Among the many recent assessments of the Atlantic alliance, this collection stands among the best. A dozen distinguished scholars from both sides of the pond have responded in diverse ways to the editor's challenge to “examine the causes and consequences of the crisis in Atlantic relations associated with the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.” While accepting in varying degrees the editor's premise that “the project of building and maintaining an Atlantic community is at risk as never before,” the authors place the current crisis in historical and theoretical context, explore the policies of the principal allies, and assess the immediate and longer-term consequences of the crisis for the Atlantic nations and for the global order.
Geir Lundestad's opening chapter sets the stage, and in many ways the tone, for the volume. The diplomacy of the run-up to the Iraq war, he writes, “suggests a break with the practice of the past fifty years.” American unilateralism, based less on strength than on a new sense of vulnerability, encountered a creatively obdurate France, a united Germany increasingly liberated from Cold War constraints and a broader Europe whose integration had gained momentum and which had new capacities and new members to show for it. As he reminds us, however, the Atlantic alliance is a serial crisis-survivor; while it is reasonable to ask if the US and Europe are capable of a “balanced relationship,” this crisis need not render us pessimistic about the “more distant future.”
Elizabeth Pond's account of transatlantic relations from early 2002 onward is a study in the failure of diplomacy. While she places the greatest portion of blame on the usual suspects in the Bush administration, she reserves some for Germany's Chancellor Schroeder. The “wary rapprochement” she observes by the end of 2003 is not yet, in her view, a reconciliation. The third chapter in this section, by David Andrews, draws attention to the muted or delayed effects of post-Cold War changes in the structure of the international system as the backdrop—not the full explanation—of the alliance's current trials.
Complementing Andrews' structural analysis, Miles Kahler provides an account of US policy toward Europe which stresses domestic politics and economic interdependence. His is the first of five chapters in a section devoted to the policies of the major allies: the US, France, Germany, the UK and Italy. In addition to their richness and sophistication, these chapters are notable for the variety both in their explanations of the crisis and in their views of the alliance's prospects. Assessing the “failed reconciliation” between Chirac's France and the US, Georges-Henri Soutou is perhaps the most pessimistic. Hubert Zimmerman, on the other hand, notes that German-American acrimony led us to overlook the useful transition of Germany—and Europe—toward a new global role as provider of security. William Wallace and Tim Oliver provide a detailed critical assessment of Tony Blair's version of the UK's traditional role as transatlantic “bridge,” raising strong doubts as to its future prospects. And Leopoldo Nuti describes Italy's pro-American policy as simply the latest expression of its traditional Machiavellian conviction that “the richest and farthest master is always best.”
Marc Trachtenberg pulls together themes from earlier chapters by drawing an illuminating comparison between the transatlantic crises of 1963 and 2003, both of which saw an alignment between France and Germany creating anger and consternation in Washington. The earlier crisis was resolved by some tough talk from the Kennedy administration. The later one, Trachtenberg warns, is likely to endure, even if the ensuing palliative rhetoric might suggest otherwise. Indeed, the most provocative part of his chapter is devoted to a trenchant dismissal of the critique of America's actions by supporters of multilateralism and the UN Charter. That he can find targets on both sides of the Atlantic only underlines the gravity of these issues.
Wade Jacoby's chapter focuses on the Central and Eastern European states, whose difficult situation in this crisis was underlined both by Donald Rumsfeld's tendentious distinction between old and new Europe and by Jacques Chirac's patronizing suggestion that they keep quiet. Jacoby takes the Bush administration to task for seeking “policy loyalty”—approval of the Iraq mission from often-weak governments ill-placed to offer it—rather than an increase in their military competence that might have constituted a real, long-term contribution to the alliance.
David Andrews' concluding chapter returns to the central question: whether the alliance can survive the combination of this acute crisis and the long-term structural change he and others have discerned widening the Atlantic. Authors writing in 2004 may be forgiven a degree of pessimism. From the vantage point of 2007, however, it would seem that the alliance is not so much in crisis as in limbo and that its still-uncertain destiny is to be determined not in Iraq but in Afghanistan.
