QandO

August 18, 2004

Withdrawing from the world
Posted by Dale Franks

Ronald Asmus, the State Department's big Euro-boy in the Clinton Administration, has read about the proposed withdrawal of troops from Europe, and he doesn't like it. Not one bit.

Harry Truman must be turning over in his grave.

The planned withdrawal of U.S. troops from Europe and Asia that President Bush announced this week, if allowed to stand, could lead to the demise of the United States' key alliances across the globe, including the one that Truman considered his greatest foreign policy accomplishment: NATO.

The president proposes something that generations of U.S. diplomats and soldiers fought to prevent and that our adversaries sought unsuccessfully to achieve: radical reduction of U.S. political and military influence on the European and Asian continents.

Now, that's just disingenuous. First, as VodkaPundit points out, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are probably still spinning in their graves at having a standing army of US troops stationed there in the first place.

That aside, though, Asmus conveniently forgets why we sent all those troops over there in the first place. There used to be this evil empire called the Soviet Union, the key phrase in that sentence being "used to be".

When Truman created NATO, and committed the United States to defending South Korea, there was an expansionist, international communist movement to defeat and subjugate the Free World.

No, really, there's books about it and everything.

Creating NATO, and keeping hundreds of thousands of US troops in Europe was a necessary corollary to the policy of containment. There were, after all, 45 Soviet Army divisions sitting in East Germany, ready to swoop down through the Fulda Gap into Western Europe. Preventing that was a prime goal of not only Truman, but seven successive presidents as well.

But, in case Mr. Asmus hasn't noticed, the USSR collapsed more than a decade ago, the Warsaw Pact dissolved, and the only remaining major communist state is rather busy at the moment putting new KFCs and McDonald's on every street corner, getting the cell phones to work right in Shanghai, and espousing the hip, new, "Wealth is Good" brand of communism.

US troops were stationed in Europe to defend against a threat that died a decade ago. I doubt that Truman, who, until 1948, was doing everything he could to reduce the US troop presence in Europe, would be imminently satisfied that we are finally able to do so.

NATO was created for a purpose, not merely to justify it's own existence. That purpose has, thankfully, passed into history. Perhaps the overriding importance of NATO should, too.

The Bush message, delivered at a campaign rally, also smells of political opportunism. Under pressure but unable to withdraw troops from Iraq, the president has instead reached for what his advisers hope is the next best thing politically -- a pledge to bring the boys home from Europe and Asia.

That might be a little more convincing argument if the DoD hadn't announced it was going to start studying how to implement such a policy in 2001.

Whether this is good or bad politics remains to be seen. But there is little doubt that it is bad strategy and bad diplomacy, for which the United States is likely to pay a heavy price. The reasons are fairly simple. In Europe after the Cold War, the United States decided to significantly reduce its former troop levels but to leave sufficient military forces on the ground to accomplish three objectives: help ensure that peace and stability on the continent would endure; have the capacity to support NATO and European Union expansion and project the communities of democracies eastward; and provide the political and military glue to enable our allies to reorient themselves militarily and prepare, together with the United States, to address new conflicts beyond the continent's borders.

Ok, let's take those three objectives one at a time.

help ensure that peace and stability on the continent would endure

It looks to me like we've pretty much done that. The last time I looked, the Europeans had a continent-wide political union, a single currency (for the most part), and were discussing a new constitution that creates what is essentially a central European state, with its own executive, parliament, government ministries, and the like. I'm not entirely sure what large numbers of US troops could achieve over that.

The Europeans themselves are so convinced of it that they basically have no armed forces to speak of. If they don't think having their own troops are necessary for engendering peace or stability, I'm not sure I see how they need to keep a lot of our lounging around.

Actually, that's not quite true. I am sure. They don't.

have the capacity to support NATO and European Union expansion and project the communities of democracies eastward

Well, NATO now contains pretty much the entire former Warsaw Pact, except for Russia, and even Russia participates in some of the intra-European security councils. The EU has been extended right up to the Russian Border, and Vladimir Putin is giving them long looks, and batting his pretty eyes about an invite. Looks to me like the EU and NATO has expanded about as far east as it can go, without inviting Alaska to become a member.

So, "mission accomplished", as someone once said.

and provide the political and military glue to enable our allies to reorient themselves militarily and prepare, together with the United States, to address new conflicts beyond the continent's borders.

Well, a majority of NATO countries have troops in Iraq, and those that don't have them in Afghanistan. But, with that said, it doesn't appear to have convinced Germany or France to join up with the Iraq project. At best, our ability to convince European governments to join us in military operations outside Europe is mixed, despite having a several divisions of troops there for more than half a century.

I suspect that the required political glue comes from something other than US troops in Europe. Europeans will join us in military adventures elsewhere only to the extent that they feel to do so is compatible with their interests, and it's fantasy to suggest otherwise. I highly doubt they take the presence of US troops on their soil into account when the time comes to make such judgments.

It certainly didn't help in Germany, where we have tens of thousands of troops, but who sent none to Iraq. And not having troops in Poland, who did join us in Iraq, seemed not to deter them from doing so.

With transatlantic relations badly frayed, Russia turning away from democracy and the United States facing the challenge of projecting stability from the Balkans to the Black Sea, Washington should be putting forward a plan to repair the transatlantic alliance, not ruin it.

One wonders how transatlantic relations could have become so badly frayed, what with all the troops we have there and all. Perhaps the reason for our strained relations with Germany have some other source--and, hence, some other solution--than the number of troops we station there.

In Asia the stakes are just as high and the challenges perhaps greater. There the United States faces the long-term challenge of managing the rise of China as a great power. North Korea's eventual collapse and the unification of Korea will raise the question of that country's future geopolitical orientation. And such seismic events will undoubtedly have a considerable impact on the evolution of Japan's role and orientation as well.

No doubt. But since the Koreans have been less than subtle in making their dislike of such a large foreign presence in their country increasingly clear, Does Mr. Asmus suggest that we ignore their wishes? If the South Koreans feel our presence there is unpleasant and/or unnecessary, who are we to dispute them? It is, after all their country, and not ours.

And, as far as the specter of an emerging China is concerned, Korea seems like an awfully exposed forward base into which to put the majority of our marbles. Maybe it's just me, but I would like a little less exposed position from which to base any required counters to Chinese obstreperousness.

The president's plan is unfortunately further evidence of the strategic myopia that has afflicted this administration and is undercutting the United States' standing in the world. At a time when we should be mobilizing and reinvigorating our alliances in Europe and Asia, we are dismantling them.

Well, he's certainly right that someone is dismantling them. But, one notes that one doesn't see large protest marches in San Francisco demanding the removal of US troops from Korea, the way one sees in, say, Seoul. One also notes that the United States hasn't been casting UN Security Council vetoes over French military invasions of the African portion of la Francophonie. The reverse, however, is not true.

Instead of creating multilateral structures to mobilize the world in a common struggle against terrorism and new anti-Western ideologies and movements, we opt for a unilateral course that leaves us with fewer friends.

Multilateral institutions, of course, famously efficient at stopping trouble in places like the Congo, Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, etc. And who could forget the League of Nations, and the tireless campaign they waged against Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, in the 1930s.

It would really help Mr. Asmus' argument a lot if he could point to a track record of effectiveness by multilateral institutions in the areas of peace and security.

Is there room for reconfiguring the U.S. military deployment plan overseas and modernizing it for a new era? Of course, there is.

"I'm not prepared to suggest one at this time, but believe me, I could. Entirely doable"

Sen. John Kerry has recognized that the lesson of Sept. 11 is that the U.S. need for allies is going up, not down. He has pledged to make the reinvigoration of U.S. alliances a foreign policy priority. He has claimed that his election would allow for a "fresh start" and close a remarkably divisive chapter in relations with many of our close allies.

"And nothing should be inferred from the fact that he hasn't actually presented any such plan. Once he has the power of the presidency, his wisdom will manifest itself. Trust me."

There is little doubt that Kerry's election would be enthusiastically welcomed in both Europe and Asia.

And that should influence us, why, precisely? Are the states of Europe and Asia as keen as the citizens of the United States to defend US interests and security?

I doubt it.

Indeed, the public utterances of their officials should incline any rational person to the opposite view. The whole purpose of the European Union, for example, as legions of French officials have tactlessly lectured us over the past 30 years, is to reduce the power and influence of the United States, and to become a "counterweight" to it. So, I don't think their happiness should invoke any reaction in us but a distinct sense of unease.

Entirely missing in Mr. Asmus' article is any sense that there is any blame at all that can be placed at the feet of our allies for the current state of our relations. It is as if they were entirely passive participants in the past four years.

No marches against US bases in Korea. No national election campaigns in which German politicians compared the president to less savory figures from Germany's past. No times in which French officials, after personally assuring the US Secretary of State of their support in the UN Security Council, actively lobbied other states to join them in opposing it.

It is as if all of our allies keenly wished to join us in our crusade to spread democracy and freedom, and defeat terror, but were only prevented from doing so by the unfortunate personal qualities of Mr. Bush.

That is farcical. Nations make policy decisions based upon their perceived interests, not upon the personality of allied leaders. That is why, for example, we allied ourselves with the odious Josef Stalin in WWII, or for that matter, the arrogant Charles deGaulle, a man so untrustworthy that he couldn’t even be informed of the D-Day invasion of his own country until it was too late for him to sabotage it with his unceasing petty demands.

Relations between the US and some nations in Western Europe are strained not because Mr. Bush has sabotaged those relations, but because those nations perceive their interests to diverge from ours. The only way to repair such divisions is to align our interests more closely with those they espouse. Such an alignment might very well make Mr. Chirac, the president of France, deliriously happy, but it does not mean that it would advance the interests or security of the United States, unless one supposes that the support of France is the paramount goal of US foreign policy.

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