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    Europe and America in a New CenturyDavid P. Calleo

    Published online: 11 Dec 2013.

    To cite this article: David P. Calleo (2013) Europe and America in a New Century, Survival: GlobalPolitics and Strategy, 55:5, 211-224, DOI: 10.1080/00396338.2013.841822

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    I

    For most of modern history, Europe has been America’s Signicant Other.

    For the past half century in particular, an alliance between the two has

    dominated world politics. But how long can this alliance be expected to

    last, and in what form? How well does it t the world likely to evolve in

    the twenty-rst century?

    The present close relationship was not inevitable, as a study of its history

    indicates. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the

    transatlantic relationship was governed by American isolationism. Thisamounted to a diplomatic trade-o where the United States refrained from

     being drawn into European power politics and European states refrained

    from intervening in the Western Hemisphere. The trade-o held until the

    world wars of the twentieth century. Of course, the United States was

    hardly unaware of Europe over this long stretch. America was, after all, a

    nation whose population was based primarily on constant European immi-

    gration. Events in Europe like the Potato Famine, the revolutions of 1848

    and Italian unication had major consequences for the ow and character

    of America’s imported population. Immigration reproduced in the United

    States something like Europe’s own diverse patchwork of vigorously com-

    peting nationalities. But nationalist cohabitation in America was not always

    peaceful. New immigrants often arrived with their old antagonisms intact.

    Closing Argument

    Europe and America in aNew Century

    David P. Calleo

    David P. Calleo  is a University Professor at Johns Hopkins University, Dean Acheson Professor at its Paul H.

    Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and a Survival  Contributing Editor.

    Survival  | vol. 55 no. 5 | October–November 2013 | pp. 211–224 DOI 10.1080/00396338.2013.841822

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    212 | David P. Calleo

    Absorbing this rich diversity peacefully has been a Herculean task for the

    American Republic.

    Paradoxically, America’s population of European immigrants is one

    factor in explaining the long persistence of America’s isolationist policytoward Europe. Playing an active role in Europe’s rivalries would have

     been hazardous for America’s own multinational consensus. Meanwhile,

    to satisfy its lust for space, America had its own West, where the military

    threat was seldom formidable, and where internal antagonism among

    America’s national families could more easily be avoided, at least until ter-

    ritorial expansion grew inextricably linked to the slavery question.

    The Second World War saw American isolationism towards Europe

    replaced by America’s active pursuit of European hegemony. In the process,

    the United States transformed itself from isolated giant to global leader. The

    transition was pregured as America entered the First World War in 1917.

    Despite America’s still limited military participation, President Woodrow

    Wilson was soon seizing the political high ground with his plans for a

    League of Nations. Wilson’s grand initiative failed to win stable support

    at home. The campaign to support it was bungled and illness incapacitated

    Wilson himself. The country gradually reverted to its isolationist tradition.But a quarter of a century later, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who

    had been assistant secretary of the navy in Wilson’s war cabinet, had suc -

    ceeded where Wilson had failed.

    As in the First World War, America’s participation in the Second World

    War quickly took a hegemonic form. As Japan was plunging the United States

    into the war, Roosevelt was imagining a full set of new institutions for global

    security, nance and trade – institutions in which the United States would

    play the leading role. Despite his early death, Roosevelt’s visionary schemes

    – the United Nations and its economic oshoots – were rmly established

    and live on to the present day. FDR’s assertive diplomacy proved conta-

    gious for America’s elites. As early as January 1941, Henry Luce, owner and

    editor of Time magazine, was proclaiming the ‘American Century’. By 1943,

    the Republican presidential candidate of 1940, Wendell Willkie, was touring

    the country at Roosevelt’s behest, aacking the isolationists in his own party

    and touting the virtues of ‘One World’ led by America.

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    Europe and America in a New Century | 213

    The renewed Wilsonian ambitions of the 1940s were greatly reinforced

     by another hegemonic American vision, the product of a patrician geo-

    political school which gathered in the early twentieth century around

    FDR’s distant Roosevelt cousin Theodore, president from 1901 to 1909.The group included John Hay, Henry and Brooks Adams, and the Senator

    from Massachuses, Henry Cabot Lodge. It was strongly inuenced by

    America’s own naval strategist with a geopolitical vision – Alfred Thayer

    Mahan. This ‘realist’ school of American imperialists had quite dierent

    assumptions from Wilson’s liberals, and in the end has had perhaps greater

    inuence over American foreign policy. Mahan taught that the global state

    system requires a hegemonic leader – preferably a naval power with an

    imposing manufacturing and nancial base. Britain was the nineteenth-cen-

    tury model. According to Mahan, Britain would be surpassed as America

    fullled its own continental destiny, and thereby grew able to deploy

    much greater naval power worldwide. Mahan died in 1914. He and his

    friends had been in no hurry to displace the British and, in fact, the First

    World War precipitated the breakdown of British hegemony before the

    United States was ready. But American imperialists could not be indier-

    ent, any more than the British, to the prospect of Germany becoming thecontinental hegemon, uniting Europe’s resources for projecting power into

    the world. Thus Wilson’s America went to war against Germany, despite

    the resentment of the country’s large and inuential German popula-

    tion.1  Paradoxically, at the war’s end Senator Lodge, Mahan’s principal

    political disciple, led the ght in the Senate to prevent the United States

    itself from joining the League of Nations. Part of Lodge’s disaection

    was philosophical and aesthetic. Mahan’s was a realist vision, rooted in

    Machiavelli and Hamilton, whereas Wilson’s was an idealist project, rooted

    in Locke and Jeerson. Lodge was also leery of international commitments

    that would infringe on the Senate’s own power over America’s foreign

    policy.

    The popular backlash against Wilson’s League had among its sources

    a reaction from German America, concentrated in the Midwest. Wilson’s

    failure demonstrated the essential fragility of any domestic popular base for

    vigorous American leadership abroad, above all in Europe. The presidential

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    election of November 1920 saw Warren Harding elected overwhelmingly

    on a platform condemning Wilson’s conduct and opposing the League of

    Nations. His Democratic opponent, James Cox, supported both Wilson and

    the League, and was crushed.The old isolationist hostility to involvement in European aairs persisted

    throughout the 1920s and 1930s, reinforced by German-American resent-

    ment at the Eastern Establishment’s preference for Britain and France.

    Midwestern banks poured money into Weimar Germany. When war broke

    out in Europe once more, Roosevelt, although increasingly commied to

    the Allied cause, found it dicult to edge the United States into it. It took

    the Japanese aack on Pearl Harbor to engage the US openly. Even then,

    Roosevelt was worried that he would not be able to justify joining the war

    in Europe. He was greatly relieved when, shortly after Pearl Harbor, Hitler

    himself declared war on America. Thereafter, Roosevelt rmly continued to

    give the war in Europe priority over the war in Asia. Roosevelt proved to be

    a superb war leader, who successfully fused Mahan’s realism with Wilson’s

    idealism. Thanks to him, Americans were nally ready for, as he put it, their

    ‘rendezvous with destiny’. He was greatly assisted, of course, by the loath-

    some character of the Nazi regime.

    II

    America’s victory in the Second World War, followed by the Cold War, radi-

    cally changed the domestic framework for American foreign policy. Fear

    of the Soviet Union proved in many ways a perfect catalyst for overcom-

    ing the old domestic divisions that had hitherto inhibited America’s pursuit

    of hegemony in Europe. This proved true despite the populist appeal of

    Senator McCarthy’s anti-communist witch-hunting directed at America’s

    foreign-policy elites and popular among former isolationists. But thanks to

    the brutal, irreligious and generally odious character of the Soviet regime,

    American popular support for a hegemonic alliance to contain communism

    was long lasting. The Cold War created the Federal Republic of Germany and

    transformed it into America’s closest ally. NATO came to be prized either

    as a protectorate for the homelands of America’s European populations, or

    as the best hope for the liberation of the homelands already occupied by the

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    Europe and America in a New Century | 215

    Soviets. Hence NATO’s enduring popularity in the United States and post-

    war America’s European-centred foreign policy.

    Meanwhile, partitioning the world with Stalin and Mao narrowed the

    scope of America’s hegemonic pretensions and overburdened the Sovietswith theirs. Thus, despite the Soviet Union’s heroic military victories over

    the Germans in the Second World War, in the end it was the United States

    that emerged as the victor. The Cold War that followed saw the US allied not

    only with Western Europe, including the major part of Germany, but also

    with Japan. America’s hegemonic leadership was, for the most part, grate-

    fully accepted. America’s hegemony could truthfully be called an “empire

     by invitation”.2  In contrast to America, Russia had only one major ally –

    China – with whom its relations were generally hostile. America’s victory in

    the Cold War was thus hardly surprising – as much a triumph of diplomacy

    and economics as of military power. Meanwhile, West European states,

     beginning to unite in their European Community, grew skilful in manipu-

    lating the superpowers to undermine the bipolar division of Europe.

    The Soviet collapse in 1991 ended the Cold War and introduced an amor-

    phous new post-Cold War era that has now persisted for over two decades.

    Given America’s long tradition of isolationism, with no Soviet Union and,as yet, no reliable substitute enemy, an obvious question hanging over these

    years is whether, or for how long, support for the Cold War’s transatlan-

    tic alliance will persist. There are numerous signs of American impatience:

    the intellectual elite of the American right have a tendency to see Europe

    – in particular continental Europe – as the source of uncongenial communi-

    tarian tendencies that are anti-individualist and ‘un-American’ culturally,

    politically and economically. Above all, neoconservatives tend to hold

    Europeans in contempt for their relative military weakness. By contrast, the

    libertarian wing of the American right has tended to grow increasingly

    restive at their own country’s huge defence budget, including the still heavy

    US investment in NATO.3 This opposition is hardly surprising, as America’s

    defence spending is much higher than anyone else’s.4 Meanwhile, liberal

    economists in the US have grown increasingly critical of the EU’s reluc-

    tance to adopt America’s package of neo-Keynesian remedies for the

    current global nancial crisis – quantitative easing, in particular.5

     Arguably,

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    the EU’s rejection of these remedies amounts to a European rejection of

    American economic leadership in a major crisis. Meanwhile, studies show

    a ‘values gap’ between the American and European publics.6 In short, it is

    not surprising that partisans of the Atlantic Alliance are feeling embaledand insecure.7

    III

    To restore enthusiasm for an active global alliance, both Americans and

    Europeans need a fresh narrative that explains the new post-Soviet world

    and convincingly indicates the appropriate American and European roles

    in it. Among Americans four grand narratives appear to be on oer: unipo-

    lar , declinist , pluralist and anarchic. While these are not entirely distinct, each

    implies dierent global roles for the United States and Europe, and a dier-

    ent relationship between them.

    According to the unipolar narrative, the Soviet collapse has left the United

    States the only remaining superpower, free to pursue global hegemony so

    long as America’s own domestic base will support it. Of course, hegemony

    always has opponents, at home and abroad, and its exercise needs to be

    managed skilfully. The George H.W. Bush administration, for example, wasprompt to intervene internationally but careful to cultivate the support of

    its European allies, while, at the same time, being wary of encouraging too

    much European military autonomy. The George W. Bush administration,

     by contrast, often thought the US might be stronger without its European

    allies.

    The declinist  narrative carries a quite dierent message. According to

    declinist theory, America’s hegemonic role is unlikely to last. This is because

    a hegemon, carrying the principal burden of sustaining the order and secu-

    rity enjoyed by everyone else, inevitably exhausts itself. While the free

    riders grow stronger from the benets, the hegemon grows weaker by pro-

    viding them. As hegemony fades, the world grows increasingly chaotic. A

    new hegemon eventually arises. It is not hard these days to nd trends that

    suggest America’s nancial and psychological exhaustion or the world’s

    disorder. Nor is there any lack of speculation that China will be America’s

    eventual successor.

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    Europe and America in a New Century | 217

    Our third,  pluralist , narrative sees a global future dominated not by a

    hegemon, old or new, but by several rising regional powers – perhaps, too,

     by a variety of non-state actors and interest groups capable of coordinat-

    ing on a global scale. Whereas a unipolar or declinist narrative calls for ahegemon or hegemonic aspirants, the classic recipe for peace in a plural-

    ist system is a stable balance of power, upgraded into a concert to prevent

    hegemony, while collaborating to maintain an orderly, law abiding and

    prosperous system of states.

    The anarchic narrative imagines a plural world of interdependent states,

    rising and falling without a stable balance of power or eective institu-

    tions to produce a concert. This is the outcome widely feared from a global

    system with highly competitive Asian powers whose interests are dicult

    to reconcile with those of the richer but increasingly less competitive trans-

    atlantic states.

    These four narratives, in all their variations, have faded in and out over

    recent years. The 1980s – with the ‘twin decits’ of the Reagan adminis-

    tration – were the golden age of declinism. These early declinists were

    concerned not with Soviet strength but with American economic weak-

    ness. The Soviet collapse in 1991 sent the declinist narrative into eclipse andinstead brought forward the unipolar narrative. The inuence of this tri-

    umphalist view remained strong in the rst Bush administration, through

    the Clinton administration and into the second term of the George W. Bush

    administration. By then, the signs of America’s decline had grown increas-

    ingly compelling. The American public was weary of indecisive wars;

    politics was beginning to be aected by the widespread perception that

    the average citizen’s living standards had been slipping as America’s pre- 

    eminent economic position was challenged by the rising great powers of

    Asia, China especially.8  Meanwhile, the banking crisis in America that

    erupted in 2006 soon spread to Europe. American weakness was leading to

    global disorder and nancial chaos, just as declinist theory had promised.

    In eect, the declinist narrative, foretelling the end of American hegemony,

    was also pointing to an anarchic result.

    The shrinking credibility of the unipolar narrative, along with the resur-

    gence of the declinist and the prospect of the anarchic, naturally feed a

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    new interest in a more collaborative approach to managing international

    aairs. In eect, US policy has grown more accepting of a plural system.

    This means recasting, but not necessarily abandoning, the traditional alli-

    ance. East European states, still frightened by Russian ambitions, wouldprefer the traditional NATO to continue indenitely. But even the more

    secure Europeans, who have wanted to see the new Russia as an oppor-

    tunity rather than a threat, have all along remained content for a formal

    Atlantic alliance to continue – as a way of maintaining a balanced frame-

    work of order in the face of big and hostile neighbours. So long as Russia or

    Iran have unfriendly governments, Europeans are unlikely to throw away

    their American protection. Nor, however, are they willing to pay too high

    a price for it – as the history of transatlantic relations during the George W.

    Bush presidency makes clear. Europeans resist any American connection

    that locks them into a hostile relationship with their Russian and Muslim

    neighbours. Their hope is ultimately to embrace these neighbours in a coop-

    erative pan-European system. Thus, despite the discouraging features of the

    Putin regime and the lingering fears of the recently liberated East European

    states, major West European governments are wary of allowing any NATO

    expansion that would restore the old Cold War antagonism.American foreign policy has gradually adopted these European perspec-

    tives. Instead of pursuing the isolated omnipotence of the unipolar view,

    the Obama administration touts a strategy of ‘constant engagement’. It has

    hoped in doing so to reverse the transatlantic disaection of the Bush years

    and to rejuvenate the old alliance, but without designating Russia as the

    ocial enemy. Obama’s America has also assiduously avoided trying to

    exploit military and diplomatic dierences among the allies. In particular,

    it has avoided the old game of rounding up the smaller European countries

    and piing them against the bigger. It encouraged the Anglo-French inter-

    vention in Libya. It provided support when needed, but was careful not to

    take over the project. Uncharacteristically, the United States has sought ‘to

    lead from behind’. Obama’s US has also ‘reset’ its relations with Russia,

    to discourage Russia-baiting among the East European states and give

    support to the big West European states trying to develop stable relations

    with their giant neighbour. Obama has not completely abandoned this strat-

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    Europe and America in a New Century | 219

    egy, despite the discouraging climate since Putin’s return to the Russian

    presidency. The US has tried, moreover, to adjust its Iranian policy to suit

    European perspectives, which traditionally have been more hopeful about

    negotiation.These American policies have certainly improved the atmosphere for

    transatlantic relations. But it remains to be seen whether common interests

    are strong enough to keep a close transatlantic alliance together. The US

    and the EU states have competing as well as common interests – in relations

    with Russia and the Islamic world, or in any new world order generally.

    Relations with China are certainly vital to both Americans and Europeans,

     but their policies towards China may not be easily compatible. Each is, after

    all, competing to ll the role of China’s principal Western partner. In short,

    even a strong EU would not necessarily always share the same perspectives

    and interests as a strong United States. Thus it seems far from certain that a

    close transatlantic alliance must endure.

    Since the 1970s an increasingly globalised economy has been shaken by a

    series of nancial crises. The most recent, still very much with us, has already

    provoked a serious decline in Western condence and solidarity. While the

    gloomy prospects and immediate dangers of the present breakdown have been studied exhaustively, analyses of the longer-term implications are in

    shorter supply.

    *  * *

    If we assume that the EU and the US somehow do avoid being dragged

    down by the present nancial and political crisis, and allow ourselves to take

    a very long view – say, to mid-century – how might Europe and America

    relate to each other then? The answer will probably depend greatly on how

    each evolves domestically. Today’s EU remains in the midst of a lengthy and

    still inconclusive dening of its constitution. But since the European states

    do collectively have large resources, the ultimate outcome of their consti-

    tutional evolution may well impose signicant changes on the rest of the

    world. If Europe’s sovereign states, while remaining in a confederal union,

    somehow nd the formulas needed to manage their own interdependence

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    successfully, Europe is likely to remain a major force in the world – both

    for its amassed resources but also by the example it sets. If a confederal EU

    holds together, it will remain one of the world’s largest economic systems.

    If it is still more a confederacy than a federation, it will probably remain dis-inclined to dene itself primarily as a military power. Instead, it will most

    likely present a model that favours diplomatic bargaining and conciliation.9 

    Europe’s natural instinct will be to reach out to Russia and the Muslim

    world, to entice them into its own orbit of stable peace and prosperity.

    If Europe does evolve in this fashion, it may prove ideally suited to

    acting as a mediating power between the United States and China. Europe’s

    constitutional character would accord well with its geographical posi-

    tion, occupying, as it does, the cape of the Eurasian continent. Indeed, the

    institutions and practices of confederal Europe might be the model for

     building a world system that permied the mutual accommodation of rising

    Asia and a still vigorous West. In short, Europe could be a critical balancer

    in the evolving institutions for global order, a role for which its own confed-

    eral character would have prepared it. In this sense, the success of Europe’s

    confederal experiment should be seen as a critical interest for the whole

    world.These expectations, however, assume that Europe succeeds without

    having to abandon its present confederal structure. Many people now

     believe, however, that to survive the EU will need to turn away from its

    traditional constitution toward a more centralised American-style federal

    model. Given its resources and imperial traditions, if the EU does travel very

    far down this path it might gradually nd itself becoming a superpower.

    Having such a Europe would point rmly toward our third narrative – a

    multipolar world of several great powers. If such a plural global system

    does emerge, the odds for a peaceful and tolerably just global order seem

    more promising – as long as a relatively rational and conciliatory Europe

    remains a major player.

    The rearmation of such a Europe despite today’s nancial crisis,

    combined with the geopolitical and scal consolidation of overstretched

    America and a more measured pace for China’s rise – taken together with a

    successful reform of the monetary system – would suggest a more rational

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    Europe and America in a New Century | 221

    and hopeful future for the world. Much, of course, will depend on whether

    Europe collectively can continue to develop its own model successfully – in

    other words, whether it can nd the right balance in its own aairs between

    conciliation and eectiveness. Europe’s importance for shaping the world’sfuture suggests a heavy responsibility for today’s leaders and opinion-mak-

    ers – a challenge perhaps not well enough understood in either Europe or

    America.

    Instead, underestimating Europe’s importance has already become a bad

    transatlantic habit in the twenty-rst century. Doubtless, Americans cling

    too jealously to their global responsibilities and imagine too central a role

    for themselves in the world’s future. For Europeans, however, presuming

    their own weakness has become too convenient a way of escaping responsi-

     bility for the future, of taking a vacation from history. No one should deny

    America’s contribution to the last century. But possibly Europe will have

    more to oer to the present. Since the Second World War, Europeans have

     built a remarkable confederal system – one that retains its nation-states but

    within a superstructure that demands mutual regard and encourages the

    search for common interests. At present, it is passing through a delicate

    moment of constitutional redenition. It may fail, but the record of the pastseveral decades suggests it may not. Out of its own terrible experiences,

    post-war Europe has created a durable continental formula, one that may

    well oer tomorrow’s more plural world its best hope for a sane future. The

    European Union is Europe’s gift to world history. It should not be thrown

    away in retrograde quarrels among citizens and leaders suddenly deprived

    of their generosity and vision. Europe’s historic education has been too

    expensive to be allowed to fail.

    Notes

    1  For an account of the German-

    American positions during the

    First World War, see Frederick C.

    Luebke, Bonds of Loyalty: German-

     Americans and World War I  (DeKalb,

    IL: Northern Illinois University Press,

    1974).

    2  Geir Lundestad, ‘Empire by

    Invitation? The United States and

    Western Europe, 1945–1952’, Journal

    of Peace Research , vol. 23, no. 3,

    September 1986, pp. 263–77.3  See Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and

    Power: America and Europe in the New

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    World Order (New York: Alfred A.

    Knopf, 2002), which builds further on

    his Policy Review article ‘Power and

    Weakness’ (no. 113, June–July 2002,

    pp. 3–28), where he famously sum-marises the dierent priorities in the

    Europe–US relationship: ‘Americans

    are from Mars and Europeans are

    from Venus’ (p. 3). Scholars from the

    Cato Institute – a libertarian think

    tank – have commented on the US

    ‘overinvestment’, and EU ‘underin-

    vestment’ in NATO over the years. See

    Doug Bandow, ‘NATO Has Become a

    Form of U.S. Foreign Aid’, 2012, and

    Ted Carpenter ‘Armed, Overbearing

    and Dangerous’, 2013, etc. Others,

    such as former Congressman and lib-

    ertarian Ron Paul, a staunch supporter

    of reducing government size, espouse

    a US exit from NATO altogether (see

    comments made in interview with

    CBS News’ John Dickerson, 8 July

    2010, hp://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6658752n).

    4  The President’s Budget for Fiscal Year

    2014 shows that in 2012, US defence

    spending amounted to about 4.4%

    of GDP. Oce of Management and

    Budget, ‘The President’s Budget for

    Fiscal Year 2014’, Historical Tables:

    Table 3.1 – Outlays by Superfunction

    and Function: 1940–2017, hp://www.

    whitehouse.gov/sites/default/les/

    omb/budget/fy2014/assets/hist03z1.

    xls. Data from the IISS in The Military

    Balance 2013 shows that this dwarfs

    any of its Western neighbours or the

    European countries, which as a whole

    spent ‘only’ 1.52% of their GDP on

    defence.5  Paul Krugman, a self-proclaimed

    Keynesian and columnist for the

    New York Times , in his blog, ‘The

    Conscience of a Liberal’, regularly

    makes this critique. See, for instance,

    Paul Krugman, ‘The Austerity

    Delusion’, New York Times , 24 March2011; ‘Those Revolting Europeans’,

    New York Times , 6 May 2012.6  Pew Research Center, ‘The American–

    Western European Values Gap’, 17

    November 2011 (updated 29 February

    2012).7  An indication of the insecurity about

    transatlantic ties can be gauged

    from articles from institutions such

    as the Center for Transatlantic

    Relations (SAIS) in its ‘Transatlantic

    Topics’, EU–US area, or conferences

    such as the Wilson Center’s ‘The

    Transatlantic Relationship: Problems

    and Prospects’, which describe the

    many challenges ahead and how con-

    nections between the partners can and

    must be strengthened, if the alliance is

    to exist in the future.8  See Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall

    of the Great Powers: Economic Change

    and Military Conict from 1500 to 2000 

    (New York: Random House, 1987);

    David P. Calleo, Beyond American

    Hegemony: The Future of the Western

     Alliance (New York: Basic Books,

    1987).9  The notion of the European Union as

    a ‘civilian power’ was early described

     by François Duchêne (1973), who

    saw the EU (or the contemporary

    European Community) as a model

    structure for how ‘inuence … can be

    wielded by a large political coopera-

    tive formed to exert essentially civilian

    forms of power’ and, in his view,

    should be a ‘civilian group of coun-

    tries long on economic power and

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    Europe and America in a New Century | 223

    relatively short on armed force’. In the

    40 years following Duchêne’s charac-

    terisation of the EU, the notion, which

    over time also evolved from its origi-

    nal meaning, has been and still is very

    much alive. In ‘Beyond the Civilian

    Power Debate’ (Politique Européenne ,

    no. 17, 2005/3), Karen E. Smith sheds

    light on what the term has come to

    mean and on the (ongoing) debate.

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     This publication can be purchased online at www.iiss.org/publications/adelphi

    or at www.iiss-routledgepublications.com

    ADELPHI books

    Emile Hokayem is Senior Fellow

    for Regional Security at the Middle

    East ofce of The International

    Institute for Strategic Studies. He

    was previously Political Editor of The

    National, in the UAE, and a Middle

    East analyst at the Stimson Center,

    in Washington DC.

    Adelphi 438; published May 2013; 234x156; 212pp; Paperback: 978-0-415-71738-0; £9.99

     This Adelphi is also available in Kindle format from Amazon

     BY EMILE HOKAYEM

    ‘ A well-argued, informative account of the Syrian conict by an expert

    who has tracked the crisis every step of the way. An important read for

    those interested in understanding the evolution of the revolt and the dire

    prospects for Syria’s future.’

    Roula Khalaf, Middle East Editor of the Financial Times

    ‘ This book offers the most timely and sophisticated analysis of the

    tragic war in Syria. Its author is one of the most subtle and perceptive

    observers of the Syrian political scene and relies in his arguments and

    presentation on primary sources, eldwork and in-person interviews with

    a whole range of actors from Syria and the region. You will not nd a

    better work on both the history and current dynamics of this conict.’

     Bernard Haykel, Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University 

    ‘ Emile Hokayem provides deep insight into the complexities of Syrian

    society and the demise of a strong state, and, most usefully, walks the

    reader through the maze of conicting agendas and interests of the

    regional players. It is an authoritative account of the most dynamic

    and difcult period of modern Syrian history. Hokayem’s work will be a

     valued tool for regional security studies, as Syria’s tragedy is likely todrive the agenda for regional analysis in the years ahead.’

     Ellen Laipson, President and CEO of the Stimson Center and Director of

    their Middle East/Southwest Asia program

    As an upbeat and peaceful uprising quickly and

    brutally descended into a zero-sum civil war, Syria

    crumbled from a regional player into an arena in which

    a multitude of local and foreign actors compete. The

    volatile regional fault lines that run through Syria have

    ruptured during this conict, and the course of events

    in this fragile yet strategically signicant country will

    profoundly shape the future of the Levant.

    Emile Hokayem’s rst-hand experience and sober

    analysis provide up-to-date insight into the myriad

    opposition groups, the conicting external interests

    and the murky calculations of the Assad regime.

    Tracking the seeds of dissent that laid the groundwork

    for rebellion, he looks at how Syria’s largely apolitical

    society mobilised and at the unpredictable dynamics

    that have been unleashed as the protest movement has

    radicalised and militarised. In the face of such profound

    challenges to its four decades of authoritarian rule,

    Hokayem also assesses the continued resilience of a

    regime that has escalated beyond the point of return.

     SYRIA’S  UPRISINGAND THE FRACTURINGOF THE LEVANT