French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine cautioned against that approach, warning that it ran the risk “of diluting the alliance”. Without a reasonably tight geographic focus, he believed, NATO could become a global crusader, endangering European interests in remote arenas. Spanish Foreign Minister Abel Matutes was even more specific that Europe did not have a stake in every geopolitical problem the United States might want to address somewhere else in the world. He stressed that what happens “8,000 kilometers from us — in Korea, for example … cannot be considered a threat to our security.” Vedrine echoed his point, saying that NATO “is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, not the North Pacific”. Such comments indicated a graphic recognition that American and European interests were distinct and separable, not identical or even always compatible.
Henry Kissinger, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, and other prominent “NATO traditionalists” also made that important distinction from the American side two decades ago. Krauthammer was caustic about the increasing focus of the “new NATO” on out-of-area missions. “For the clever young thinkers of the [Clinton] administration,” he observed sarcastically, the Alliance’s traditional deterrence mission apparently was “too boring”. He saw them as wanting to refashion NATO as “a robust, restless alliance ready to throw its weight around outside its own borders to impose order and goodness”. Kissinger shared that concern. “Kosovo is no more a threat to America than Haiti is to Europe—and we never asked for help there”. He worried about blurring such important differences and having Washington responsible for resolving every manner of parochial problem in or near Europe.
Such concerns were warranted. The United States is still entangled in the Balkans, trying to help resolve quarrels between Serbia and now-independent Kosovo. Washington even dispatched a 500-person troop contingent in 2017 to bolster the international peacekeeping force there when tensions flared sharply. A major reason that Barack Obama’s administration launched a regime-change war in Libya was because of pressure from key NATO allies, especially Britain and France. The US government also is on the front lines of dealing with Russian-Ukrainian and Russian-Georgian disputes. US leaders still seem to make no meaningful distinction between the interests of the United States and Europe.
That approach is both illogical and excessively burdensome. A new generation of critics is renewing the argument that NATO shows serious signs of obsolescence and that U.S. and European interests are not identical. Public opinion surveys also confirm that there are substantial and widening differences between American and European perspectives on a wide range of foreign policy issues. Such a realization might well have taken root and grown after the first round of dissent that surfaced in the late 1990s, but the 9–11 attacks and the onset of the so-called war on terror temporarily reinforced a sense of transatlantic solidarity, thereby stifling debate and needed policy changes.
Creating a strong European security organization to handle purely European contingencies makes sense for both sides. US leaders should encourage European ambitions for an independent security capability, not blindly emulate previous administrations and seek to sabotage those ambitions. Such an organization ought to take primary responsibility for the Continent’s security affairs and for addressing problems on Europe’s periphery. A mechanism for transatlantic security cooperation should be reserved for serious threats that menace both the United States and Europe.
