Foundation.
References
[1]Frederick Taylor, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), pp. 443-48.
[2]Frederick Taylor, "How Many Died in the Bombing of Dresden?" Spiegel Online, October 2, 2008, at http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,581992,00.html (May 27, 2009).
[3]Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), p. 446.
[4]Taylor, Dresden, pp. 190-191.
[5]See Taylor, Dresden, ch. 13, and in particular p. 148.
[6]Ibid., pp. 370-371.
[7]Ibid., p. 372.
[8]Ibid., pp. 392-393.
[9]"The Ruling Against David Irving," The Guardian, April 11, 2000, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/irving/article/0,,181049,00.html (May 27, 2009).
[10]Evans, Third Reich, p. 463.
[11]Ibid., p. 462.
Heritage WebMemo #2460, May 28, 2009
On June 5, President Obama will visit the German city of Dresden. This visit will be intensely controversial. Dresden is most famous for the Anglo-American bombing raid against it on February 13, 1945. The Dresden raid did cause serious loss of life, but in the Second World War it was not unprecedented or unusual. The myths that have grown up about the raid were fostered by the Nazis and spread by post-war Soviet propaganda.
Because of this spurious symbolism, President Obama's decision to visit Dresden is ill-advised. During his visit, the President must absolutely reject any equation of the Western Allies and the Nazis. He must avoid accepting as true the claims of the Nazi and Soviet propagandists about the Dresden raid. Finally, he must stoutly defend the Anglo-American air campaign, which served vital military purposes and which led to the liberation of Western Europe from the Nazis in 1945, and, ultimately, of Eastern Europe from the Soviet Union in 1989.
The Raid on Dresden
On February 13, 1945, 1,100 British and American bombers attacked the city of Dresden, which lies south of Berlin. The bombers dropped a mix of high explosives and incendiary bombs, which created a firestorm that destroyed the center of the city. The number of casualties will never be known, but at the time Nazi authorities privately estimated that 25,000 people lost their lives. A 2004 study of the raid by British historian Frederick Taylor sets the toll at between 25,000 and 40,000 killed,[1] while in 2008 an authoritative commission of German historians estimated the likely toll at 18,000 and definitely no more than 25,000.[2]
The attack on Dresden was not unusual. In July 1943, a British raid on Hamburg created a similar firestorm that destroyed 56 percent of the city's dwellings and killed 40,000 people.[3] Both attacks were part of the Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign that was launched after U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943. That campaign followed the German bombing of Warsaw in September 1939 and Rotterdam in May 1940, the Nazi blitz against London in the summer and fall of 1940, the German destruction of Belgrade from the air in April 1941, and the British bombing campaign against Germany that began in May 1940 and intensified in 1942.
The raid on Dresden was made at the request of the Soviet Union, which wanted the city's railway junction destroyed to prevent the Germans from concentrating forces against advancing Soviet armies.[4] Dresden also contained over a hundred factories engaged in war-related work. As Taylor sums up, "Dresden was ranked high among the Reich's wartime industrial centers." This work included firms that made parts for torpedoes and machine guns.[5] Though Dresden was known as a cultural center, it was not, as later myth had it, a city of no military importance.
The Myths Surrounding Dresden
The Nazi regime, frustrated by its inability to stop the Anglo-American attacks, countered by waging a propaganda campaign against them. After the raid on Dresden, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, instead of downplaying it, decided to exaggerate the attack. He leaked falsified documents to the press that multiplied German casualties in the attack by 10: 25,000 became 250,000. He also played on Dresden's reputation by claiming that it was a city of cultural and artistic treasures only, not a center of war work.[6]
Goebbels's lies were widely accepted. As Taylor concludes, "The extent of the wide, long-lasting ripple of international outrage that followed the Dresden bombing represents, at least in part, Goebbels's final, dark masterpiece."[7]
After the war, Dresden was part of the Soviet zone of occupation and, later, East Germany. The Soviet and East German authorities used the Nazi myth of Dresden as part of their Cold War propaganda campaign against the U.S., Britain, and West Germany. By 1953, mass meetings in East Germany were being told that former Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower--by then, President of the United States--was personally responsible for the attack of the "Anglo-American Air Gangsters," a term invented by Goebbels. In 1954, the death toll for the raid was officially set by the Communist regime at "hundreds of thousands."[8]
This Nazi-inspired falsehood was widely accepted. It was repeated in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), which was informed by David Irving's The Destruction of Dresden (1963). In a 2000 libel trial in Britain, Irving was described by the judge as an "active Holocaust denier" who "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence."[9] Irving's treatment of the Dresden raid marked the beginning of an ideological assault on the morality of the war and of the Western Allies.
The Achievements of the Air Campaign
In reality, the raid on Dresden was part of the broader Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign. This campaign achieved five vital objectives that were central to the defeat of Nazi Germany.
First, from 1940 through 1942, it demonstrated that Britain retained the will to fight back. This was vital for British relations with the U.S. and, after June 1941, with the U.S.S.R.
Second, as eminent historian Richard J. Evans argues, the campaign "did even more than the defeats at Stalingrad and in North Africa to spread popular disillusion about the Nazi Party."[10]
Third, the campaign did immense damage to German war production: The Germans calculated in January 1945 that bombing had reduced their tank production by 25 percent.[11]
Fourth, the campaign compelled Germany to expend substantial resources on an air defense system, resources that could have been devoted to fighting the Western and Soviet armies. It also led Hitler to emphasize the development of the V-1 and V-2 rockets. Both were amazing technological achievements but military irrelevancies that consumed scarce resources.
Finally, the air campaign drew the German Luftwaffe away from the Eastern Front--so aiding the Soviet advance--and ultimately destroyed it in the West. Without this air superiority, the D-Day landings would not have been possible. It was those landings that liberated Western Europe from the Nazis and created a base of freedom that led to the collapse of Communist Eastern Europe in 1989. The air campaign did not win the war on its own, but its contributions were immense, and they did not end in 1945.
The Symbolism of Dresden and of Obama's Visit
But for many critics, the Dresden raid has come to symbolize the wrongs of the entire Anglo-American air war against Nazi Germany. For these critics, who are as strong on the far left as on the far right, the attack on Dresden was only the most egregious example of the Anglo-American conduct of that campaign, which they allege constituted a war crime.
The city of Dresden, thus, is the focal point of an effort to establish a degree of moral equivalence between the Western Allies and Nazi Germany and, more broadly, to discredit and criminalize U.S. and British foreign policy when--as in 2003 in the Iraq War--it moves in a direction the critics dislike.
This effort began with the Communist propaganda after 1945. As long as the Cold War lasted, it made little headway, but with the fall of the U.S.S.R. and the reunification of Germany, it grew in popularity. By 2002, with the publication of Jörg Friedrich's Der Brand, which subtly equates the air war on Germany with the Holocaust, the campaign had reached best-seller status.
The symbolism of Dresden, even if it is poorly grounded in the facts of history, is a reality: It stands in mythology for the supposed war crimes committed by the Americans and the British in their war against the Nazis and, by implication, for their supposed offenses since 1945. By choosing to visit Dresden, of all Germany's cities, President Obama will have this myth as his backdrop. He would have been better advised to avoid Dresden.
Obama's decision to visit the city raises the concern that he will use the opportunity to apologize for the Dresden raid. As that raid has come to symbolize the supposed evils of the entire air war, an apology for Dresden would have far reaching implications about the morality of the Second World War itself. It is particularly unfortunate that Obama will visit Dresden and the Buchenwald concentration camp on the same day. The fact that both the camp and Dresden have been deemed worthy of a presidential visit could be taken to imply the moral equivalence between them that revisionists like Friedrich have sought to create.
What Obama Must Do
The President must not fall for the Nazi- or Communist-inspired myths about Dresden, such as the number of people killed in the raid or the importance of the war-related work being done in the city.
He must also avoid giving any credence whatsoever to efforts to equate the Western Allies and the Nazis, or the air war and the Holocaust. Indeed, he should counter the unfortunate scheduling of his visit to the Buchenwald camp by making an explicit statement that Dresden was part of the broader Anglo-American air campaign against the Nazi regime and that this campaign was vital to the defeat of the Nazis and the victory of the West in 1945.
Finally, he should make the broader point that the lesson of the Second World War is not that there should never again be a war nor that pacifism is a moral choice. The lessons of that war are that evil is a reality, that appeasement is not a virtue, and that no war--even in pursuit of just ends like the defeat of Nazi Germany--can be won without difficult but necessary choices.
Ted R. Bromund, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, a division of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, at The Heritage Foundation.
References
[1]Frederick Taylor, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), pp. 443-48.
[2]Frederick Taylor, "How Many Died in the Bombing of Dresden?" Spiegel Online, October 2, 2008, at http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,581992,00.html (May 27, 2009).
[3]Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), p. 446.
[4]Taylor, Dresden, pp. 190-191.
[5]See Taylor, Dresden, ch. 13, and in particular p. 148.
[6]Ibid., pp. 370-371.
[7]Ibid., p. 372.
[8]Ibid., pp. 392-393.
[9]"The Ruling Against David Irving," The Guardian, April 11, 2000, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/irving/article/0,,181049,00.html (May 27, 2009).
[10]Evans, Third Reich, p. 463.
[11]Ibid., p. 462.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
The match that lit Germany's radicals was a Stasi spy - Karl-Heinz Kurras
Ghosts of the '60s in Germany. WSJ Editorial
The match that lit Germany's radicals was a Stasi spy.
WSJ, May 28, 2009
The past can never be predicted, and perhaps never more so than when it comes to the German left. Two years ago, we learned that Nobel Laureate Günter Grass -- the literary scourge of all things fascist, especially America -- had himself been a member of the Waffen SS. Now comes another zinger that casts the radical political and social upheavals of the late 1960s in new and revealing light.
The historical surprise concerns a turning point whose ripple effects were felt in Europe and beyond. On June 2, 1967, a West German policeman fatally shot an unarmed, 26-year-old literature student in the back of his head during a demonstration in West Berlin against the visiting Shah of Iran. Benno Ohnesorg became "the left wing's first martyr" (per the weekly Der Spiegel). His dying moments captured in a famous news photograph, Ohnesorg galvanized a generation of left-wing students and activists who rose up in the iconic year of 1968. What was a fringe soon turned to terrorism.
To them his killer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, was the "fascist cop" at the service of a capitalist, pro-American "latent fascist state." "The post-fascist system has become a pre-fascist one," the German Socialist Student Union declared in their indictment hours after the killing. The ensuing movement drew its legitimacy and fervor from the Ohnesorg killing. Further enraging righteous passions, Mr. Kurras was acquitted by a court and returned to the police force.
Now all that's being turned on its head. Last week, a pair of German historians unearthed the truth about Mr. Kurras. Since 1955, he had worked for the Stasi, East Germany's dreaded secret police. According to voluminous Stasi archives, his code name was Otto Bohl. The files don't say whether the Stasi ordered him to do what he did in 1967. But that only fuels speculation about a Stasi hand behind one of postwar Germany's transformative events.
Mr. Kurras, who is 81 and lives in Berlin, told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that he belonged to the East German Communist Party. "Should I be ashamed of that or something?" He denied he was paid to spy for the Stasi, but asked, "What if I did work for them? What does it matter? It doesn't change anything." Mr. Kurras may be the monster of the leftist imagination -- albeit now it turns out he is one of their own.
To answer his last question, this revelation matters. It belies yet again the claims of the '68 hard left, passed on to our times as anti-globalization riots, that a free market and liberal democracy are somehow "fascistic." This brand of intolerance is at core prone to violence. The true, ruthless heirs to National Socialism and the Gestapo were the East German regime and the Stasi, the Soviets and the KGB. And in turn, some of the terrorist groups that emerged from the radicalization of the 1960s.
Present in Berlin that June day in 1967 were Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin, who went on to found the "Baader-Meinhof Gang," aka the Red Army Faction. From 1968 until 1991, the RAF carried out dozens of kidnappings, bombing and murders -- all to fight the "roots of capitalism" and a "resurgent Nazi state." As 1968 historian Paul Berman notes, the most famous terrorist organization born in this era was the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The analogue in the U.S. became the Weather Underground.
Some '68ers grew up and peeled away. Others took time to see its dark side. An early reveille came at the 1972 Munich Olympics, when PLO gunmen aided by a leftist German group, the Revolutionary Cells, took hostage and killed 11 Israeli athletes and coaches. The 1974 publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" was another. So was Pol Pot, the Vietnamese boat people; the list goes on.
Historical amnesia makes us vulnerable to repeating mistakes. Particularly in an America, where many quickly forgot the lessons of the Cold War and of 9/11. More than most nations, Germans are condemned to a living history. That turns up the kinds of surprises that force a hard re-examination of the past and the present.
The match that lit Germany's radicals was a Stasi spy.
WSJ, May 28, 2009
The past can never be predicted, and perhaps never more so than when it comes to the German left. Two years ago, we learned that Nobel Laureate Günter Grass -- the literary scourge of all things fascist, especially America -- had himself been a member of the Waffen SS. Now comes another zinger that casts the radical political and social upheavals of the late 1960s in new and revealing light.
The historical surprise concerns a turning point whose ripple effects were felt in Europe and beyond. On June 2, 1967, a West German policeman fatally shot an unarmed, 26-year-old literature student in the back of his head during a demonstration in West Berlin against the visiting Shah of Iran. Benno Ohnesorg became "the left wing's first martyr" (per the weekly Der Spiegel). His dying moments captured in a famous news photograph, Ohnesorg galvanized a generation of left-wing students and activists who rose up in the iconic year of 1968. What was a fringe soon turned to terrorism.
To them his killer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, was the "fascist cop" at the service of a capitalist, pro-American "latent fascist state." "The post-fascist system has become a pre-fascist one," the German Socialist Student Union declared in their indictment hours after the killing. The ensuing movement drew its legitimacy and fervor from the Ohnesorg killing. Further enraging righteous passions, Mr. Kurras was acquitted by a court and returned to the police force.
Now all that's being turned on its head. Last week, a pair of German historians unearthed the truth about Mr. Kurras. Since 1955, he had worked for the Stasi, East Germany's dreaded secret police. According to voluminous Stasi archives, his code name was Otto Bohl. The files don't say whether the Stasi ordered him to do what he did in 1967. But that only fuels speculation about a Stasi hand behind one of postwar Germany's transformative events.
Mr. Kurras, who is 81 and lives in Berlin, told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that he belonged to the East German Communist Party. "Should I be ashamed of that or something?" He denied he was paid to spy for the Stasi, but asked, "What if I did work for them? What does it matter? It doesn't change anything." Mr. Kurras may be the monster of the leftist imagination -- albeit now it turns out he is one of their own.
To answer his last question, this revelation matters. It belies yet again the claims of the '68 hard left, passed on to our times as anti-globalization riots, that a free market and liberal democracy are somehow "fascistic." This brand of intolerance is at core prone to violence. The true, ruthless heirs to National Socialism and the Gestapo were the East German regime and the Stasi, the Soviets and the KGB. And in turn, some of the terrorist groups that emerged from the radicalization of the 1960s.
Present in Berlin that June day in 1967 were Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin, who went on to found the "Baader-Meinhof Gang," aka the Red Army Faction. From 1968 until 1991, the RAF carried out dozens of kidnappings, bombing and murders -- all to fight the "roots of capitalism" and a "resurgent Nazi state." As 1968 historian Paul Berman notes, the most famous terrorist organization born in this era was the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The analogue in the U.S. became the Weather Underground.
Some '68ers grew up and peeled away. Others took time to see its dark side. An early reveille came at the 1972 Munich Olympics, when PLO gunmen aided by a leftist German group, the Revolutionary Cells, took hostage and killed 11 Israeli athletes and coaches. The 1974 publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" was another. So was Pol Pot, the Vietnamese boat people; the list goes on.
Historical amnesia makes us vulnerable to repeating mistakes. Particularly in an America, where many quickly forgot the lessons of the Cold War and of 9/11. More than most nations, Germans are condemned to a living history. That turns up the kinds of surprises that force a hard re-examination of the past and the present.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Moving toward Europe--but Do Americans Want to Go?
Moving toward Europe--but Do Americans Want to Go? By Michael Barone
The European model sacrifices growth in the hope of reducing economic inequality.
AEI, Tuesday, April 28, 2009
As the Obama presidency reaches the hundred-day mark, it is becoming apparent that he would like America to take on a more European cast. Increased government spending, greater government control of health care, and the implementation of a cap-and-trade system are all goals that President Obama has tried to further in his first hundred days. Yet pursuing such policies would end up hindering growth in the name of economic equality--and Americans are ambivalent about moving their country in this direction.
Ninety-nine days in, with 1,362 days to go, and we can see with some clarity the trajectory on which Barack Obama wants to take the United States. To put it in geographical terms, he wants to move us some considerable distance toward Europe.
This is apparent in the budget he has presented for the next fiscal year and its projections for the years to come. Government spending is scheduled to rise as a percentage of the economy. This will be accomplished by raising taxes and, even more, by borrowing that will double the national debt in five years and nearly triple it in 10 years. This trajectory can be altered in the future, but much of it is set in stone by the $3 trillion-plus deficit that will, give or take a few hundred billion, be produced by the budget voted this year.
Other Obama goals are less certain of achievement. He wants government to take over much of the one-seventh of the economy that is devoted to health care, but how much and by what means are still unclear. One result, common in Europe, is likely: rationing of care. Obama also wants to reshape the energy sector by imposing a cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions. This will raise energy costs, particularly on the 60 percent of Americans whose electricity is produced by coal, and will provide opportunities for corporations to make profits by gaming the system. But it's not clear that it will encourage development of the one plentiful non-carbon-emitting energy source that France, for one, relies on--nuclear power.
The European model sacrifices growth in the hope of reducing economic inequality. American experience suggests that this can work, but not perhaps at an acceptable cost.
There are two decades in which economic inequality was sharply reduced. One was the 1930s. High earners made less and low earners fell down toward zero, so incomes were more equal. But the cost in lost economic growth and human misery were very high.
The other decade was the 1940s when, in the phrase of the day, there was a war on. Government controlled wages and prices, required workers to join unions, ordered industries to produce arms and mobilized 16 million Americans into the military.
But those policies seem unlikely today.
Obama has only limited plans to take over the private sector economy (he hopes cap-and-trade will produce otherwise uneconomic "green" jobs), and he has abandoned, at least for the moment, the unions' card check bill that would enroll millions of workers in unions by effectively abolishing the secret ballot in unionization elections and then having federal arbitrators impose wage levels and work rules. And he certainly has no plans to expand the military to its proportion of the population in World War II--35 million men and women.
Still, Obama may take us some distance toward the Europe whose "dynamic union" he hailed in Strasbourg, with some marginal gains in economic equality and, if Europe's experience is a guide, considerably less economic creativity and growth.
Abroad, Obama has eschewed American "arrogance" and embraced the European model of diplomatic engagement and avoidance of confrontation. He argues that if we show "persistence" in apologizing for America's past and willingness to negotiate with Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and shake hands with Hugo Chavez, they will come to recognize our good will and make concessions they would otherwise refuse.
Perhaps. But one recalls that this was the European response to the genocide in its own back yard by Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic and that he was brought to justice only by the force of American arms. That lesson has not been lost on Obama who, for all his rhetoric, has ordered troop increases in Afghanistan despite the refusal of Europeans to do more.
Obama and his party were brought to power by George W. Bush's perceived incompetence on Katrina and Iraq, not because of some pent-up and suddenly overwhelming demand for the Europeanization of America.
Polls show voters ambivalent about Obama's expansion of government, skeptical of global warming theories, and appreciative despite the financial crisis and recession of the efficacy of market capitalism to produce economic growth. They are also confident, as Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy were, that America is a special and unique country. Obama audaciously believes he can lead the country in a direction it's not sure it wants to go.
Michael Barone is a resident fellow at AEI.
The European model sacrifices growth in the hope of reducing economic inequality.
AEI, Tuesday, April 28, 2009
As the Obama presidency reaches the hundred-day mark, it is becoming apparent that he would like America to take on a more European cast. Increased government spending, greater government control of health care, and the implementation of a cap-and-trade system are all goals that President Obama has tried to further in his first hundred days. Yet pursuing such policies would end up hindering growth in the name of economic equality--and Americans are ambivalent about moving their country in this direction.
Ninety-nine days in, with 1,362 days to go, and we can see with some clarity the trajectory on which Barack Obama wants to take the United States. To put it in geographical terms, he wants to move us some considerable distance toward Europe.
This is apparent in the budget he has presented for the next fiscal year and its projections for the years to come. Government spending is scheduled to rise as a percentage of the economy. This will be accomplished by raising taxes and, even more, by borrowing that will double the national debt in five years and nearly triple it in 10 years. This trajectory can be altered in the future, but much of it is set in stone by the $3 trillion-plus deficit that will, give or take a few hundred billion, be produced by the budget voted this year.
Other Obama goals are less certain of achievement. He wants government to take over much of the one-seventh of the economy that is devoted to health care, but how much and by what means are still unclear. One result, common in Europe, is likely: rationing of care. Obama also wants to reshape the energy sector by imposing a cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions. This will raise energy costs, particularly on the 60 percent of Americans whose electricity is produced by coal, and will provide opportunities for corporations to make profits by gaming the system. But it's not clear that it will encourage development of the one plentiful non-carbon-emitting energy source that France, for one, relies on--nuclear power.
The European model sacrifices growth in the hope of reducing economic inequality. American experience suggests that this can work, but not perhaps at an acceptable cost.
There are two decades in which economic inequality was sharply reduced. One was the 1930s. High earners made less and low earners fell down toward zero, so incomes were more equal. But the cost in lost economic growth and human misery were very high.
The other decade was the 1940s when, in the phrase of the day, there was a war on. Government controlled wages and prices, required workers to join unions, ordered industries to produce arms and mobilized 16 million Americans into the military.
But those policies seem unlikely today.
Obama has only limited plans to take over the private sector economy (he hopes cap-and-trade will produce otherwise uneconomic "green" jobs), and he has abandoned, at least for the moment, the unions' card check bill that would enroll millions of workers in unions by effectively abolishing the secret ballot in unionization elections and then having federal arbitrators impose wage levels and work rules. And he certainly has no plans to expand the military to its proportion of the population in World War II--35 million men and women.
Still, Obama may take us some distance toward the Europe whose "dynamic union" he hailed in Strasbourg, with some marginal gains in economic equality and, if Europe's experience is a guide, considerably less economic creativity and growth.
Abroad, Obama has eschewed American "arrogance" and embraced the European model of diplomatic engagement and avoidance of confrontation. He argues that if we show "persistence" in apologizing for America's past and willingness to negotiate with Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and shake hands with Hugo Chavez, they will come to recognize our good will and make concessions they would otherwise refuse.
Perhaps. But one recalls that this was the European response to the genocide in its own back yard by Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic and that he was brought to justice only by the force of American arms. That lesson has not been lost on Obama who, for all his rhetoric, has ordered troop increases in Afghanistan despite the refusal of Europeans to do more.
Obama and his party were brought to power by George W. Bush's perceived incompetence on Katrina and Iraq, not because of some pent-up and suddenly overwhelming demand for the Europeanization of America.
Polls show voters ambivalent about Obama's expansion of government, skeptical of global warming theories, and appreciative despite the financial crisis and recession of the efficacy of market capitalism to produce economic growth. They are also confident, as Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy were, that America is a special and unique country. Obama audaciously believes he can lead the country in a direction it's not sure it wants to go.
Michael Barone is a resident fellow at AEI.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Ukraine Powers Chinese Carriers
Ukraine Powers Chinese Carriers
Strategy Page, April 6, 2009
China is working closely with Ukraine to supply key components for the aircraft carriers China is building. Ukraine supplied many components for Russian carriers back in the days of the Soviet Union (which Ukraine was a part of). Now independent, Ukraine is eager to find customers for local manufacturers that can produce carrier components. Russia is no longer building carriers, despite talk of restarting that program.
Last year, Chinese officials visited Ukraine and inspected the naval aviation training facilities that were built there before the Soviet Union dissolved. Ukraine wants to use those facilities to establish an international center for training carrier aviators.
A major Ukrainian product the Chinese are interested in are ship engines, especially the large ones a carrier would require. Chinese gas turbines are not all that efficient and reliable. The Ukrainian UGT-16000 and UGT-25000 turbines, developed from the DT-59 they have been making since 1975, are major competitors for General Electric models used in large ships. Ukrainian firms build a number of other world class components for large ships, and China is looking to acquire equipment, and technology. Ukraine is aware of the fact that the Chinese steal technology, but right now Ukraine needs the business, and China needs the turbines.
Strategy Page, April 6, 2009
China is working closely with Ukraine to supply key components for the aircraft carriers China is building. Ukraine supplied many components for Russian carriers back in the days of the Soviet Union (which Ukraine was a part of). Now independent, Ukraine is eager to find customers for local manufacturers that can produce carrier components. Russia is no longer building carriers, despite talk of restarting that program.
Last year, Chinese officials visited Ukraine and inspected the naval aviation training facilities that were built there before the Soviet Union dissolved. Ukraine wants to use those facilities to establish an international center for training carrier aviators.
A major Ukrainian product the Chinese are interested in are ship engines, especially the large ones a carrier would require. Chinese gas turbines are not all that efficient and reliable. The Ukrainian UGT-16000 and UGT-25000 turbines, developed from the DT-59 they have been making since 1975, are major competitors for General Electric models used in large ships. Ukrainian firms build a number of other world class components for large ships, and China is looking to acquire equipment, and technology. Ukraine is aware of the fact that the Chinese steal technology, but right now Ukraine needs the business, and China needs the turbines.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Belgium & Spain offer NATO trainers for Afghanistan
Barack Obama fails to win Nato troops he wants for Afghanistan. By Michael Evans and David Charter in Strasbourg
The Times, April 4, 2009
Barack Obama made an impassioned plea to America’s allies to send more troops to Afghanistan, warning that failure to do so would leave Europe vulnerable to more terrorist atrocities.
But though he continued to dazzle Europeans on his debut international tour, the Continent’s leaders turned their backs on the US President.
Gordon Brown was the only one to offer substantial help. He offered to send several hundred extra British soldiers to provide security during the August election, but even that fell short of the thousands of combat troops that the US was hoping to prise from the Prime Minister.
Just two other allies made firm offers of troops. Belgium offered to send 35 military trainers and Spain offered 12. Mr Obama’s host, Nicolas Sarkozy, refused his request.
The derisory response threatened to tarnish Mr Obama’s European tour, which yesterday included a spellbinding performance in Strasbourg in which he offered the world a vision of a future free of nuclear weapons.
Mr Obama – who has pledged 21,000 more troops to combat the growing insurgency and is under pressure from generals to supply up to 10,000 more – used the eve of Nato’s 60th anniversary summit to declare bluntly that it was time for allies to do their share. “Europe should not simply expect the United States to shoulder that burden alone,” he said. “This is a joint problem it requires a joint effort.”
He said that failing to support the US surge would leave Europe open to a fresh terrorist offensive. “It is probably more likely that al-Qaeda would be able to launch a serious terrorist attack on Europe than on the United States because of proximity,” he said.
The presidential charm offensive failed to move fellow Nato countries. President Sarkozy told Mr Obama that France would not be sending reinforcements to bolster its existing force northeast of Kabul.
Germany, Italy, Poland, Canada and Denmark said that they were considering their positions. After a meeting with Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, Mr Obama tried to apply further moral pressure. “I am sure that Germany, as one of the most important leaders in Europe, will be stepping up to the plate and helping us to get the job done.”
Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the Nato Secretary-General, warned that new laws proposed by President Karzai in Afghanistan sanctioning child marriage and marital rape had made it harder to raise more soldiers.
“We are there to defend universal values and when I see, at the moment, a law threatening to come into effect which fundamentally violates women’s rights and human rights, that worries me,” he said.
“I have a problem to explain to a critical public audience in Europe, be it the UK or elsewhere, why I’m sending the guys to the Hindu Kush.”
The temporary British deployment falls short of the 2,000 soldiers that the Army had planned to deploy long-term to Afghanistan and appeared to catch defence chiefs by surprise.
Mr Brown announced the commitment as he flew into Strasbourg for the two-day summit, but hopes that it would spur other allies to follow suit were soon dashed. British officials said that the extra troops, expected to number between 500 and 700 – increasing Britain’s military strength there to about 9,000 – would be dispatched to southern Afghanistan for a four-month period leading up to and beyond the election, due to take place on August 20.
The plan is to withdraw them once the election is over. Mr Brown said that the extra troops were only supposed to provide a “temporary uplift”.
Military contingency plans remain on the table to send up to 2,000 more troops long-term, taking the total to 10,000, but that will depend on the political will to approve the deployment.
Although the Prime Minister discussed Afghanistan with President Obama when they held bilateral talks before the G20 summit in London, it is understood that no formal offer of extra troops was made.
The Times, April 4, 2009
Barack Obama made an impassioned plea to America’s allies to send more troops to Afghanistan, warning that failure to do so would leave Europe vulnerable to more terrorist atrocities.
But though he continued to dazzle Europeans on his debut international tour, the Continent’s leaders turned their backs on the US President.
Gordon Brown was the only one to offer substantial help. He offered to send several hundred extra British soldiers to provide security during the August election, but even that fell short of the thousands of combat troops that the US was hoping to prise from the Prime Minister.
Just two other allies made firm offers of troops. Belgium offered to send 35 military trainers and Spain offered 12. Mr Obama’s host, Nicolas Sarkozy, refused his request.
The derisory response threatened to tarnish Mr Obama’s European tour, which yesterday included a spellbinding performance in Strasbourg in which he offered the world a vision of a future free of nuclear weapons.
Mr Obama – who has pledged 21,000 more troops to combat the growing insurgency and is under pressure from generals to supply up to 10,000 more – used the eve of Nato’s 60th anniversary summit to declare bluntly that it was time for allies to do their share. “Europe should not simply expect the United States to shoulder that burden alone,” he said. “This is a joint problem it requires a joint effort.”
He said that failing to support the US surge would leave Europe open to a fresh terrorist offensive. “It is probably more likely that al-Qaeda would be able to launch a serious terrorist attack on Europe than on the United States because of proximity,” he said.
The presidential charm offensive failed to move fellow Nato countries. President Sarkozy told Mr Obama that France would not be sending reinforcements to bolster its existing force northeast of Kabul.
Germany, Italy, Poland, Canada and Denmark said that they were considering their positions. After a meeting with Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, Mr Obama tried to apply further moral pressure. “I am sure that Germany, as one of the most important leaders in Europe, will be stepping up to the plate and helping us to get the job done.”
Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the Nato Secretary-General, warned that new laws proposed by President Karzai in Afghanistan sanctioning child marriage and marital rape had made it harder to raise more soldiers.
“We are there to defend universal values and when I see, at the moment, a law threatening to come into effect which fundamentally violates women’s rights and human rights, that worries me,” he said.
“I have a problem to explain to a critical public audience in Europe, be it the UK or elsewhere, why I’m sending the guys to the Hindu Kush.”
The temporary British deployment falls short of the 2,000 soldiers that the Army had planned to deploy long-term to Afghanistan and appeared to catch defence chiefs by surprise.
Mr Brown announced the commitment as he flew into Strasbourg for the two-day summit, but hopes that it would spur other allies to follow suit were soon dashed. British officials said that the extra troops, expected to number between 500 and 700 – increasing Britain’s military strength there to about 9,000 – would be dispatched to southern Afghanistan for a four-month period leading up to and beyond the election, due to take place on August 20.
The plan is to withdraw them once the election is over. Mr Brown said that the extra troops were only supposed to provide a “temporary uplift”.
Military contingency plans remain on the table to send up to 2,000 more troops long-term, taking the total to 10,000, but that will depend on the political will to approve the deployment.
Although the Prime Minister discussed Afghanistan with President Obama when they held bilateral talks before the G20 summit in London, it is understood that no formal offer of extra troops was made.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
The Implications of the European Contribution to the Global Financial Crisis for the G-20 Summit
The Implications of the European Contribution to the Global Financial Crisis for the G-20 Summit. By Ted R. Bromund and Daniella Markheim
Heritage WebMemo #2369
March 30, 2009
The story that Europe is telling about the global financial crisis is untrue: The crisis is not simply the fault of the United States. European policies, on both the national and the EU levels, contributed to the buildup of systemic risk that led to the crisis. These policies reduced European competitiveness, led to high levels of leverage at European banks, helped to create property bubbles across Europe, and--through both the Euro and the broader policy of European integration--introduced moral hazard into European markets.
The basic fallacies of European policies are their emphasis on top-down control and their advocacy of a one-size-fits-all model. The policies the EU is advancing for the G-20 summit repeat these errors on a larger scale. Instead of blaming the U.S., Europe should address its lack of competitiveness and growing entitlements burden. Doubling down on centralized control will result in lower growth and a less stable world economy at a time when Europe needs to promote a sustained recovery.
The European Myth
Europe is telling a story about the origins of the global financial crisis. The story is simple: It is America's fault. The BBC reports that the European resistance to stimulus spending derives from its reluctance to go deeper into debt "to rescue the US economy, which they argue was the country that caused the crisis in the first place."[1] The Economist concluded in October that the European approach to the crisis was based in part on the "flawed" assumption that the financial system is chiefly suffering from "transatlantic contagion."
The first signs of the current global financial crisis did appear in the U.S. But the collapse of the U.S. real estate market, though important, was merely the first stone in an avalanche. As the Economist pointed out, the view that only the U.S. is to blame "fails to take account of ... slowing [European] economies ... the slumping housing markets in countries such as Spain and Ireland ... [and] European banks' dependence on wholesale funding."[2]
The origins of the global financial crash, not surprisingly, are global. Some factors affected some countries more than others, but no country has cause to claim that it was damaged solely by the actions of others. Yet it is those actions that must now face scrutiny. If there is a common theme in the crisis, it can be found in the interaction between politics and economics that created perverse and ultimately dangerous incentives.
The European Reality
In spite of the desire of the EU to pretend otherwise, the European states are very different. Thus, at the national level, the problems these states must confront are not identical. Nevertheless, four features that are present in more than one European state deserve to be highlighted:
Moreover, the Euro was, in essence, a seal of approval on countries such as Spain, Portugal, and Greece. This encouraged investors to regard these markets as less risky than they in fact were. The admission of many of the now-troubled Eastern European states into the EU also created moral hazard in the market by encouraging investors to treat these states as if they ranked with the established economies of the West. This approach did not accord with reality.
The False European Solutions
In short, a series of policies--some national, some European--created a framework that encouraged risky decisions by investors and weakened the national foundations on which the resulting bubbles grew. The irony is that Europe is now proposing to double down on these failed policies in response to the crisis.
Europe's call for a global regulator with a mandate to ensure the stability and balance of the world economy would be a tremendous step toward forcing its slow growth model on the rest of the world. Its campaign against "tax havens" is another part of this effort to force other nations to adopt Europe's own anti-growth, anti-competitive tax regime.[7]
These policies are a return to the concept of one size fits all and to the belief that politicians and unelected bureaucrats on the global level can effectively manage the world's economy. Europeans should ask why, if this model works so well, it failed to stop the build-up of systemic risk in Europe. The campaign to blame the U.S. is a form of denial: By refusing to look in the mirror, Europe seeks to avoid facing the unpleasant reality of failure.
This reality includes the fact that the European states are not all alike. Nothing underlines this more effectively that the fact that Germany, having been one of the cheerleaders of European integration, is now reluctant to bear a disproportionate share of the Europe-wide costs of stabilizing that system.[8] From the national point of view, this reluctance makes sense. But it is a sign of the incoherence of European integration that its leading advocate is not willing to pay the bills for the policies it claims to wholeheartedly back.
The True Solutions
It is legitimate to discuss measures that should be taken in immediate response to the crisis. But neither these measures nor the crisis itself should divert Europe from addressing its underlying problems. These begin with its lack of competitiveness and the entitlements burden that, as in the U.S., poses what will in the long term be an unbearable burden.[9] Instead of turning--as it and its trading partners are now doing--to protectionism, Europe needs to move away from the faith in centralized control and the ability of governments to manipulate markets that has brought turmoil to the U.S. and Europe alike.[10]
Ted R. Bromund, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, a division of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, and Daniella Markheim is Jay Van Andel Senior Trade Policy Analyst in the Center for International Trade and Economics at The Heritage Foundation.
Full text w/notes here.
Heritage WebMemo #2369
March 30, 2009
The story that Europe is telling about the global financial crisis is untrue: The crisis is not simply the fault of the United States. European policies, on both the national and the EU levels, contributed to the buildup of systemic risk that led to the crisis. These policies reduced European competitiveness, led to high levels of leverage at European banks, helped to create property bubbles across Europe, and--through both the Euro and the broader policy of European integration--introduced moral hazard into European markets.
The basic fallacies of European policies are their emphasis on top-down control and their advocacy of a one-size-fits-all model. The policies the EU is advancing for the G-20 summit repeat these errors on a larger scale. Instead of blaming the U.S., Europe should address its lack of competitiveness and growing entitlements burden. Doubling down on centralized control will result in lower growth and a less stable world economy at a time when Europe needs to promote a sustained recovery.
The European Myth
Europe is telling a story about the origins of the global financial crisis. The story is simple: It is America's fault. The BBC reports that the European resistance to stimulus spending derives from its reluctance to go deeper into debt "to rescue the US economy, which they argue was the country that caused the crisis in the first place."[1] The Economist concluded in October that the European approach to the crisis was based in part on the "flawed" assumption that the financial system is chiefly suffering from "transatlantic contagion."
The first signs of the current global financial crisis did appear in the U.S. But the collapse of the U.S. real estate market, though important, was merely the first stone in an avalanche. As the Economist pointed out, the view that only the U.S. is to blame "fails to take account of ... slowing [European] economies ... the slumping housing markets in countries such as Spain and Ireland ... [and] European banks' dependence on wholesale funding."[2]
The origins of the global financial crash, not surprisingly, are global. Some factors affected some countries more than others, but no country has cause to claim that it was damaged solely by the actions of others. Yet it is those actions that must now face scrutiny. If there is a common theme in the crisis, it can be found in the interaction between politics and economics that created perverse and ultimately dangerous incentives.
The European Reality
In spite of the desire of the EU to pretend otherwise, the European states are very different. Thus, at the national level, the problems these states must confront are not identical. Nevertheless, four features that are present in more than one European state deserve to be highlighted:
- A loss of competitiveness. European states such as Ireland and Italy have lost competitiveness. In these states, public expenditure has grown faster than private sector pay and productivity. In Ireland, for instance, public spending doubled between 1997 and 2003. This caused inflation to rise two-and-a-half times faster than in the Euro zone as a whole.[3] The loss of competitiveness was the result of government policies that placed excessive burdens on productive employment.
- The level of leverage in European banks. Leverage is the ratio of a bank's total liabilities to shareholder equity. Higher leverage means the bank is doing more business on a relatively narrower base. Leverage can be excessive, but it is not evil--on the contrary, it is necessary for the functioning of the banking system. There is wide debate on the best way to measure leverage. But it is clear that many European banks were more highly leveraged than their American counterparts. A survey by the Centre for European Policy Studies found that the average leverage ratio of Europe's twelve largest banks as of September 2008 was 35 to 1, compared to less than 20 to 1 in the U.S. The survey described Europe's ratios as "a disaster in waiting."[4] Higher levels of leverage do make more credit available and thus reduce its cost. This was appealing in Europe, because cheaper credit fueled growth in its generally sluggish economies.
- The European property bubbles. But this rapid expansion of credit in Europe played an important role in the creation of European real estate bubbles. The IMF has pointed out that, in the run-up to the crisis, "credit aggregates grew extremely fast in the United Kingdom, Spain, Iceland, and several Eastern European countries. As in the U.S., these credit expansions fueled real estate booms. House prices rose rapidly in most of the Eastern and Western European countries now caught in the financial turmoil."[5] The bubbles in Europe were as unsustainable as those in the U.S.
- The moral hazards of the Euro and the EU. These factors speak to the same underlying cause. The years after the Cold War saw high global growth and benign conditions that "fed the build up of systemic risk." As the IMF puts it, "[l]ow interest rates, together with increasing and excessive optimism about the future, pushed up asset prices ... [in] a broad range of ... advanced countries and emerging markets." The result was a search for yield and the creation of ever-riskier assets.[6]
Moreover, the Euro was, in essence, a seal of approval on countries such as Spain, Portugal, and Greece. This encouraged investors to regard these markets as less risky than they in fact were. The admission of many of the now-troubled Eastern European states into the EU also created moral hazard in the market by encouraging investors to treat these states as if they ranked with the established economies of the West. This approach did not accord with reality.
The False European Solutions
In short, a series of policies--some national, some European--created a framework that encouraged risky decisions by investors and weakened the national foundations on which the resulting bubbles grew. The irony is that Europe is now proposing to double down on these failed policies in response to the crisis.
Europe's call for a global regulator with a mandate to ensure the stability and balance of the world economy would be a tremendous step toward forcing its slow growth model on the rest of the world. Its campaign against "tax havens" is another part of this effort to force other nations to adopt Europe's own anti-growth, anti-competitive tax regime.[7]
These policies are a return to the concept of one size fits all and to the belief that politicians and unelected bureaucrats on the global level can effectively manage the world's economy. Europeans should ask why, if this model works so well, it failed to stop the build-up of systemic risk in Europe. The campaign to blame the U.S. is a form of denial: By refusing to look in the mirror, Europe seeks to avoid facing the unpleasant reality of failure.
This reality includes the fact that the European states are not all alike. Nothing underlines this more effectively that the fact that Germany, having been one of the cheerleaders of European integration, is now reluctant to bear a disproportionate share of the Europe-wide costs of stabilizing that system.[8] From the national point of view, this reluctance makes sense. But it is a sign of the incoherence of European integration that its leading advocate is not willing to pay the bills for the policies it claims to wholeheartedly back.
The True Solutions
It is legitimate to discuss measures that should be taken in immediate response to the crisis. But neither these measures nor the crisis itself should divert Europe from addressing its underlying problems. These begin with its lack of competitiveness and the entitlements burden that, as in the U.S., poses what will in the long term be an unbearable burden.[9] Instead of turning--as it and its trading partners are now doing--to protectionism, Europe needs to move away from the faith in centralized control and the ability of governments to manipulate markets that has brought turmoil to the U.S. and Europe alike.[10]
Ted R. Bromund, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, a division of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, and Daniella Markheim is Jay Van Andel Senior Trade Policy Analyst in the Center for International Trade and Economics at The Heritage Foundation.
Full text w/notes here.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Britain Fights Home-Grown Islamists - The Labour government unveils a new antiterror strategy
Britain Fights Home-Grown Islamists. WSJ Editorial
The Labour government unveils a new antiterror strategy.
WSJ, Mar 26, 2009
The only good news from a British security report published this week -- that al Qaeda is "likely to fragment" -- comes with a scary caveat: Islamist splinter groups will continue Osama bin Laden's work and could prove just as dangerous, if not more so.
The possibility of a WMD attack against Britain has never been as grave as it is today, the government report warned: "Changing technology and the theft and smuggling of chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive materials make this aspiration more realistic than it may have been in the recent past."
This dire outlook may have triggered the long overdue policy change in London's antiterrorism strategy, announced Tuesday by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith. The new objective is to address the real root cause of Islamist terrorism -- its ideology. Ms. Smith promised that the government would "challenge" Muslims in Britain who may not support violence but who reject "our shared values" -- such as democracy and the rule of law -- and promote hatred toward women, homosexuals and other religions and ethnicities. While not criminalizing such ideology, Ms. Smith said, "we should all stand up for our shared values and not concede the floor to those who dismiss them."
This may sound like common sense, but it's actually a dramatic change from past British policy. Until now, the Labour government has "engaged" nonviolent extremists, believing they could help in the fight against violent extremists. To justify this approach, the government dumbed down the definition of "moderate" Muslim to include those who claim to reject terrorism but still support a global caliphate, oppose democracy and justify suicide bombings outside Britain as "resistance." The assumption was that only "moderates" who hold such radical views possess the credibility to dissuade young Muslims from the path of jihad.
The consequences of this policy have been predictably devastating. "The effect has been to empower reactionaries within Muslim communities and to marginalize genuine moderates," according to a study published this month by the think tank Policy Exchange. "The link between non-violent and violent extremism is habitually underplayed." Policy Exchange also found that the government spent almost £90 million over the past three years on nonviolent radical Islamic groups, "underwriting the very Islamist ideology which spawns an illiberal, intolerant and anti-Western world view."
Hazel Blears, secretary of state for communities and local government, has long pushed for changing this approach and seems to have made a start. This week she suspended ties with the Muslim Council of Britain -- once the Labour government's favorite Muslim organization -- because its deputy secretary general, Daud Abdullah, signed a declaration in Istanbul last month that calls for jihad against Israel and any country supporting it, which could include Britain.
The Labour government shares much of the blame for making radical Muslim views respectable in the eyes of British Muslims who may have otherwise shunned them. In the process, it has endangered Britain's national security and that of its allies. Most of Britain's 2,000 terror suspects are home-grown and U.S. officials have warned that British Islamists entering the U.S. under the visa-waiver program pose a severe threat to homeland security.
The threat of a terror attack against Britain, including during next week's G-20 financial summit in London, is "severe," Home Secretary Smith said this week -- meaning "it's highly likely" and "could happen without warning."
The break from the policy of courting radical Muslims is long overdue. Britain, and its allies, will be safer for it.
The Labour government unveils a new antiterror strategy.
WSJ, Mar 26, 2009
The only good news from a British security report published this week -- that al Qaeda is "likely to fragment" -- comes with a scary caveat: Islamist splinter groups will continue Osama bin Laden's work and could prove just as dangerous, if not more so.
The possibility of a WMD attack against Britain has never been as grave as it is today, the government report warned: "Changing technology and the theft and smuggling of chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive materials make this aspiration more realistic than it may have been in the recent past."
This dire outlook may have triggered the long overdue policy change in London's antiterrorism strategy, announced Tuesday by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith. The new objective is to address the real root cause of Islamist terrorism -- its ideology. Ms. Smith promised that the government would "challenge" Muslims in Britain who may not support violence but who reject "our shared values" -- such as democracy and the rule of law -- and promote hatred toward women, homosexuals and other religions and ethnicities. While not criminalizing such ideology, Ms. Smith said, "we should all stand up for our shared values and not concede the floor to those who dismiss them."
This may sound like common sense, but it's actually a dramatic change from past British policy. Until now, the Labour government has "engaged" nonviolent extremists, believing they could help in the fight against violent extremists. To justify this approach, the government dumbed down the definition of "moderate" Muslim to include those who claim to reject terrorism but still support a global caliphate, oppose democracy and justify suicide bombings outside Britain as "resistance." The assumption was that only "moderates" who hold such radical views possess the credibility to dissuade young Muslims from the path of jihad.
The consequences of this policy have been predictably devastating. "The effect has been to empower reactionaries within Muslim communities and to marginalize genuine moderates," according to a study published this month by the think tank Policy Exchange. "The link between non-violent and violent extremism is habitually underplayed." Policy Exchange also found that the government spent almost £90 million over the past three years on nonviolent radical Islamic groups, "underwriting the very Islamist ideology which spawns an illiberal, intolerant and anti-Western world view."
Hazel Blears, secretary of state for communities and local government, has long pushed for changing this approach and seems to have made a start. This week she suspended ties with the Muslim Council of Britain -- once the Labour government's favorite Muslim organization -- because its deputy secretary general, Daud Abdullah, signed a declaration in Istanbul last month that calls for jihad against Israel and any country supporting it, which could include Britain.
The Labour government shares much of the blame for making radical Muslim views respectable in the eyes of British Muslims who may have otherwise shunned them. In the process, it has endangered Britain's national security and that of its allies. Most of Britain's 2,000 terror suspects are home-grown and U.S. officials have warned that British Islamists entering the U.S. under the visa-waiver program pose a severe threat to homeland security.
The threat of a terror attack against Britain, including during next week's G-20 financial summit in London, is "severe," Home Secretary Smith said this week -- meaning "it's highly likely" and "could happen without warning."
The break from the policy of courting radical Muslims is long overdue. Britain, and its allies, will be safer for it.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
The EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy: How It Threatens Transatlantic Security
The EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy: How It Threatens Transatlantic Security, by Sally McNamara
Heritage Backgrounder #2250
March 17, 2009
[Full article w/notes at the link above]
A series of international events over the past year have pushed the European Union to the front of the international stage. When Russia invaded Georgia in August 2008, it was the EU that took the reins of leadership. When Russia turned off the gas taps to Ukraine in December, the EU again assumed the position of negotiator in chief.
Since the Maastricht Treaty of 1991, the European Union has sought to forge a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) precisely to take the lead in times of global crises. When Europe's collective weaknesses were cruelly exposed by Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansing in Kosovo in 1999, EU leaders tried to expedite the EU's foreign policy integration. Institutionally and politically, the EU has centralized elements of foreign-policy making in Brussels so that all EU members may "speak with one voice" on international issues.[1] Under proposals in the Lisbon Treaty (successor to the European Constitution) this centralization process would receive its most significant boost to date—removing foreign policy from the intergovernmental sphere and making it a supranational EU competence.
The EU sent a six-page letter to President Obama in early February, seeking to play a greater role on the international stage.[2] When Vice President Joe Biden outlined the Obama Administration's foreign policy vision at the Munich Security Conference that same month, he presented enthusiastic agreement.
But the United States should be wary of relinquishing its transatlantic leadership role to the European Union. Rather than realizing America's need for Europe to take on more of its own security burden, a common EU foreign policy is more likely to drain the already limited military capabilities of the member countries and potentially serve as a tool for those in Europe who believe that American global power must be "counterbalanced." The United States should not seek a single phone line to Europe: It will undermine America's fruitful bilateral relationships, such as the Anglo–American Special Relationship, which have served American interests well since the end of World War II.
The Creation of the Common Foreign and Security Policy
This is the hour of Europe. It is not the hour of the Americans.[3]
—Luxembourg's Foreign Minister Jacques Poos on the EU's mediation efforts in Yugoslavia, June 1991
When the Yugoslav state started to disintegrate in 1991 and the prospect of widespread regional conflict loomed, the EU claimed leadership of the crisis, epitomized by Jacques Poos's infamous proclamation that the hour of Europe had arrived.[4] Taking place at the same time as the negotiations for the Treaty of Maastricht, which proposed huge centralizing initiatives, such as the Single Currency, the EU immediately sought a unified line on Yugoslavia as a vehicle for proving its foreign policy credentials.
The United States was relieved to see Europe step up to the plate and happily deferred leadership. Achieving a successful resolution of the Yugoslavia crisis presented the EU with an opportunity to both prove itself on the international stage, and to disentangle America from European security arrangements.
At the very outset, however, the EU failed to comprehend the sheer complexity of the problem, its own institutional and military limitations, and the very different historical perspectives and policies of its 12 constituent members. The tragedies that followed laid rest to the claim that Europe's time had come or that the EU was even unified. Having failed to secure peace through diplomacy and unable to agree on the deployment of a European peacekeeping "interposition force" in September 1991, Germany pushed the EU to reverse its previous policy and recognize the independence of Croatia and Slovenia.[5] The EU's initial strategy of maintaining the territorial unity of the Yugoslav Federation at all costs was left in tatters.[6]
Breaking with the EU position and disregarding strong British and French objections, Germany forced Europe's hand by unilaterally recognizing Croatia and Slovenia as sovereign states on December 23, 1991.[7] The other members of the European Community followed suit on January 15, 1992, in an attempt to reconcile Europe's growing divisions, and thereafter proceeded to steadily hand off leadership of the growing Balkan crisis to NATO and the United States. As European analyst Mario Zucconi notes, "The Western Europeans used Yugoslavia to gratify their vanity."[8] "In the end," he concludes, "the Yugoslav conflict dealt a serious blow to the image and credibility of the organization, to its perceived weight as a major unitary actor, and to its aspiration to anchor the emerging political order on the European continent."[9]
EU Treaties: The Juggernaut of Integration
In the midst of its early failures over Yugoslavia, the EU signed the Treaty of Maastricht which included institutional and political mechanisms to advance a Common Foreign and Security Policy.[10] The EU quickly drew the conclusion that if Europe had had better decision-making procedures and centralized institutions, its performance in Yugoslavia would have been better. The driving ethos behind the CFSP's creation was the idea that the nations of Europe could be stronger collectively than they are separately. Despite the gaping holes in European unity over Yugoslavia, it was assumed that new institutional arrangements would create unity by themselves.
Since its formulation in the Treaty of Maastricht, the backbone of a common EU foreign policy has been that Europe should seek a common position that no EU member state should break, regardless of evolving circumstances. The Maastricht treaty states:
The Member States shall support the Union's external and security policy actively and unreservedly in a spirit of loyalty and mutual solidarity. They shall refrain from any action which is contrary to the interests of the Union or likely to impair its effectiveness as a cohesive force in international relations. The Council shall ensure that these principles are complied with."[11]
As stated in Maastricht, the goal of a common defense policy is to reinforce, "the European identity and its independence in order to promote peace, security and progress in Europe and in the world."[12] The treaty also called on member states to coordinate positions at international institutions and to "uphold the common positions in such fora."[13] Maastricht specifically called on the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (France and Britain) to defend EU positions at the U.N.[14]
The EU argued that the CFSP was an attempt to address its foreign policy shortcomings and to improve its military capabilities, which were nakedly displayed over Yugoslavia. The EU's credibility gap, however, was once again exposed when America was forced to supply the vast majority of equipment used during NATO's air campaign against Milosevic's ethnic cleansing in Kosovo in 1999.[15] In addition to revealing a massive chasm between Europe and America in terms of military capability, Kosovo also demonstrated the vital role of American leadership in the Balkans. After years of failed EU negotiations with Milosevic, using lucrative carrots but less credible sticks, only America was able to legitimately threaten action, which was ultimately taken through NATO without an explicit authorizing resolution from the U.N. Security Council (in part due to French opposition to a further resolution authorizing military action).[16]
Resentment festered in many European quarters that NATO, and more specifically the United States, had once again been called in to resolve a European conflict.[17] Having failed to play the lead role, or even a meaningful part in resolving the Kosovo conflict, the EU decided once more that further centralization of power was the answer. It is significant that after every foreign policy failure the EU's analysis led to the conclusion that ever more concentration of power and more institution-building in Brussels could remedy the problem. The EU's failures in Kosovo, combined with the impetus for European military integration after the St. Malo summit between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac in 1998, gave EU planners a green light to propose ever bolder initiatives to supra-nationalize European foreign policy.
The Treaty of Amsterdam, signed in 1997 and implemented in 1999, created the post of High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy—effectively an EU Foreign Minister. Amsterdam also reformed decision making for the CFSP, introducing the concept of "constructive abstention," and extended qualified majority voting to some areas of foreign policy.[18]
The ensuing Treaty of Nice, signed in 2001 and implemented in 2003, provided for the development of autonomous EU military arrangements, including the creation of permanent political and military structures and commitment to an EU-level rapid reaction force. Nice established defense policy as a formal EU competence for the first time and spearheaded the development of the EU's military policy.[19] Through the treaties of Maastricht, Amsterdam, and Nice, foreign policy was centralized in Brussels step by step.
Components of Failure
The creation of new institutional mechanisms and the centralization of foreign-policy making in Brussels have not created a stronger Europe capable of handling global, or even European, security. Instead, the CFSP has resulted in inaction, or been subject to domination by France and Germany. It has also frequently been used as a platform from which to confront America and frustrate U.S. policy, particularly the war on terrorism. In fact, three characteristics can be drawn from looking at the performance of the CFSP to date.
1. Inaction. Many Europeans have argued that the members of the European Union can exert greater influence in the world if they act together rather than separately; and that following the decline of Europe's major powers, individual states' power can collectively create a more powerful and credible European voice on the world stage. Elements of this philosophy are also to be found in the Obama Administration's theory that when acting within a multilateral alliance, the legitimacy and effectiveness of a specific action is enhanced. During the presidential election campaign, Barack Obama called for America and Europe to embrace new forms of multilateralism for the 21st century, to jointly confront "dangerous currents," such as climate change, terrorism, and nuclear proliferation.[20]
Sovereignty, however, cannot be traded for influence. The ability to project power, whether regionally or globally, depends on several factors, including leadership, credibility, military capability, popular support, and dependable allies. The EU lacks all of these qualities and in assembling its constituent parts, it, therefore, tends to adopt the position of its slowest actors. Or, as The Times opined in 1996 as the EU stood impotent before the dissolution of Yugoslavia, "It looks impressive but the increase in size has been bought by losing punch."[21]
In order for 27 member states to agree on a united foreign policy, almost all the meat will have to be taken off the bones of that policy in order to build a consensus. However, that consensus, no matter how weak, may then restrict member states from taking stronger actions outside its parameters. As EU academic analyst Professor Simon Hix explains:
The reforms contained in the Maastricht and Amsterdam Treaties may have reduced the institutional constraints on the capacity for common action, but the rival historical and political interests of the member states prevent the definition of a common European security identity, and undermine any possibility of acting upon this identity in a united front.[22]
The EU's policy on Zimbabwe illustrates the fallacy of this approach. In 2003, the EU failed to renew travel sanctions against brutal dictator Robert Mugabe after French President Jacques Chirac invited him to attend a Franco–African summit in Paris.[23] Despite indisputable proof of Mugabe's systematic violation of human rights and political freedoms, he was once again given the red-carpet treatment in 2007 when Portugal officially broke with an EU travel ban (with Brussels' political blessing) to allow Mugabe and his senior aides to travel to Lisbon for an EU–Africa Summit.[24] Despite British protestations and a boycott by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Mugabe attended the Summit, and Britain sent a low-level government representative in order to conform to the EU's consensus decision that Mugabe should be welcomed by the EU.[25]
Considering Mugabe's tyrannical and oppressive leadership, with routine politically motivated violence and economic collapse, a united policy sanctioning the dictator's travel would seem an obvious one. Yet the EU was incapable of forming any substantial policy, while simultaneously preventing other members from meaningful dissention.
2. Franco–German Dominance. While the EU rarely manages to speak with one voice in any meaningful way, there have been certain instances where the EU has taken the lead role on an international issue. Russia's invasion of Georgia in August 2008 is one such instance where French President Nicolas Sarkozy, as the EU's biggest political figure and then-president of the European Council, assumed the role of world spokesman.
Unfortunately, Sarkozy's handling of the crisis was a disaster and represented a barely concealed Franco–German agenda to restore EU–Russian relations as quickly as possible. From the very outset of the crisis, Sarkozy focused exclusively on achieving a six-point ceasefire—a ceasefire that was thrust upon Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and which Moscow had no intention of observing. With no enforcement mechanisms, Sarkozy failed to compel Russia to fulfill the conditions of the ceasefire and also failed to prevent Russia's subsequent de facto annexation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Further, despite German Chancellor Angela Merkel's trip to Tbilisi during the height of the conflict where she publicly affirmed Germany's support for Georgia's membership in NATO, she soon reversed position to veto it during NATO's Foreign Ministerial summit in Brussels in December 2008.[26]
Despite the failure of his ceasefire and Russia's redrawing of Europe's borders by force, Sarkozy went on to engineer a return to "business as usual" between Russia and the EU. This was done without any formal negotiation with the Secretary General of NATO, who had suspended all high-level diplomatic contact with Russia in support of the EU-led ceasefire negotiations. In a bid to protect Europe's relationship with Moscow, especially Russian–German energy projects and a deal for Russian helicopters for the EU's mission to Chad, Sarkozy sidelined NATO and used the European Union as a cosmetic cover for Franco–German interests.[27]
3. Limiting American Power. Successive American Administrations have argued that a stronger Europe means greater help for realizing American goals of international peace and stability. President George W. Bush spent much of his second term trying to repair ties in Europe, hoping to engage Europe in supporting a transatlantic agenda on issues such as free trade, energy security, and stabilizing Afghanistan. But the EU chose to obstruct American policies instead of engaging on areas of mutual concern. In areas such as the rendition of terrorists, visa waiver policy, and data sharing, the European Union purposefully obstructed American policy.[28]
Some European leaders also describe the EU as a check on American global power. Former French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin described America as an "unchecked hyper-power."[29] Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt talked about EU integration in terms of its "emancipation" from the United States.[30] Current Spanish Prime Minister José Zapatero openly talked about deconstructing American global influence within two decades.[31]
A report published by the U.K. House of Lords in July 2003 found that the EU tended to oppose U.S. policy "simply to make its voice heard."[32] This explains why, standing next to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev in November 2008, EU president Sarkozy called for a temporary moratorium on the planned U.S. missile defense deployments in Poland and the Czech Republic.[33] Speaking to the European Parliament immediately before the NATO Summit in December, French defense minister Hervé Morin also questioned the need for the "third site."[34] The French position was especially important since Paris was holding the EU presidency at that time, speaking with the added authority of that office.
This position contrasts sharply with two NATO endorsements of the planned deployment, including the alliance's foreign ministerial endorsement that came immediately after Mr. Morin's comments before the European Parliament.[35] Although France officially backed both NATO communiqués, its position within the EU was the polar opposite, demonstrating a frustrating inconsistency. It should give the U.S. Administration pause in supporting further EU foreign policy integration when it cannot expect to hear the same message from NATO as it does from the European Union.
France and Missile Defense: Taking One Position for NATO, a Different Position Elsewhere
Ballistic missile proliferation poses an increasing threat to Allies' forces, territory and populations. Missile defence forms part of a broader response to counter this threat. We therefore recognise the substantial contribution to the protection of Allies from long-range ballistic missiles to be provided by the planned deployment of European-based United States missile defence assets.
—NATO Heads of State Final Declaration, April 3, 2008
…[P]lease let's not have any more talk of deployment of missiles or deployment of antimissile systems. Deployment of a missile defense system would bring nothing to security in Europe.
—President Sarkozy at EU–Russia Summit in France, November 15, 2008
Who would hold the key to their [European-based United States missile defense assets] use? What threat would they tackle? There are risks, yes, but to say that there is a threat today would need to be checked.
—French Defense Minister, Hervé Morin, December 1, 2008
Ballistic missile proliferation poses an increasing threat to Allies' forces, territory, and populations. Missile defence forms part of a broader response to counter this threat. We therefore recognise the substantial contribution to the protection of Allies from long-range ballistic missiles to be provided by the planned deployment of European-based United States missile defence assets. As tasked at the Bucharest Summit, we are exploring ways to link this capability with current NATO missile defence efforts… As all options include the planned deployment of European-based United States missile defence assets, we note as a relevant development the signature of agreements by the Czech Republic and the Republic of Poland with the United States regarding those assets.
—NATO Foreign Ministers' Final Communiqué, December 3, 2008
War and Peace
The divisions among the powers of Europe over the war in Iraq in 2003 revealed the problem of imposing a single foreign policy on all EU member states. Faced with its members and acceding countries supporting one of two diametrically opposed positions, the EU descended into chaos trying to fashion a single policy out of pure contradiction.[36] Europe's countries were broadly split down the middle. France heightened tensions in Europe by telling largely pro-war accession countries that they had "missed a good opportunity to keep quiet."[37] France also sought to deny Turkey planning assistance within the NATO alliance, owing to Paris's vehement opposition to the American-led invasion of Iraq.[38]
The Atlanticists responded with a letter of support to the U.S. Administration, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote to all EU capitals urging them to consider military action as a viable last resort.[39] Less than a week before the invasion, the leaders of the United States, the U.K., and Spain met in the Azores to build international momentum for action on Iraq in a summit that was quickly interpreted as a confrontation with the Franco–German led anti-war axis.
The president of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, commented that "Whatever the outcome of the war, there can be no denying that this is a bad time for the common foreign and security policy for the European Union as a whole."[40] EU divisions over Operation Iraqi Freedom illustrate the fallacy of assuming the nations of Europe have a single foreign policy voice. Washington diplomatically engaged its European allies on a systematic bilateral basis, and, where necessary, on an ad hoc multilateral basis. The juggernaut of European integration, however, seeks to remove that option, making Brussels the only port of call for American foreign policy planners. It is inevitable that this will be to the detriment of American foreign policy. As Henry Kissinger has noted:
When the United States deals with the nations of Europe individually, it has the possibility of consulting at many levels and to have its view heard well before a decision is taken. In dealing with the European Union, by contrast, the United States is excluded from the decision-making process and interacts only after the event, with spokesmen for decisions taken by ministers at meetings in which the United States has not participated at any level.... Growing estrangement between America and Europe is thus being institutionally fostered.[41]
The Lisbon Treaty
Following the deep European divisions over whether to support or oppose the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the EU more determinedly wrestled with the question of how to fashion a supranational foreign policy, determined that such division should not happen again. Former Member of the European Parliament and current leader of Britain's Liberal Democratic Party, Nick Clegg, stated in 2003 at the height of EU tensions over Iraq:
The relish with which the anti-European British press has rushed to proclaim the last rites over the EU's fledgling common foreign and security policy is premature. The EU has a habit of rebounding strongly from internal crisis and strife.[42]
In 2004, EU leaders signed the European Constitution, which would have codified the supreme legal basis of the 25 member states at the time, marking a monumental departure from the previous, treaty-based approach to European integration.[43] The constitution was an audacious document, which proposed to significantly extend the EU's competency in foreign-policy making and introduce permanent high-ranking political positions, such as an EU president and a single EU foreign minister. It was subsequently rejected in referenda by the voters of France and Holland. The EU pressed on regardless of this stark popular opposition and "renegotiated" a virtually identical document, the Lisbon Treaty.[44]
The Lisbon Treaty is currently pending ratification by all EU member states, having already been rejected once by voters in Ireland. The Irish government has committed to holding a second referendum on the treaty later this year, since Lisbon cannot proceed without the ratification of all member states. Just like the European Constitution, the Lisbon Treaty contains the building blocks of a United States of Europe and will shift power from the member states of the EU to Brussels in several areas of policymaking, including defense, national security, and foreign policy.[45] The treaty is a blueprint for restricting the sovereign right of EU member states to determine their own foreign policies; above all, the treaty underscores the EU's long-held ambitions to become a global power.
As with the EU Constitution, the Lisbon Treaty will create a permanent EU president, and extend the roles of the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and of the EU's powerful diplomatic corps. With a single legal personality, Brussels would sign international agreements on behalf of all member states. Critically, unanimous voting has been removed in several key areas and majority voting introduced for 12 different areas of foreign policy, including the election of the EU foreign minister and proposals emanating from the foreign minister.[46]
The treaty will restrict the ability of member states to operate on the international stage on an independent basis. Should the EU decide on a common foreign policy position, the EU will automatically speak for the U.K. and France in the United Nations Security Council.[47] This should be particularly worrisome to the United States since the U.K. and U.S. have proved to be valuable partners in this body in the past. The treaty further asserts the value and importance of the European Union over members' sovereign rights and national interests. It states:
Before undertaking any action on the international scene or entering into any commitment which could affect the Union's interests, each Member State shall consult the others within the European Council or the Council. Member States shall ensure, through the convergence of their actions, that the Union is able to assert its interests and values on the international scene. Member States shall show mutual solidarity.[48]
A Threat to the Anglo–American-Led Operation in Afghanistan
The Lisbon Treaty represents a major threat to the NATO alliance. Rather than creating additional military resources, Lisbon will lead to the replication of NATO and duplicate many of its functions. The long-term goal of creating a European army and duplicating NATO's Article V commitment—that an attack against one member constitutes an attack against all members—illustrates these dangers.
In 2000, the EU announced proposals for an army of 100,000 (60,000 of whom could be deployed at 60 days' notice for up to a year at a time). Britain's Conservative Party commented at the time that this would effectively destroy NATO.[49] The British government rejected this criticism, claiming that the EU was not taking on collective defense, which was purely NATO's responsibility.[50] The Treaty of Lisbon however, proposes an EU mutual defense clause:
If a Member State is the victim of armed aggression on its territory, the other Member States shall have towards it an obligation of aid and assistance by all the means in their power, in accordance with Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. This shall not prejudice the specific character of the security and defence policy of certain Member States.[51]
In addition to duplicating NATO's Article V, the EU remains intent on creating its own military. In the absence of additional defense spending, these resources will have to come at NATO's expense. Under the Lisbon Treaty, the EU would have "Permanent Structured Cooperation"—an inner group of EU nations (currently proposed to consist of France, the U.K., Germany, Spain, Italy, and Poland) pooling military resources and manpower to form an army of 60,000 to undertake EU missions.[52] The reality is that frontline British troops would have to be mandated for EU availability at NATO's expense, probably from Afghanistan. As Open Europe, a British policy institute, warns:
In simple terms, the UK would have to earmark 10,000 frontline troops for service on EU missions. For the EU force to be viable UK troops would need to be constantly available for EU operations. The fact that the UK is one of the few EU countries to have modern combat forces is likely to mean that the UK would have to keep its 10,000 in the UK/EU. Given the UK's current military overstretch, the plans would almost certainly divert vital resources away from the British mission in Afghanistan.[53]
A cross-party group of former senior British ministers commented in 2000 that the creation of an EU army was "an openly political project,"[54] a point confirmed by then-German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer: "This is part of the European integration process."[55] Now, as then, no additional troops are available for this paper army. Either troops already committed to NATO will be counted twice, or, in the worst case scenario, troops will be withdrawn from existing NATO missions.
In 2000, Lady Thatcher described the creation of an EU army as "a piece of monumental folly that puts our security at risk in order to satisfy political vanity."[56] Rather than representing a genuine attempt to increase Europe's military contribution to vital missions, such as Afghanistan, the EU is merely seeking to advance its own political ambitions.
This is of particular importance to the United Kingdom, whose relationship with the United States has been underpinned by shared military commitments over the years. President Barack Obama has already stated that the war in Afghanistan is America's top foreign policy priority; a deterioration of Britain's commitment to Afghanistan at this time would be unacceptable to the United States. [57]
Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton argues that the Lisbon Treaty poses a threat to both the Anglo–American Special Relationship and to NATO.[58] By reducing the ability of member states to set their own foreign policies and work with America outside of the EU's purview, the Treaty of Lisbon represents a profound threat to the Obama Administration's pledge to renew positive relations with European countries.[59]
What the Administration and Congress Should Do
The transatlantic relationship is vital to European and international security. European countries and the United States must nurture their relationships in order to achieve and maintain global peace and security. Specifically:
Conclusion
Foreign policy is an attribute of statehood that must remain at the nation-state level if it is to be meaningful or effective. If the United States wishes to continue enjoying the benefits of its long-standing relationships with the countries of Europe, it must oppose the creation of a supranational EU foreign policy and the duplication of NATO resources by the European Union. U.S. support for a single European foreign and military policy has been misplaced. While successive U.S. Administrations have believed their desire for Europe to undertake a greater share of the global security burden to be achievable through further European integration, evidence suggests the exact opposite to be the case.
The U.S. government should instead pursue a policy under which its bilateral engagements with European nations are prioritized, and engagement with the EU is based purely on where Brussels can add value to a specific policy area. The United States and Europe should engage on critical foreign policy issues, such as military planning and counterterrorism, both bilaterally and through NATO. The usurpation of power by Brussels jeopardizes these types of engagements—and ultimately threatens the security of the United States.
Sally McNamara is Senior Policy Analyst in European Affairs in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, a division of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, at The Heritage Foundation. The author is grateful to Morgan L. Roach, Research Assistant in the Thatcher Center, and Parker Broaddus, Thatcher Center intern, for their assistance in preparing this paper.
Heritage Backgrounder #2250
March 17, 2009
[Full article w/notes at the link above]
A series of international events over the past year have pushed the European Union to the front of the international stage. When Russia invaded Georgia in August 2008, it was the EU that took the reins of leadership. When Russia turned off the gas taps to Ukraine in December, the EU again assumed the position of negotiator in chief.
Since the Maastricht Treaty of 1991, the European Union has sought to forge a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) precisely to take the lead in times of global crises. When Europe's collective weaknesses were cruelly exposed by Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansing in Kosovo in 1999, EU leaders tried to expedite the EU's foreign policy integration. Institutionally and politically, the EU has centralized elements of foreign-policy making in Brussels so that all EU members may "speak with one voice" on international issues.[1] Under proposals in the Lisbon Treaty (successor to the European Constitution) this centralization process would receive its most significant boost to date—removing foreign policy from the intergovernmental sphere and making it a supranational EU competence.
The EU sent a six-page letter to President Obama in early February, seeking to play a greater role on the international stage.[2] When Vice President Joe Biden outlined the Obama Administration's foreign policy vision at the Munich Security Conference that same month, he presented enthusiastic agreement.
But the United States should be wary of relinquishing its transatlantic leadership role to the European Union. Rather than realizing America's need for Europe to take on more of its own security burden, a common EU foreign policy is more likely to drain the already limited military capabilities of the member countries and potentially serve as a tool for those in Europe who believe that American global power must be "counterbalanced." The United States should not seek a single phone line to Europe: It will undermine America's fruitful bilateral relationships, such as the Anglo–American Special Relationship, which have served American interests well since the end of World War II.
The Creation of the Common Foreign and Security Policy
This is the hour of Europe. It is not the hour of the Americans.[3]
—Luxembourg's Foreign Minister Jacques Poos on the EU's mediation efforts in Yugoslavia, June 1991
When the Yugoslav state started to disintegrate in 1991 and the prospect of widespread regional conflict loomed, the EU claimed leadership of the crisis, epitomized by Jacques Poos's infamous proclamation that the hour of Europe had arrived.[4] Taking place at the same time as the negotiations for the Treaty of Maastricht, which proposed huge centralizing initiatives, such as the Single Currency, the EU immediately sought a unified line on Yugoslavia as a vehicle for proving its foreign policy credentials.
The United States was relieved to see Europe step up to the plate and happily deferred leadership. Achieving a successful resolution of the Yugoslavia crisis presented the EU with an opportunity to both prove itself on the international stage, and to disentangle America from European security arrangements.
At the very outset, however, the EU failed to comprehend the sheer complexity of the problem, its own institutional and military limitations, and the very different historical perspectives and policies of its 12 constituent members. The tragedies that followed laid rest to the claim that Europe's time had come or that the EU was even unified. Having failed to secure peace through diplomacy and unable to agree on the deployment of a European peacekeeping "interposition force" in September 1991, Germany pushed the EU to reverse its previous policy and recognize the independence of Croatia and Slovenia.[5] The EU's initial strategy of maintaining the territorial unity of the Yugoslav Federation at all costs was left in tatters.[6]
Breaking with the EU position and disregarding strong British and French objections, Germany forced Europe's hand by unilaterally recognizing Croatia and Slovenia as sovereign states on December 23, 1991.[7] The other members of the European Community followed suit on January 15, 1992, in an attempt to reconcile Europe's growing divisions, and thereafter proceeded to steadily hand off leadership of the growing Balkan crisis to NATO and the United States. As European analyst Mario Zucconi notes, "The Western Europeans used Yugoslavia to gratify their vanity."[8] "In the end," he concludes, "the Yugoslav conflict dealt a serious blow to the image and credibility of the organization, to its perceived weight as a major unitary actor, and to its aspiration to anchor the emerging political order on the European continent."[9]
EU Treaties: The Juggernaut of Integration
In the midst of its early failures over Yugoslavia, the EU signed the Treaty of Maastricht which included institutional and political mechanisms to advance a Common Foreign and Security Policy.[10] The EU quickly drew the conclusion that if Europe had had better decision-making procedures and centralized institutions, its performance in Yugoslavia would have been better. The driving ethos behind the CFSP's creation was the idea that the nations of Europe could be stronger collectively than they are separately. Despite the gaping holes in European unity over Yugoslavia, it was assumed that new institutional arrangements would create unity by themselves.
Since its formulation in the Treaty of Maastricht, the backbone of a common EU foreign policy has been that Europe should seek a common position that no EU member state should break, regardless of evolving circumstances. The Maastricht treaty states:
The Member States shall support the Union's external and security policy actively and unreservedly in a spirit of loyalty and mutual solidarity. They shall refrain from any action which is contrary to the interests of the Union or likely to impair its effectiveness as a cohesive force in international relations. The Council shall ensure that these principles are complied with."[11]
As stated in Maastricht, the goal of a common defense policy is to reinforce, "the European identity and its independence in order to promote peace, security and progress in Europe and in the world."[12] The treaty also called on member states to coordinate positions at international institutions and to "uphold the common positions in such fora."[13] Maastricht specifically called on the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (France and Britain) to defend EU positions at the U.N.[14]
The EU argued that the CFSP was an attempt to address its foreign policy shortcomings and to improve its military capabilities, which were nakedly displayed over Yugoslavia. The EU's credibility gap, however, was once again exposed when America was forced to supply the vast majority of equipment used during NATO's air campaign against Milosevic's ethnic cleansing in Kosovo in 1999.[15] In addition to revealing a massive chasm between Europe and America in terms of military capability, Kosovo also demonstrated the vital role of American leadership in the Balkans. After years of failed EU negotiations with Milosevic, using lucrative carrots but less credible sticks, only America was able to legitimately threaten action, which was ultimately taken through NATO without an explicit authorizing resolution from the U.N. Security Council (in part due to French opposition to a further resolution authorizing military action).[16]
Resentment festered in many European quarters that NATO, and more specifically the United States, had once again been called in to resolve a European conflict.[17] Having failed to play the lead role, or even a meaningful part in resolving the Kosovo conflict, the EU decided once more that further centralization of power was the answer. It is significant that after every foreign policy failure the EU's analysis led to the conclusion that ever more concentration of power and more institution-building in Brussels could remedy the problem. The EU's failures in Kosovo, combined with the impetus for European military integration after the St. Malo summit between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac in 1998, gave EU planners a green light to propose ever bolder initiatives to supra-nationalize European foreign policy.
The Treaty of Amsterdam, signed in 1997 and implemented in 1999, created the post of High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy—effectively an EU Foreign Minister. Amsterdam also reformed decision making for the CFSP, introducing the concept of "constructive abstention," and extended qualified majority voting to some areas of foreign policy.[18]
The ensuing Treaty of Nice, signed in 2001 and implemented in 2003, provided for the development of autonomous EU military arrangements, including the creation of permanent political and military structures and commitment to an EU-level rapid reaction force. Nice established defense policy as a formal EU competence for the first time and spearheaded the development of the EU's military policy.[19] Through the treaties of Maastricht, Amsterdam, and Nice, foreign policy was centralized in Brussels step by step.
Components of Failure
The creation of new institutional mechanisms and the centralization of foreign-policy making in Brussels have not created a stronger Europe capable of handling global, or even European, security. Instead, the CFSP has resulted in inaction, or been subject to domination by France and Germany. It has also frequently been used as a platform from which to confront America and frustrate U.S. policy, particularly the war on terrorism. In fact, three characteristics can be drawn from looking at the performance of the CFSP to date.
1. Inaction. Many Europeans have argued that the members of the European Union can exert greater influence in the world if they act together rather than separately; and that following the decline of Europe's major powers, individual states' power can collectively create a more powerful and credible European voice on the world stage. Elements of this philosophy are also to be found in the Obama Administration's theory that when acting within a multilateral alliance, the legitimacy and effectiveness of a specific action is enhanced. During the presidential election campaign, Barack Obama called for America and Europe to embrace new forms of multilateralism for the 21st century, to jointly confront "dangerous currents," such as climate change, terrorism, and nuclear proliferation.[20]
Sovereignty, however, cannot be traded for influence. The ability to project power, whether regionally or globally, depends on several factors, including leadership, credibility, military capability, popular support, and dependable allies. The EU lacks all of these qualities and in assembling its constituent parts, it, therefore, tends to adopt the position of its slowest actors. Or, as The Times opined in 1996 as the EU stood impotent before the dissolution of Yugoslavia, "It looks impressive but the increase in size has been bought by losing punch."[21]
In order for 27 member states to agree on a united foreign policy, almost all the meat will have to be taken off the bones of that policy in order to build a consensus. However, that consensus, no matter how weak, may then restrict member states from taking stronger actions outside its parameters. As EU academic analyst Professor Simon Hix explains:
The reforms contained in the Maastricht and Amsterdam Treaties may have reduced the institutional constraints on the capacity for common action, but the rival historical and political interests of the member states prevent the definition of a common European security identity, and undermine any possibility of acting upon this identity in a united front.[22]
The EU's policy on Zimbabwe illustrates the fallacy of this approach. In 2003, the EU failed to renew travel sanctions against brutal dictator Robert Mugabe after French President Jacques Chirac invited him to attend a Franco–African summit in Paris.[23] Despite indisputable proof of Mugabe's systematic violation of human rights and political freedoms, he was once again given the red-carpet treatment in 2007 when Portugal officially broke with an EU travel ban (with Brussels' political blessing) to allow Mugabe and his senior aides to travel to Lisbon for an EU–Africa Summit.[24] Despite British protestations and a boycott by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Mugabe attended the Summit, and Britain sent a low-level government representative in order to conform to the EU's consensus decision that Mugabe should be welcomed by the EU.[25]
Considering Mugabe's tyrannical and oppressive leadership, with routine politically motivated violence and economic collapse, a united policy sanctioning the dictator's travel would seem an obvious one. Yet the EU was incapable of forming any substantial policy, while simultaneously preventing other members from meaningful dissention.
2. Franco–German Dominance. While the EU rarely manages to speak with one voice in any meaningful way, there have been certain instances where the EU has taken the lead role on an international issue. Russia's invasion of Georgia in August 2008 is one such instance where French President Nicolas Sarkozy, as the EU's biggest political figure and then-president of the European Council, assumed the role of world spokesman.
Unfortunately, Sarkozy's handling of the crisis was a disaster and represented a barely concealed Franco–German agenda to restore EU–Russian relations as quickly as possible. From the very outset of the crisis, Sarkozy focused exclusively on achieving a six-point ceasefire—a ceasefire that was thrust upon Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and which Moscow had no intention of observing. With no enforcement mechanisms, Sarkozy failed to compel Russia to fulfill the conditions of the ceasefire and also failed to prevent Russia's subsequent de facto annexation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Further, despite German Chancellor Angela Merkel's trip to Tbilisi during the height of the conflict where she publicly affirmed Germany's support for Georgia's membership in NATO, she soon reversed position to veto it during NATO's Foreign Ministerial summit in Brussels in December 2008.[26]
Despite the failure of his ceasefire and Russia's redrawing of Europe's borders by force, Sarkozy went on to engineer a return to "business as usual" between Russia and the EU. This was done without any formal negotiation with the Secretary General of NATO, who had suspended all high-level diplomatic contact with Russia in support of the EU-led ceasefire negotiations. In a bid to protect Europe's relationship with Moscow, especially Russian–German energy projects and a deal for Russian helicopters for the EU's mission to Chad, Sarkozy sidelined NATO and used the European Union as a cosmetic cover for Franco–German interests.[27]
3. Limiting American Power. Successive American Administrations have argued that a stronger Europe means greater help for realizing American goals of international peace and stability. President George W. Bush spent much of his second term trying to repair ties in Europe, hoping to engage Europe in supporting a transatlantic agenda on issues such as free trade, energy security, and stabilizing Afghanistan. But the EU chose to obstruct American policies instead of engaging on areas of mutual concern. In areas such as the rendition of terrorists, visa waiver policy, and data sharing, the European Union purposefully obstructed American policy.[28]
Some European leaders also describe the EU as a check on American global power. Former French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin described America as an "unchecked hyper-power."[29] Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt talked about EU integration in terms of its "emancipation" from the United States.[30] Current Spanish Prime Minister José Zapatero openly talked about deconstructing American global influence within two decades.[31]
A report published by the U.K. House of Lords in July 2003 found that the EU tended to oppose U.S. policy "simply to make its voice heard."[32] This explains why, standing next to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev in November 2008, EU president Sarkozy called for a temporary moratorium on the planned U.S. missile defense deployments in Poland and the Czech Republic.[33] Speaking to the European Parliament immediately before the NATO Summit in December, French defense minister Hervé Morin also questioned the need for the "third site."[34] The French position was especially important since Paris was holding the EU presidency at that time, speaking with the added authority of that office.
This position contrasts sharply with two NATO endorsements of the planned deployment, including the alliance's foreign ministerial endorsement that came immediately after Mr. Morin's comments before the European Parliament.[35] Although France officially backed both NATO communiqués, its position within the EU was the polar opposite, demonstrating a frustrating inconsistency. It should give the U.S. Administration pause in supporting further EU foreign policy integration when it cannot expect to hear the same message from NATO as it does from the European Union.
France and Missile Defense: Taking One Position for NATO, a Different Position Elsewhere
Ballistic missile proliferation poses an increasing threat to Allies' forces, territory and populations. Missile defence forms part of a broader response to counter this threat. We therefore recognise the substantial contribution to the protection of Allies from long-range ballistic missiles to be provided by the planned deployment of European-based United States missile defence assets.
—NATO Heads of State Final Declaration, April 3, 2008
…[P]lease let's not have any more talk of deployment of missiles or deployment of antimissile systems. Deployment of a missile defense system would bring nothing to security in Europe.
—President Sarkozy at EU–Russia Summit in France, November 15, 2008
Who would hold the key to their [European-based United States missile defense assets] use? What threat would they tackle? There are risks, yes, but to say that there is a threat today would need to be checked.
—French Defense Minister, Hervé Morin, December 1, 2008
Ballistic missile proliferation poses an increasing threat to Allies' forces, territory, and populations. Missile defence forms part of a broader response to counter this threat. We therefore recognise the substantial contribution to the protection of Allies from long-range ballistic missiles to be provided by the planned deployment of European-based United States missile defence assets. As tasked at the Bucharest Summit, we are exploring ways to link this capability with current NATO missile defence efforts… As all options include the planned deployment of European-based United States missile defence assets, we note as a relevant development the signature of agreements by the Czech Republic and the Republic of Poland with the United States regarding those assets.
—NATO Foreign Ministers' Final Communiqué, December 3, 2008
War and Peace
The divisions among the powers of Europe over the war in Iraq in 2003 revealed the problem of imposing a single foreign policy on all EU member states. Faced with its members and acceding countries supporting one of two diametrically opposed positions, the EU descended into chaos trying to fashion a single policy out of pure contradiction.[36] Europe's countries were broadly split down the middle. France heightened tensions in Europe by telling largely pro-war accession countries that they had "missed a good opportunity to keep quiet."[37] France also sought to deny Turkey planning assistance within the NATO alliance, owing to Paris's vehement opposition to the American-led invasion of Iraq.[38]
The Atlanticists responded with a letter of support to the U.S. Administration, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote to all EU capitals urging them to consider military action as a viable last resort.[39] Less than a week before the invasion, the leaders of the United States, the U.K., and Spain met in the Azores to build international momentum for action on Iraq in a summit that was quickly interpreted as a confrontation with the Franco–German led anti-war axis.
The president of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, commented that "Whatever the outcome of the war, there can be no denying that this is a bad time for the common foreign and security policy for the European Union as a whole."[40] EU divisions over Operation Iraqi Freedom illustrate the fallacy of assuming the nations of Europe have a single foreign policy voice. Washington diplomatically engaged its European allies on a systematic bilateral basis, and, where necessary, on an ad hoc multilateral basis. The juggernaut of European integration, however, seeks to remove that option, making Brussels the only port of call for American foreign policy planners. It is inevitable that this will be to the detriment of American foreign policy. As Henry Kissinger has noted:
When the United States deals with the nations of Europe individually, it has the possibility of consulting at many levels and to have its view heard well before a decision is taken. In dealing with the European Union, by contrast, the United States is excluded from the decision-making process and interacts only after the event, with spokesmen for decisions taken by ministers at meetings in which the United States has not participated at any level.... Growing estrangement between America and Europe is thus being institutionally fostered.[41]
The Lisbon Treaty
Following the deep European divisions over whether to support or oppose the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the EU more determinedly wrestled with the question of how to fashion a supranational foreign policy, determined that such division should not happen again. Former Member of the European Parliament and current leader of Britain's Liberal Democratic Party, Nick Clegg, stated in 2003 at the height of EU tensions over Iraq:
The relish with which the anti-European British press has rushed to proclaim the last rites over the EU's fledgling common foreign and security policy is premature. The EU has a habit of rebounding strongly from internal crisis and strife.[42]
In 2004, EU leaders signed the European Constitution, which would have codified the supreme legal basis of the 25 member states at the time, marking a monumental departure from the previous, treaty-based approach to European integration.[43] The constitution was an audacious document, which proposed to significantly extend the EU's competency in foreign-policy making and introduce permanent high-ranking political positions, such as an EU president and a single EU foreign minister. It was subsequently rejected in referenda by the voters of France and Holland. The EU pressed on regardless of this stark popular opposition and "renegotiated" a virtually identical document, the Lisbon Treaty.[44]
The Lisbon Treaty is currently pending ratification by all EU member states, having already been rejected once by voters in Ireland. The Irish government has committed to holding a second referendum on the treaty later this year, since Lisbon cannot proceed without the ratification of all member states. Just like the European Constitution, the Lisbon Treaty contains the building blocks of a United States of Europe and will shift power from the member states of the EU to Brussels in several areas of policymaking, including defense, national security, and foreign policy.[45] The treaty is a blueprint for restricting the sovereign right of EU member states to determine their own foreign policies; above all, the treaty underscores the EU's long-held ambitions to become a global power.
As with the EU Constitution, the Lisbon Treaty will create a permanent EU president, and extend the roles of the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and of the EU's powerful diplomatic corps. With a single legal personality, Brussels would sign international agreements on behalf of all member states. Critically, unanimous voting has been removed in several key areas and majority voting introduced for 12 different areas of foreign policy, including the election of the EU foreign minister and proposals emanating from the foreign minister.[46]
The treaty will restrict the ability of member states to operate on the international stage on an independent basis. Should the EU decide on a common foreign policy position, the EU will automatically speak for the U.K. and France in the United Nations Security Council.[47] This should be particularly worrisome to the United States since the U.K. and U.S. have proved to be valuable partners in this body in the past. The treaty further asserts the value and importance of the European Union over members' sovereign rights and national interests. It states:
Before undertaking any action on the international scene or entering into any commitment which could affect the Union's interests, each Member State shall consult the others within the European Council or the Council. Member States shall ensure, through the convergence of their actions, that the Union is able to assert its interests and values on the international scene. Member States shall show mutual solidarity.[48]
A Threat to the Anglo–American-Led Operation in Afghanistan
The Lisbon Treaty represents a major threat to the NATO alliance. Rather than creating additional military resources, Lisbon will lead to the replication of NATO and duplicate many of its functions. The long-term goal of creating a European army and duplicating NATO's Article V commitment—that an attack against one member constitutes an attack against all members—illustrates these dangers.
In 2000, the EU announced proposals for an army of 100,000 (60,000 of whom could be deployed at 60 days' notice for up to a year at a time). Britain's Conservative Party commented at the time that this would effectively destroy NATO.[49] The British government rejected this criticism, claiming that the EU was not taking on collective defense, which was purely NATO's responsibility.[50] The Treaty of Lisbon however, proposes an EU mutual defense clause:
If a Member State is the victim of armed aggression on its territory, the other Member States shall have towards it an obligation of aid and assistance by all the means in their power, in accordance with Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. This shall not prejudice the specific character of the security and defence policy of certain Member States.[51]
In addition to duplicating NATO's Article V, the EU remains intent on creating its own military. In the absence of additional defense spending, these resources will have to come at NATO's expense. Under the Lisbon Treaty, the EU would have "Permanent Structured Cooperation"—an inner group of EU nations (currently proposed to consist of France, the U.K., Germany, Spain, Italy, and Poland) pooling military resources and manpower to form an army of 60,000 to undertake EU missions.[52] The reality is that frontline British troops would have to be mandated for EU availability at NATO's expense, probably from Afghanistan. As Open Europe, a British policy institute, warns:
In simple terms, the UK would have to earmark 10,000 frontline troops for service on EU missions. For the EU force to be viable UK troops would need to be constantly available for EU operations. The fact that the UK is one of the few EU countries to have modern combat forces is likely to mean that the UK would have to keep its 10,000 in the UK/EU. Given the UK's current military overstretch, the plans would almost certainly divert vital resources away from the British mission in Afghanistan.[53]
A cross-party group of former senior British ministers commented in 2000 that the creation of an EU army was "an openly political project,"[54] a point confirmed by then-German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer: "This is part of the European integration process."[55] Now, as then, no additional troops are available for this paper army. Either troops already committed to NATO will be counted twice, or, in the worst case scenario, troops will be withdrawn from existing NATO missions.
In 2000, Lady Thatcher described the creation of an EU army as "a piece of monumental folly that puts our security at risk in order to satisfy political vanity."[56] Rather than representing a genuine attempt to increase Europe's military contribution to vital missions, such as Afghanistan, the EU is merely seeking to advance its own political ambitions.
This is of particular importance to the United Kingdom, whose relationship with the United States has been underpinned by shared military commitments over the years. President Barack Obama has already stated that the war in Afghanistan is America's top foreign policy priority; a deterioration of Britain's commitment to Afghanistan at this time would be unacceptable to the United States. [57]
Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton argues that the Lisbon Treaty poses a threat to both the Anglo–American Special Relationship and to NATO.[58] By reducing the ability of member states to set their own foreign policies and work with America outside of the EU's purview, the Treaty of Lisbon represents a profound threat to the Obama Administration's pledge to renew positive relations with European countries.[59]
What the Administration and Congress Should Do
The transatlantic relationship is vital to European and international security. European countries and the United States must nurture their relationships in order to achieve and maintain global peace and security. Specifically:
- The Obama Administration must make clear that building enduring bilateral alliances is a top U.S. foreign policy priority. The Administration should engage with the European Union on issues such as trade and international commerce. On issues of high foreign policy importance, especially defense and counterterrorism, the Administration must invest its diplomatic efforts in European capitals.
- Congress should hold hearings to analyze the implications of the Lisbon Treaty for the transatlantic alliance. The full range of policies advanced in the Lisbon Treaty must be analyzed, particularly the implications for foreign-policy making and alliance-building. The results of these hearings must be considered by the Administration before any tacit or public endorsement of the treaty.
- The Administration must challenge NATO's European members to support reform and revitalization within the alliance. The Administration should reaffirm NATO as the cornerstone of the transatlantic alliance, and invite European members to strongly back key reform measures, including the formulation of a new threat assessment and a pro-enlargement agenda.
- The Administration should take the lead in promoting missile defense in Europe. The Administration should support deployment of U.S. missile defenses in Central and Eastern Europe and dispatch high-level members to Warsaw and Prague to reaffirm the Administration's support for the "third site" installations in Poland and the Czech Republic. It should call on the NATO alliance to build on the U.S. system with complementary missile defenses.
- The Administration and Congress should withdraw support for a European army and a separate EU defense identity. French-led plans to develop the Common Foreign and Security Policy through the European Security and Defense Policy and the development of European military arrangements, separate from NATO, were significantly advanced under the French EU presidency. The United States must stress the primacy of NATO in Europe's security architecture—and the unacceptability of duplicating NATO or placing additional stress on its considerably overstretched resources.
Conclusion
Foreign policy is an attribute of statehood that must remain at the nation-state level if it is to be meaningful or effective. If the United States wishes to continue enjoying the benefits of its long-standing relationships with the countries of Europe, it must oppose the creation of a supranational EU foreign policy and the duplication of NATO resources by the European Union. U.S. support for a single European foreign and military policy has been misplaced. While successive U.S. Administrations have believed their desire for Europe to undertake a greater share of the global security burden to be achievable through further European integration, evidence suggests the exact opposite to be the case.
The U.S. government should instead pursue a policy under which its bilateral engagements with European nations are prioritized, and engagement with the EU is based purely on where Brussels can add value to a specific policy area. The United States and Europe should engage on critical foreign policy issues, such as military planning and counterterrorism, both bilaterally and through NATO. The usurpation of power by Brussels jeopardizes these types of engagements—and ultimately threatens the security of the United States.
Sally McNamara is Senior Policy Analyst in European Affairs in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, a division of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, at The Heritage Foundation. The author is grateful to Morgan L. Roach, Research Assistant in the Thatcher Center, and Parker Broaddus, Thatcher Center intern, for their assistance in preparing this paper.
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