More is expected of Europe
Ian Black, Guardian News Service, Brussels
It was Gen. Henry Shelton, former head of the U.S. joint chiefs of staff, who quipped that Europeans were fulfilling their defense commitments by sending in their boys to help old ladies cross busy roads in Pristina.
The jibe sounds especially cruel in the light of President George W. Bush's decision to increase the American defense budget by a whopping US$48 billion -- the gross national products of the Netherlands -- while his European Union allies edge nervously towards their first operational deployment: A modest police training mission in Bosnia.
Coming after Dubya's "axis of evil" speech, which blasted whole swaths of EU foreign policy with the delicacy of a daisy cutter hitting Tora Bora, the soaring levels of U.S. spending make for a gloomy contrast with laborious, low-budget attempts to give the old continent some military muscle to match its size and wealth.
Europeans have been talking about getting more bang for their euros since before U.S. air power won the Kosovo war of 1999. Thanks to Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac, progress has been made.
Yet the EU spend is still only half that of the U.S., while little has been done to acquire hi-tech kit, strategic lift or satellite intelligence -- the indispensable tools of modern war. Even -- squabbling Greeks and Turks permitting -- when the Rapid Reaction Force's 60,000 men are up and marching by 2003, its brief is peacekeeping and humanitarian tasks. It might eventually be able to take over NATO's operation in Macedonia.
No one is enjoying this transatlantic spat, especially at NATO HQ, a graveyard since Bush decided that the alliance should sit out the Afghan campaign. Secretary-general George Robertson's mounting irritation showed when he snarled recently that Europe was a military "pygmy", though he did observe that the U.S. would have to be more generous with technology transfers if the capabilities gap were ever to be narrowed, never mind closed.
NATO, like the EU (largely the same people on this side of the pond), desperately needs to modernize if it is to retain any credibility, senior chaps now admit. That's why no one laughs at the old joke that its acronym actually stands for "now almost totally obsolete".
Two lessons flow from this: That the U.S. should curb its unilateralist instincts and that Europeans should do more to make their voices heard -- and worth hearing. Blair has played piggy- in-the-middle better than any of his predecessors. But the conclusion for Britons concerned about Star Wars, Kyoto, Camp X- Ray, Iraq or Israel can only be to try harder to realize Europe's potential, admittedly distant, for becoming a global player.
Surely Little Englanders on the left need to think again about their hostility to the EU and all its works, and leave the conservative Daily Telegraph to worry about the cap badges worn by troops helping old dears across Balkan roads?