A physicist's theory of the transatlantic relationship
Monday, 31 December 2007
Philip Stephens
I heard a nice story the other day about Albert Einstein. One summer his students complained about their examination paper. The problems they had been asked to solve, they protested, were precisely the same as the ones he had set a year earlier. Well, yes, Einstein agreed, the questions were indeed identical. What the students needed to understand, however, was that the answers had changed.
Apocryphal, or otherwise, the story seems to me to serve as a useful metaphor for the long and anguished debate about how the US and Europe might refurbish the transatlantic relationship. Almost since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and more urgently since the rupture over Iraq, both sides have continued to ask themselves this same question.
Neither has realised that the answer has changed. The old architecture is beyond repair. The response that the question now demands is not a list of initiatives to recapture the past, but rather a description of what might replace the old cold war alliance.
This may seem counter-intuitive given the warming of transatlantic relations during the past year or two. Germany and France now have Atlanticist leaders, and the poison has been drained from the debate about Iraq. The latest US effort to broker peace between Israelis and Palestinians is lauded by Europeans. US intelligence assessments about Iran's nuclear programmes has eased fears about US strikes on Tehran.
The return of good-mannered collaboration, however, does not change the basic facts. The alliance reflected above all the geopolitical circumstances of the confrontation with communism. Without the existential threat from the Soviet Union, Europe is no longer at the centre of America's geopolitical interest; and Europe no longer feels the need for an ever-present protector.
The unilateral choice made by George W. Bush after the attacks of September 11 2001 spoke to this new reality. The emergence of new great powers in Asia further underscores it. I can think of a dozen reasons why the US and Europe should continue to nurture a close relationship. But, however sincere in their intentions, today's leaders cannot restore the previous equilibrium.
At issue now is whether the US, with the support of its allies, chooses to design a new system that fits the changed global landscape. For the moment, the incentives and the obstacles look fairly evenly balanced.
The overarching geopolitical fact of coming decades is likely to be the relative decline of US power. The word relative is important. Measured by economic, technological and military might, America is likely to remain the pre-eminent nation during the first half of the present century and, perhaps, well beyond. But the US is already an insufficient as well as an indispensable power. As China, India and others rise, and Russia re-asserts itself, the US will become more dependent on the goodwill of others. How it responds to the shifts will in large degree shape the new international order -- or disorder.
The image of the future in the minds of many is of a multipolar system, with power shared between two or three groups of nations. In madder moments Jacques Chirac, the former French president, imagined France and Germany joining Vladimir Putin's Russia in one these poles.
Others -- in the US as well as Europe -- conjure up a world divided into two competing blocs: the liberal democracies on one side, the authoritarian capitalists, notably but not exclusively China and Russia, on the other. It is a neat division: Nato versus the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation. Neat but flawed: in the medium to long term Moscow and Beijing are much more likely to be strategic rivals than partners.
Life is seldom simple. More probably we are on the cusp of an era of great power competition in which alliances and allegiances shift according to accidents of circumstance and geography. Those who like historical analogies could look back at the second half of the 19th century.
Washington will have a number of options as to how to respond to this shifting landscape. The US could, for example, adopt a balancing and containment strategy in an effort to slow, in particular, China's rise. Alternatively, it might seek to create a new concert of democracies to sit within the present global system -- an institutionalised "coalition of the willing". Then again, an isolationist president could seek to rebuild the walls of fortress America.
Self-styled realists will tell you that the most likely course for the US is one which mixes elements of all these approaches. They are less inclined to add that the outcome would be an inherently unstable system, as prone to conflict as the world of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The more difficult, and infinitely preferable, response to the decline in its relative power would be for the US to seek to legitimise its leadership in a new international system by remodelling alliances and institutions to embrace the rising powers as stakeholders.
That, of course, would be an immensely difficult and protracted enterprise. But so, too, was the creation after the second world war of the present system -- something I heard recalled at a recent conference in Rome organised by Aspen Italia to mark the 60th anniversary of the Marshall Plan.
One of my fellow speakers was Richard Burt, the former US official who served as Washington's chief negotiator in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks with the former Soviet Union. I had always thought of Mr Burt as one of the coldest of cold warriors. But he told the Aspen group that there had been much more than hard military resolve behind the west's eventual victory over the Soviet Union. US policy during the cold war had blended the pursuit of national interest and generosity. Washington had sought to win friends as well as to confront enemies.
There was advice, too, for Europe. Most Europeans, another speaker at Aspen Italia remarked, prefer to recall the detente dimension of the stand-off with the Soviet Union rather than the military resolve shown by Washington. But one would not have been possible without the other. These lessons offer useful insights for anyone seeking to build a new international order. America's cold war presidents, to take another of Mr Burt's examples, did not put irresolute allies in a corner by insisting they were "with us or against us".
Drawing such morals from the resilience of the old alliance, though, is one thing; attempting to recreate it another. As Einstein had cause to tell his students, sometimes the answers have to change.
Under syndication arrangement
with FE
I heard a nice story the other day about Albert Einstein. One summer his students complained about their examination paper. The problems they had been asked to solve, they protested, were precisely the same as the ones he had set a year earlier. Well, yes, Einstein agreed, the questions were indeed identical. What the students needed to understand, however, was that the answers had changed.
Apocryphal, or otherwise, the story seems to me to serve as a useful metaphor for the long and anguished debate about how the US and Europe might refurbish the transatlantic relationship. Almost since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and more urgently since the rupture over Iraq, both sides have continued to ask themselves this same question.
Neither has realised that the answer has changed. The old architecture is beyond repair. The response that the question now demands is not a list of initiatives to recapture the past, but rather a description of what might replace the old cold war alliance.
This may seem counter-intuitive given the warming of transatlantic relations during the past year or two. Germany and France now have Atlanticist leaders, and the poison has been drained from the debate about Iraq. The latest US effort to broker peace between Israelis and Palestinians is lauded by Europeans. US intelligence assessments about Iran's nuclear programmes has eased fears about US strikes on Tehran.
The return of good-mannered collaboration, however, does not change the basic facts. The alliance reflected above all the geopolitical circumstances of the confrontation with communism. Without the existential threat from the Soviet Union, Europe is no longer at the centre of America's geopolitical interest; and Europe no longer feels the need for an ever-present protector.
The unilateral choice made by George W. Bush after the attacks of September 11 2001 spoke to this new reality. The emergence of new great powers in Asia further underscores it. I can think of a dozen reasons why the US and Europe should continue to nurture a close relationship. But, however sincere in their intentions, today's leaders cannot restore the previous equilibrium.
At issue now is whether the US, with the support of its allies, chooses to design a new system that fits the changed global landscape. For the moment, the incentives and the obstacles look fairly evenly balanced.
The overarching geopolitical fact of coming decades is likely to be the relative decline of US power. The word relative is important. Measured by economic, technological and military might, America is likely to remain the pre-eminent nation during the first half of the present century and, perhaps, well beyond. But the US is already an insufficient as well as an indispensable power. As China, India and others rise, and Russia re-asserts itself, the US will become more dependent on the goodwill of others. How it responds to the shifts will in large degree shape the new international order -- or disorder.
The image of the future in the minds of many is of a multipolar system, with power shared between two or three groups of nations. In madder moments Jacques Chirac, the former French president, imagined France and Germany joining Vladimir Putin's Russia in one these poles.
Others -- in the US as well as Europe -- conjure up a world divided into two competing blocs: the liberal democracies on one side, the authoritarian capitalists, notably but not exclusively China and Russia, on the other. It is a neat division: Nato versus the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation. Neat but flawed: in the medium to long term Moscow and Beijing are much more likely to be strategic rivals than partners.
Life is seldom simple. More probably we are on the cusp of an era of great power competition in which alliances and allegiances shift according to accidents of circumstance and geography. Those who like historical analogies could look back at the second half of the 19th century.
Washington will have a number of options as to how to respond to this shifting landscape. The US could, for example, adopt a balancing and containment strategy in an effort to slow, in particular, China's rise. Alternatively, it might seek to create a new concert of democracies to sit within the present global system -- an institutionalised "coalition of the willing". Then again, an isolationist president could seek to rebuild the walls of fortress America.
Self-styled realists will tell you that the most likely course for the US is one which mixes elements of all these approaches. They are less inclined to add that the outcome would be an inherently unstable system, as prone to conflict as the world of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The more difficult, and infinitely preferable, response to the decline in its relative power would be for the US to seek to legitimise its leadership in a new international system by remodelling alliances and institutions to embrace the rising powers as stakeholders.
That, of course, would be an immensely difficult and protracted enterprise. But so, too, was the creation after the second world war of the present system -- something I heard recalled at a recent conference in Rome organised by Aspen Italia to mark the 60th anniversary of the Marshall Plan.
One of my fellow speakers was Richard Burt, the former US official who served as Washington's chief negotiator in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks with the former Soviet Union. I had always thought of Mr Burt as one of the coldest of cold warriors. But he told the Aspen group that there had been much more than hard military resolve behind the west's eventual victory over the Soviet Union. US policy during the cold war had blended the pursuit of national interest and generosity. Washington had sought to win friends as well as to confront enemies.
There was advice, too, for Europe. Most Europeans, another speaker at Aspen Italia remarked, prefer to recall the detente dimension of the stand-off with the Soviet Union rather than the military resolve shown by Washington. But one would not have been possible without the other. These lessons offer useful insights for anyone seeking to build a new international order. America's cold war presidents, to take another of Mr Burt's examples, did not put irresolute allies in a corner by insisting they were "with us or against us".
Drawing such morals from the resilience of the old alliance, though, is one thing; attempting to recreate it another. As Einstein had cause to tell his students, sometimes the answers have to change.
Under syndication arrangement
with FE