The Great Game in Europe: How the U.S. can play

All great realignments are hammered out on the anvil of crisis. Ever since the end of the Cold War, both U.S. domestic politics and the shape of the West have been in an uncertain state. With socialism and statist liberalism discredited by the collapse of centrally planned economies, parties of Left and Right have been maneuvering in the dark, hoping to bump into winning issues. No one could quite define what issues would be the dividing lines between liberals and conservatives in future battles. Similarly, the West no longer had a sure instinct for what its joint interests dictated-or if indeed it any longer had joint interests in international politics. Maybe Europe and America were destined, as the French had been arguing since de Gaulle, to journey in different directions until they became rivals for world influence.

The first great post-Cold War crisis-Kuwait-seemed to refute this pessimistic Gaullism. But the second great crisis-Bosnia-amply confirmed it. Britain and France united to oppose the American approach of "lift and strike"-i.e., lift the U.N. arms embargo that effectively favored the Serb aggressors over the Bosnian victims, and strike by assisting the outgunned Bosnian forces with U.S. air sorties. Their opposition was based originally on a crude but understandable calculation that since the Serbs were bound to win anyway, we should not prolong the war by giving false hope to the Bosnians that the West would come to their aid. As the Cambridge historian Brendan Simms points out in his magisterial Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia, however, this Anglo-French Machtpolitik was itself prolonged, indeed redoubled, long after it had become clear that the Serbs were not going to enjoy a runaway victory. London and Paris did all they could to prevent the Americans from assisting Bosnia-until their calculations were devastatingly rebuked by the course of the war itself, in which the modest U.S. and NATO intervention reversed Bosnian losses and forced the Serbs to negotiate. In persisting with their strategic and moral folly over a secondary issue, moreover, the Brits put their vital relationship with Washington to its greatest strain since Suez.

The Bosnia crisis teaches a number of lessons. It casts a harsh light on the argument that the Europeans have adopted an enlightened international ethic of rules over military force. As the bloody corpse of Bosnia circa 1994 demonstrated, a pacific multilateralism can be at least as brutal as intervention-without being as likely to attain its objective. Furthermore, the fact that Anglo-French opposition deterred Washington from its successful intervention for more than two years shows the degree to which U.S. policy can be distorted by a failure to play alliance politics effectively. And the commitment to "European" policies-generally found on the left but in the Bosnian case shared by two Tories, foreign secretary Douglas Hurd and defense secretary Malcolm Rifkind-can all too readily evolve into a carrier of anti- Americanism.

These lessons were quickly forgotten after 9/11 and the successful Afghan intervention temporarily strengthened the Atlantic alliance. For a while it seemed that "the Europeans" would back the U.S. on whatever course the war on terrorism took. Indeed, some Europeans complained about their exclusion from fighting the Afghan war. It helped that Tony Blair had succeeded the hapless Tories and was prepared to support America in a campaign against terrorism-indeed, to advance a Gladstonian moral argument for such a campaign that fitted very comfortably with the conservative Wilsonianism driving U.S. policy.

September 11 also increased the relative importance of the Atlantic alliance by exposing alternatives to it as illusory. Though President Bush had come into office hoping to make Latin America a U.S. economic (and ultimately diplomatic) partner in competition with a united Europe and a Japan-led Asia, none of the Latin nations was prepared to play a forward role in helping America in the war on terror. Nor were they in much shape to do so. Latin America is currently suffering a series of economic reverses, and is retreating from its recent market reforms. Leftist governments have been installed in Venezuela and Brazil; Mexico is disappointed by the failure of the U.S. to liberalize immigration post-9/11; narco-terrorism is rampant in Colombia and reviving in Peru; and Brazil would prefer to unite Latin America around itself rather than around the U.S. With the exception of Chile, they are too embroiled in their own problems to push hard for Bush's Free Trade Area of the Americas. And even if it were to be constructed, it would bring no serious military or diplomatic benefits in its train. You might say that Latin America is the U.S. ally of the future-and always will be.

Russia was a different matter. Bush's personal rapport with President Putin resulted in highly useful anti-terrorist cooperation. The moral cost was high-turning a blind eye to the Russian war on Chechnya-but, unlike the Realpolitik of Hurd and Rifkind, it did at least achieve results. Yet there were obvious limits to the usefulness of a Russo- American alliance alone: Russia is a struggling power with a declining population, a poor economy, and weak political institutions.