The third reality is a military-technical one. It would be difficult for Europe to build a modern defense capability even if were willing to spend the money. The nature of military weaponry, the military-industrial base, manpower requirements, and the role of space have so dramatically altered over the past four decades that Europe is not capable of achieving anything like the military power it enjoys within NATO. The changes relate not just to technology but also to the geographical space required to test, deploy, and train soldiers to use modern weapons. Europe does not have the space. Russia does. Nor does Europe enjoy a common language required for the manpower pool of a modern military in the same class as the U.S. military. Russia does. The U.S. military compensates for these European inadequacies.

Although they have suffered severe quantitative reductions, NATO's military components still enjoy a rather large qualitative advantage over any potential adversary today. This qualitative edge has been driven mainly by the United States military. Without the American stimulus, the military establishments in Europe would have difficulty staying abreast of the continuing technological dynamic in military affairs; and, conversely, without the NATO obligation a similar stagnation would be more likely in the U.S. military. Those who urge the U.S. to let Europe take care of itself probably do not understand what sustains this military advantage--otherwise they would address the implications of letting it seriously erode.

It is precisely the American involvement in Europe, through NATO, that has provided Western Europe with what it has never had in modern times and is unlikely to attain any time soon on its own: a substitute for a supra-national political and military authority. To remove it is to ensure the slowdown and eventual reversal of European economic integration and political cooperation, not to mention a breakdown in military cooperation. Thus the libertarian prescription would produce an economically stagnant and militarily insecure Europe. How libertarians see this kind of Europe fitting with their prescriptions for the U.S. economy is difficult to fathom.

It must be admitted, however, that the United States cannot continue to play this role in Europe if the Europeans do not desire it. No U.S. policy should discourage or try to block European aspirations for "taking care of themselves." On the contrary, they should be encouraged to proceed on that path. But pushing them onto it before they are ready and determined to end the Atlantic Alliance is hardly the way to ensure their success.

Return to a Balance of Power

Still another set of views recommends a return to a traditional balance of power in Europe. Henry Kissinger, and to some degree Zbigniew Brzezinski, although they both favor the expansion of NATO, subscribe to the balance of power approach. Its more avid proponents, however, do not insist on, or even favor, NATO's continued existence. By forming a new concert of European and North American powers engaged in a collective security system, they would make it essentially irrelevant. Russia, Germany, Britain, France, and the United States would organize security in Europe, managing it as the great powers did in the nineteenth century.

Some proponents do not make the argument so formally but advocate policies consistent with it. Owen Harries and Michael Lind do so in their opposition to the expansion of NATO. They do not believe the United States can sustain its leadership role in Europe, much less in an expanded NATO. Although there is a Spenglerian quality to his argument, Harries explicitly denies holding the "declinist" view of U.S. power. Rather, Europe has become economically stronger, and while chances for a political union have receded for the moment, they will return as soon as Europe's economy turns again. Lind chides the Russophobia of British emigres (e.g., Colin Gray) and Central European emigres ("mostly Polish") who fear Russian expansion, and he warns against criticizing Russia over its actions in Chechnya. The ethnic slight might come from a native born American, but the rest sounds like a voice for inaction from Oxford or Cambridge in the
1930s.

At a global level, some version of a new concert of powers makes sense. It is the only practical approach to a global order. But at the European level it makes only partial sense. Europe's security problems are primarily ones of internal instability and civil war, problems a balance of power approach will not solve. To give up NATO as the core institution for European military security would be to invite the very kinds of diplomatic competition that the "Let Europe Take Care of Itself" approach has meant in the past.

Finally, a balance of power approach alone is out of tune with American political values. The American concept for NATO at its creation was prevention of a return to the old Realpolitik game in Western Europe, and although the alliance balanced Soviet power, it was created as much to solve Western Europe's problem with Germany as it was to prevent Soviet expansion. In France and most other continental states in Western Europe in the late 1940s, the Soviet threat was little discussed in the debate on NATO. Only the United States and to a lesser degree Britain saw the Soviet Union as the major problem. In France, Germany was the problem. Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman saw NATO as an umbrella under which economic cooperation, eventually leading to political cooperation, would be possible because the military alliance would remove the old balance of power conditions. Konrad Adenauer shared that view and also saw NATO as a device for recovering Germany's independence sooner. Precisely this internal NATO mission in Western Europe is overlooked by those who see the collapse of the Soviet military threat as making NATO obsolete.

The NATO epoch has brought to Europe a significant degree of American idealism about international relations. On one level, it has produced a balance of power. On another level it has inspired ideals and cooperation unknown in modern Europe. Why should we risk the decay of this remarkable achievement in Western Europe? At the same time, collective security and balance of power make sense in dealing with the larger Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals.

The Democratic Peace

Another set of views on European security rests heavily on the idealist component of U.S. foreign policy. Bruce Russett makes a case on the empirical record that democracies do not fight each other, and explains this in terms of democratic ideals and public participation in policymaking. The solution to Europe's security problems, it seems to follow, is more democracy. Variations of this view are to be found, and the "Russia first" approach is consistent with it. If there were democracies in Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals--and virtually all countries in that expanse are trying to create them--then the security problem would go away.

It is easy to dismiss this prescription as excessively idealistic. Yet there is something to the argument, although it is sometimes articulated in a way that confuses effect with cause. In ambiguous cases where countries have gone to war--for example, America with Britain in 1812 and Germany with Britain and France in 1914--the state that initiated hostilities is written off as not really democratic. This is close to arguing that a country is not democratic if it initiates hostilities, a standard that would make the United States a non-democracy on a few past occasions. Or it is argued that one democracy in these cases did not "perceive" the other country as a democracy. Valid though this analysis may be, it would leave future security to the vicissitudes of perceptions. These quibbles aside, one has to admit that the propensity of democracies to settle disputes short of war is a correlation too strong to be dismissed. It has been near perfect among the democracies within the U.S. postwar alliance systems. Economic interdependencies have mushroomed within the market economies of those systems, and international organizations have emerged to handle political, economic, and military cooperation among democratic states.

Some observers have called this postwar system an American empire. Paul Kennedy's warning that it will fall victim, like previous empires, to "imperial overstretch," is well known. American libertarians and other U.S. domestic groups repeat it, especially those who want to shift more money from the defense budget to social programs. Whether or not the American system is properly classified as an empire is debatable, but if it is, it is one of a very new type. Instead of impoverishing the United States through heavy military burdens, it has proven a money-making proposition. The net result of U.S. military expenditures has hardly been a deficit. Without them and the alliances they have sustained, the economic prosperity of the trilateral regions of North America, Western Europe, and Northeast Asia could not have occurred. In a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in December 1994, the secretary of commerce stated that affiliates of U.S. corporations in Europe have sales of $850 billion annually and generate $30 billion in earnings. They also sell $650 billion in goods and services in the United States. U.S. exports to Europe amount to $110 billion, and about three million Americans are employed by European firms in the United States. Ted Galen Carpenter is appalled that U.S. defense expenditures for forces in Europe are about $90 billion. The true figure, when adjusted for costs that would be paid even if U.S. troops were not in Europe, actually is considerably lower. In any case, as an overhead expenditure for the largest part of the trilateral regions' security system, it is hardly in excess of the gains. Moreover, if the figures for the Asian part of this system of trading democracies were included as well as the impact of European-East Asian trade, the gains would be much larger.