Toward a New “Concert of Powers”

As the first decade of the 21st century winds down, a new urgency attends the nature and quality European-American relations, triggered in part by a resurgent Russia, but also by global concerns over climate change, energy supplies, terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the dislocations of rapidly globalizing economic and financial systems.

Some on both sides of the Atlantic either predict - or prefer - further distancing of NATO’s two pillars. In the US, some still worry about entangling alliances which, in their view, unduly constrain America’s freedom of global action. In Europe, there are mirror image proponents of a European foreign and defense policy totally independent of America’s.

American observers tend to see the US as a global superpower, with both Pacific/Asian as well as Atlantic/European commitments. As Richard Holbrooke pungently characterized it: The United States is nation where you need only one phone number – the White House – to get an official foreign- or defense- policy declaration.

In the EU, you would need 27 numbers to canvass the views of its member governments, and even with a single spokesperson for “Common Foreign and Security Policy” there is seldom a single, authoritative EU policy to be spoken of. Witness Georgia, or Iran.

Robert Kagan characterized the fundamental differences in perspective across the Atlantic by suggesting that modern Europeans “come from Venus” and contemporary Americans “from Mars.” Kagan thus capsulized what he sees as US willingness to use military power to protect its allies and interests, and European preference for using what Joseph Nye calls “soft power” to moderate tensions and dampen conflicts with diplomacy, negotiations and other non-military exchanges.

Long before Kagan and Nye, Ibn Khaldun, Gibbon and Toynbee described empires and nations as organisms that are born, grow, thrive, and eventually lose their dynamism as they slide into decline.

The common theme of cyclical philosophers was that civilization mellows societies -- they become cosmopolitan and sophisticated, inward-looking and consumerist, passive and reactive. And, ultimately, their dominant positions are ceded to more vigorous and agile successors.

Along parallel lines, Samuel Huntington predicted that the 21st century would usher in a “clash of civilizations” culminating eventually with the “West” facing all “the rest” (Islamic, Slav/Orthodox, Hindu, Confucian, Japanese, African and Latin American). Implicit in the Harvard professor’s argument was the notion that a system of global order could not be sustained given the incompatibility of Western values and practices with those of the “non-Western” civilizations.

These and other witty but facile characterizations have led us to overlook a more fundamental and ultimately more interesting concept: a global balance of power system in which Europe, Japan and America are playing major roles.

In fact, this has been the concerted approach to dealing with reclusive North Korea and bombastic Iran alike. It has also been applied - so far unsuccessfully - to the seemingly endless “peace process” between Israelis and Palestinians.

As Henry Kissinger has noted, balance of power systems seldom exist, and when they do emerge, they seldom endure. The underlying common values which created them prove transient, or they come to be viewed as unjust or unfair. Even when credited with the promotion of stability, they are usually debited in the dimensions of economic development or even freedom.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many Americans leaped to the unfounded conclusion that there would be a “new world order” where nations and societies would gradually evolve in the image of America’s exceptionalism, as they would come to appreciate the benefits of consumer economics, individual liberty and responsibility.

But reality always intrudes.

Expectations of a US-led, progressive world were first undermined by continuing dependence on foreign oil and then foreign capital to bankroll the US debt. They were further eroded by the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the 1998 bombings of American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and, ultimately, by 9/11. The “new world order” proved neither new nor orderly.

Ironically, the terrorist strikes against shared values of economic development, individual liberty, political freedom, and social well-being – while initially drawing the major global powers together in the immediate shock of 9/11 – eventually drove these same powers apart. A main contributor to this estrangement was the Bush Administration’s dogged insistence on prosecuting an ill-conceived and badly executed war for “regime change” in Iraq without effectively mobilizing a broad coalition under a UN umbrella.

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, at a recent UK conference at Churchill's birthplace, Blenheim Palace, emphasized that “To manage diverse challenges in the years ahead, we – America and Europe together – will need strength and solidarity such as we have demonstrated in the past. Our policies and responses must show a mixture of resolve and restraint. ... The goal must be to come together and take the steadfast and prudent steps now – political, economic, and, when appropriate, military – to shape the international environment and choices of other powers.”

Regardless of whether a McCain or an Obama administration assumes office in January 2009, America and Europe would do well to forge a new “global concert of powers,” establishing institutions and processes to engage China, India, Russia and perhaps Brazil and others to use multiple tools to constrain revisionist powers bent on creating instability or outright conflict. The US and Europe must, as Gates said: “ … try to prevent situations where we have only two bleak choices: confrontation or capitulation, 1914 or 1938. “