Consequences for Europe

Now to return to your question, which is how does [the outcome of French and German elections] affect their relationships -- Germans, French -- to the other European actors?

That's a very interesting thing. What happened is that this axis, the Franco-German axis, did not manage to actually achieve its claim to the leadership of Europe. The irony in this game was, as they tried to gang up and balance against the United States, at least eighteen other European nations got together to balance and gang up against the Franco-German duo, aligning with the United States on the Iraq war. These are nations from Portugal to Poland, from Slovenia to Slovakia to Bulgaria, Britain, of course, Italy; signaling to the Franco-German duo, "We do not accept your claim to leadership." Signaling, also, that "If we depend on our security for others, we'd rather depend for our security on a superpower like the United States, than to two close-by medium powers like France and Germany." So once the bouncing game begins -- that's my basic point -- it's a game that can be played by everybody.

And so the last thought: today there is much less Europe than there was six months ago. Perhaps the most prominent victim in the Iraq war was and remains Europe, which has fallen apart under the pressure.

So Rumsfeld's use of the distinction "old Europe" versus the "new Europe" that was siding with us was savvy, in putting a name to this inchoate game.

Well, it's not the new Europe versus the old Europe. It was parts of the old Europe with parts of the new Europe. The parts of the old Europe are by no means insignificant parts. It's Britain, it's Italy, it's Spain, it's Portugal. So we have four significant members of the so-called old Europe aligning themselves with so many members of the new Europe.

They are new in the sense that if they're with the United States, they're "thinking new," no matter their historic origins, is maybe Rumsfeld's thinking.

The problem with Don Rumsfeld is that he would rather lose a good friend than a good phrase. So he comes up with nice little shibboleths like that. It doesn't quite run to the truth correctly. There's a lot of the old Europe in this new Europe in the sense that like the old Europe of the Cold War, these newly sovereign European nations want to go back to the tradition of postwar Europe, which is to view the United States not as an imposition or a neo-imperial power, but one where their security is being taken care of more reliably than by Europe itself. So in a way, the new Europe harkens back to an old, that is, a forty-year-old Cold War tradition, that we think that the United States is certainly a power in Europe, if not a European power. That used to be new in 1945, but was the European reality from 1945 all the way to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Let's go through some of these institutions before we move into talking about where you think the world is going. What about NATO? What body blow has been inflicted on NATO in this crises? Or will it survive in a new guise?

You mean this crises in Iraq?

Iraq and the preparations to the war.

Alliances die when they win. This alliance, after forty years, won in 1989 when the wall came down. It won on Christmas day in 1991 when the red hammer and sickle flag was hauled down for the last time at the Kremlin. And what is it? Blue, white and red? No, white. The Russian three-color went up for the first time. At that point, NATO died, because the reason that had given birth to it and had sustained it was gone. That's when NATO died, Christmas day of 1991.

If you wish, it kind of lingered on until 1994. Why 1994? That's another historic date in the history of Europe. The last of the Russian troops withdrew from Central Europe and back to Russia. At that time, the great strategic threat that had given birth and substance to NATO was gone. So NATO died somewhere between 1989 and 1994. That was the biggest body blow, to pick up your term, and that was the body blow paradoxically delivered by its historic success.

Since then, a new NATO, let's call it NATO II, has emerged. It is what I would call "alliance à la carte" or "ad hoc alliance," or what Don Rumsfeld calls the "coalition of the willing," where the United States, in '95 in Bosnia [and] in '99 in Kosovo, picked "à la carte" an alliance of the willing which supported the war against Slobodan Milosevic.

Again, after 9/11, another coalition was formed but it was not NATO that destroyed the battlefield in Afghanistan, but, again, a coalition of the willing, mostly drawn from NATO, but not only.

If we now get to the Iraq war, NATO simply did play a zero role. The United States picked a very small coalition of the willing, consisting of the Brits -- the only ones who are really fighting -- plus symbolic [force assistance.] The Australians are fighting, or have been fighting, and the Poles, too, and some Danes, etc., etc.

In conclusion, NATO as an apparatus where people interact, train with each other, speak the same language, work for interoperability is going to be à la carte; but it's no longer going to be the NATO that obeyed the Three Musketeers principle, "All for one and one for all." It's à la carte and ad hoc.

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