CAPÍTULO IV: RESULTADOS Y SIMULACIÓN
4.3. Costos del prototipo
The history of alliance relations prior to the Bush administration con- tains several lessons. On one hand, the fact that the allies have always been at odds, sometimes as severely as they were over Iraq in 2002– 2003, is comforting to those who believe the alliance has a future. A generation before Robert Kagan concluded that Europeans were from Venus (and Americans from Mars), other Americans were already arguing that Europeans were “relatively rich and ungrateful introverts.” And decades before Germany’s failure to support an American inva- sion of Iraq led to calls to remove U.S. troops from Germany, other Americans were predicting that the failure of their European allies to
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support U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf would lead to the removal of U.S. troops from Europe. The long history of transatlantic crises and the track record of overcoming those crises suggests that the United States and Europe have learned to manage some very serious stresses in their alliance—and provides hope that they can do so again.
At the same time, the history also shows why future cooperation will be more difficult. It was the Cold War that was responsible for the formation of the alliance in the first place and for its survival at least through its early crises. While alliance norms of consultation and com- promise on issues of European strategy and security were extensive throughout the Cold War, those norms never applied very well to “out-of-area” issues, which are precisely the set of issues that pose the greatest challenges today.
Despite the end of the Cold War, the Clinton administration con- tinued to believe in the value of allied support and made considerable efforts to persuade allies to adapt the Atlantic alliance to better deal with new types of threats from regions beyond Europe. Despite growing American power and freedom of maneuver to confront new threats, Clinton was convinced that the United States should do every- thing possible to ensure agreement among European allies before resorting to unilateral action, not only on issues like the Balkans, which directly affected those allies, but even on global issues like the Middle East.
That degree of commitment to alliance consensus would change significantly with the arrival of George W. Bush to the White House, and then again, even more so, after the September 11 terrorist attacks. In retrospect, the final Clinton years were the calm before the storm, and clouds were gathering on the Atlantic horizon. It was under George W. Bush that the storm would strike.
Chapter
2
BUSH AND
EUROPE:
THE
GROWING
DIVIDE
A
s he took office in January 2001, George W. Bush’s views on for- eign affairs, and by extension, those of his administration, were not well known. Contrary to the now common notion that the Bush team was distinctly hawkish and unilateralist from the start, some core principles of foreign policy, particularly on when and how to use American mili- tary power, remained undecided when Bush entered office. The Bush campaign had avoided taking strong positions on foreign policy sub- jects that tended to divide Republicans, and many believed that Bush would follow in his father’s footsteps in pursuing a prudent, multilat- eral foreign policy.During the campaign, the focus of Bush’s foreign policy speeches was on criticizing Clinton’s policy. He did so using language and ideas
that specifically avoided the controversial issue of when and how to use force. For those who feared imperial overstretch, Bush promised a “humble” foreign policy that concentrated on “enduring national interests”—a contrast with Clinton’s alleged inconsistencies. He cau- tioned against too much foreign intervention or using U.S. troops for nation-building, warning against the notion that “our military is the answer to every difficult foreign policy situation—a substitute for strategy.” At the same time, Bush declared his belief in the power of American confidence, moral clarity, and leadership to secure U.S. inter- ests. His “distinctly American internationalism” presented an explicit contrast to Clinton’s alleged lack of principles and excessive willingness to compromise with allies.
Reflecting this divide, the new Bush administration seemed struc- tured to provide an undecided President with varied advice on foreign policy. Bush appointed people to the top positions at the Defense Department, who had a reputation for hawkish, even unilateralist, views, such as Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. But his closest foreign policy adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was a protégé of his father’s pragmatic National Security Adviser, Brent Scowcroft. Even more prominently, as Secretary of State, Bush appointed Colin Powell, the scourge of the hawkish wing of the Republican party. Powell was famous (or infamous, to some) for his reluctance to use force and for his insistence, borne of his painful experience in Vietnam, that military force when applied should be directed at securing identifiable and indisputable national interests.
Bush himself summed up this balance on appointing Rumsfeld Secretary of Defense in December 2000: “General Powell’s a strong figure, and Dick Cheney’s no shrinking violet. But neither is Don Rumsfeld . . . nor Condi Rice. I view the four as being able to comple- ment each other. There’s going to be disagreements. I hope there is dis- agreement, because I know the disagreement will be based upon solid thought.” As a result, the administration’s only sacred foreign policy
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principles on entering office seemed to be a commitment to national missile defense and a strong desire to distance itself from the policy of its predecessor.
Despite this very real balance, however, it would be wrong to con- clude that prior to September 11 the Bush administration did not develop any new understanding of how foreign policy works in a world defined by U.S. power. In his first few months in office, Bush began to demonstrate this understanding, particularly in his dealings with European allies. Where Bill Clinton had engaged in protracted diplo- macy and sometimes reached difficult compromises with European allies over such issues as missile defense, the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Accords, and even Iran and Iraq, Bush clearly had lit- tle patience with European views. Many in the administration, more- over, saw Europeans as unwilling to recognize the importance of force in international relations and all too ready to appease dictators and weapons proliferators rather than confront them.