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End of the postwar alliance pact



Francis Fukuyama Special to The Yomiuri Shimbun

The first shot of the second Gulf War has yet to be fired, but already the conflict is producing unanticipated consequences that will have a lasting impact long after the war is over. The most important result so far is the unraveling of the U.S. alliance structure, and the weakening of a series of key institutions, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the European Union and the United Nations.

In planning its strategy of forcibly disarming Iraq, the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush assumed that the United States' European allies would complain and protest, but ultimately fall in line behind a new U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq. It had, after all, secured a 14-0 vote last autumn in favor of U.N. Resolution 1441, which included tough language making clear that Baghdad had one final opportunity to prove that it was actively disarming. But Washington completely miscalculated the depth of European--indeed, global--opposition to a new war.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder took the unprecedented step of running, successfully, for reelection last autumn on a platform of opposition to a U.S. war against Iraq. While his popularity has dropped precipitously since then as a result of the German economy, popular opposition to the war remains overwhelming. Schroeder represents a younger generation of Germans who, unlike their elders, do not feel an instinctive emotional gratitude to the United States. The lingering memories of World War II have created a nation of committed pacifists.

France's motives are much more complex and cynical than Germany's. Popular opposition to the war is higher there as well, but French presidents can usually ignore public opinion in making foreign policy. The French are chiefly concerned about preserving their role in two institutions that greatly magnify their otherwise modest influence in world affairs, the Security Council (of which they are a veto-bearing permanent member) and the EU (the tone of which France sets).

After U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation of evidence to the Security Council on Feb. 6 of the Iraqi failure to comply with Resolution 1441, the French, rather than dropping their resistance to the U.S. initiative, escalated pressure by joining with the Germans to demand further inspections. With the Belgians, they took the unprecedented step of vetoing NATO support for one of its members, Turkey, on the ground that they did not want to lend support to the war effort.

The French-German action exposed a deep split within Europe, exacerbated by U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's flippant remark consigning the two countries to an "old Europe." There is indeed a significant difference in perspective between France and Germany, on the one hand, and the "new" European democracies such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, all once part of the Soviet bloc, that are much more grateful for U.S. support during the Cold War.

The not-so-secret truth about the EU is that it was initially based on a Franco-German agreement under which the French gave Germany legitimacy while the Germans allowed the French to dominate the Brussels bureaucracy and subsidized French agriculture. This agreement was already showing strain when Europe had only 12 members, but with the expected enlargement to include the states of Eastern Europe, the ability of France and Germany to control the EU was slipping fast. The willingness of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to join Britain, Italy and Spain in signing a letter supporting U.S. policy in Iraq exposed the hollowness of the French claim to speak for the whole of Europe. This produced an unbelievable outburst of petulance from French President Jacques Chirac at the emergency E.U. summit on Feb. 17, attacking the new Eastern European democracies as children who were "badly brought up" and who had missed "an opportunity to keep quiet."

As a result of this split, NATO is likely to sustain permanent damage. With the demise of the Soviet threat that it was originally designed to contain, NATO's only remaining function is for mutual military support in regional crises such as the one brewing in the Middle East. But the organization is far too deeply split to act effectively outside Europe. U.S. anger at the "old" Europe is growing daily; France has become the butt of jokes and ridicule among ordinary Americans, not to mention high-level policymakers. The coming months may see the beginning of U.S. efforts to rebase U.S. forces out of Germany and to locate them further east, in Poland or Romania. Americans will be asking as well why they need to station troops to "defend" as anti-U.S. an ally as Germany.

The other international organization likely to be hurt by the current crisis is the United Nations. There is clearly no consensus today in the Security Council for either forcibly disarming Iraq or for extending inspections. If, as is likely, the United States goes to war either without the backing of a second resolution, or with only a weak one, the United Nations will have been bypassed in two directions. It will have proved itself unable either to enforce its own disarmament resolutions, or, as the French had hoped, to shape and constrain the policies of its most powerful member.

That the United Nations has proven to be so ineffective an organization should come as no surprise to people who have observed it over the years. Many people around the world would like to see the United Nations become the center of a global security system to deal with problems like international terrorism, but there are good reasons why this is unlikely to happen. The current crisis points to a critical weakness of the U.N. system, which is what economists call a "collective action" problem. The Security Council, with its five veto-bearing members, was deliberately designed to be a weak institution, one that must operate by consensus. During the Cold War, everyone understood that the ideological split between the United States and the Soviet Union would prevent the United Nations from intervening in disputes between the superpowers. But even in the less ideologically divided post-Cold War period, the need for consensus within the Security Council means it cannot take decisive action either for or against war. Security threats have to be overwhelmingly large and obvious before U.N. action is remotely possible, and by that time it is usually too late to do anything about them.

Let us put aside, for the moment, the question of whether Iraq really represents as great a threat as the Bush administration maintains. In the future, terrorists may buy, steal or be given nuclear weapons from a variety of places such as North Korea, Pakistan or Russia. It is easy to imagine circumstances in which the threat is actually very high, but the evidence for the threat ambiguous or incomplete. Under these circumstances, the United Nations, based on its recent behavior, will be paralyzed and unable to act decisively. Only nation-states--whether the United States acting against Iraq, Japan acting against North Korea, or India against Pakistan--can reliably fill this security vacuum.

More has happened in the past month to change international institutions and realign loyalties than in the preceding decade. When you add to the crisis in NATO the current crisis in U.S.-South Korean relations over how to handle a nuclear North Korea, it becomes clear that the United States' entire Cold War alliance structure in both Europe and Asia may collapse within the coming months or years. These alliances were not designed for the purposes to which they are now being put, and have become a greater source of irritation than help. Attitudes are changing in both Europe and the United States as well, as former allies reevaluate who is really their friend and willing to show solidarity. The alliance system may hold on if the coming war with Iraq is over quickly and with a minimum of unforeseen consequences. But if it escalates in unpredictable ways, our old institutions will quickly dissolve. In either case, it is only a matter of time before they disappear, just like the Cold War which spawned them. They will not, unfortunately, be replaced by a strong and decisive United Nations representing the broader community of nations, but by a series of ad hoc coalitions of states seeking their own security.

Fukuyama is a professor of international political economy at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.