LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Autumn 2008

by Alexander Graf Lambsdorff

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Sharp as usual and extremely pertinent, Simon Serfaty’s call for a shared Euro-Atlantic security strategy for the 21st century comes at just the right time. The transatlantic community of "compatible values, overlapping interests and common goals" needs a new road map for progress in harmonising American and European security strategies. With new threats and new power centres emerging, we undoubtedly need a more united approach if the West is to reassert itself as a driving force of global politics in the new century.

While lending Simon Serfaty my full support, I have to strike a note of caution. The "ever closer" Euro-Atlantic strategy that he and I both aspire to would need to encompass the EU, the US and NATO. Seen from within the cosmos that is Brussels, this seems to be very difficult to achieve. This cosmos is defined by two planets that circle around each other with almost no perceptible signs of alignment: the EU and NATO. The bitter reality is that the kind of strategic coherence that Serfaty is arguing for would be nothing short of a great leap forward for both institutions and many other actors involved.

The concept of finality – which is at the heart of Serfaty's latest book – offers fruitful insights into the conundrum. The lesson we learned from the debate about the political finality of the European Union is that we can achieve a surprising amount of progress by leaving the grand questions aside and moving forward in small steps. The debate about the finality of EU-US-NATO relations is very useful, but it must not delay concrete steps that could be taken now. This is all the more true since the Irish No to the Lisbon treaty has postponed the next big steps towards a common European security and defence policy.

If America and Europe genuinely want to strengthen transatlantic security policy, they need to tackle the imbalance between American and European capabilities. Serfaty stresses the fact that global security today relies more than ever on a combination of military capability and civilian action. In the words of Javier Solana: "The strictly military phase of crisis management is never as short as one thinks or hopes – and the stabilisation and reconstruction efforts are never as civilian as one wishes." On the civilian side, Washington needs to improve relations with the myriad actors involved in crisis management and post-conflict peace-building. On the military side, we Europeans undoubtedly need to step up our clout. We cannot turn away from the fact that our defence capabilities are currently so underdeveloped that we can barely mesh forces with the US in a way that the missions of the 21st century will demand of us.

It seems that leaders on both sides of the Atlantic now agree that transatlantic defence is not a zero-sum game. It is in the interests of both the US and NATO that the EU develops and integrates further in the domain of security and defence. Achieving the transatlantic strategy coherence that Serfaty and I both hope for entails a long and uphill struggle, but we would be wise to take one step at a time and to leave the big "qui fait quoi" of transatlantic security for some point in the future.