I would so much like to believe in Julian Lindley-French’s thesis that despite all its troubles, NATO is to remain “essential to the strategies of Europe and the United States”.

 

But will it really remain essential if the United States, through such projects as the anti-missile shield, establishes absolute supremacy, if the new world disorder persists, and if the UN and the international community proves incapable of managing a Greater Middle East that is in flames? Will NATO remain essential if different perceptions of threatsand interests divide the Atlantic partners?

 

“The new transatlantic contract” now in place may break down, because the legitimacy that Europe has given to American interventionism cannot be guaranteed indefinitely. Europe’s engagement may at the very most be highly selective, should America’s “grand mission” end in fiasco. Iraq already stands as an ominous symbol, of the long and strenuous road from a “simple” military intervention, demonstrating America’s role in the world, to achieving stability in a country, let alone in a whole region. In similar future cases, it may turn out that America and Europe are unable to walk such a road together. We’ll have to wait and see what happens in Afghanistan.

 

It is precisely because it wants to deliver the message of freedom, democracy and stability to people outside the West’s culture and civilisation that the United States should bid farewell to its present provocative mode of conducting global politics. Instead, Washington should master the art of self-limitation and establish intensive political dialogues with others. This would also strengthen US leadership amongst its NATO partners and facilitate a fresh transatlantic security dialogue, assuming, of course, that Washington really is interested in increasing Europe’s military capabilities.

 

Indeed the capabilities gap inside NATO is now so broad that it risks threatening cooperation between Europe and America. Yet the only way to close that gap is through the ESDP. And if the EU’s defence arm is developed further, that could theoretically, and over time, lead to the European Union becoming fully autonomous in the area of defence and security.

 

Like most European analysts, Julian Lindley-French seems to suggest that Europe already represents a whole (“the strength of European pluralism”), even though European countries are to a large extent characterised by a re-nationalisation of security and defence politics. That is also why smaller countries tend to value their membership in NATO and their links with the US, so there are many reasons for which the future may belong to coalitions of the willing.