A Call to Arms

It was, at first blush, the same old depressing script. When U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates gave a major speech on the need for NATO members to step up their efforts in Afghanistan at the annual Munich Conference on Security Policy last week, a quick scan of the headlines would have made you think we were back where we were five (or, to be honest, 25) years ago. That is to say: an American policymaker comes to Europe and lectures the Allies on the need to recognize that it's a dangerous world out there, that the comfortable folk on the eastern shores of the Atlantic can't leave it to their cousins to the west (plus a few pals) to bring order to chaos, that they have to step up and help. To which Europeans reply that the trouble with Americans is that they shoot first and ask questions later, don't hug enough old ladies on the streets of Kabul, yada yada yada ...

There was some of that, of course. Gates was a mite schoolmasterly, expressing concern that "many people on this Continent may not comprehend the magnitude of the direct threat to European security" from violent Islamic extremism. Some comments in Germany after his speech — Gates has been involved in a very public effort to persuade the German government to boost its contribution to the NATO force in Afghanistan and post troops to the dangerous south of the country as well as the north and west — showed the world-weary hauteur that Americans have come to expect from some Europeans. "The superpower America reacts to crisis situations in Afghanistan," sniffed the newspaper Handelsblatt, "with its stereotypical call for an extension of military operations."

Stand back, however, and something rather encouraging is going on. Those making U.S. security policy are learning how to pitch appeals for European help with humility. ("We have stumbled along the way," said Gates. "And we are still learning.") And Europeans have learned to listen to their U.S. friends with respect.

The U.S. and Europe will never be in total agreement on the need to use force in out-of-the-way places. For the U.S. — as Gates said in Munich — Sept. 11, 2001 was a "galvanizing event, one that opened the American public's eyes to dangers from distant lands." Europeans too have suffered from terrorism, of course, but never on the scale of 9/11. For their part, Europeans are cognizant in a way that few Americans are that the use of force in the developing world can be counter-productive, summoning up the ghosts of a racist colonialism among those it is supposed to help. In fact, after their blood-drenched last century, many Europeans are just plain skeptical about force as a policy instrument in any circumstances. Unsurprisingly, those attitudes are held with particular devotion in Germany. In a recent poll for the German TV station ARD, 86% answered no to the question: "Should the German army carry out combat missions in Afghanistan like other nations' troops do?"

But wait a minute: what's important in that question is the part that is only implied. That is to say, there are, today, German troops in Afghanistan — 3,500 of them. They may not be in the most dangerous parts of the country or hunting down well-armed bands of Taliban guerrillas, but they are there. That, when you think about it, is astonishing. American author and columnist Ralph Peters (who is nobody's idea of a softie on defense matters) was at the Munich conference, and put things in perspective for me. When he was serving in U.S. Army intelligence in Germany, Peters said, "We couldn't get the Germans to move 8 km. Now we've got them moving 8,000 miles." That speaks to a transformation in NATO's true nature. For all its vaunted success in the cold war, Peters argues, NATO back then was really a political organization. But now — fitfully, to be sure — it is becoming a true military alliance, one that fights, and shares the business of fighting among its members.

And this, I think, is beginning to be understood in Europe. With the election of younger, muscular Atlanticists such as Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, debate on security matters is moving beyond the peaceful pieties of the post-war generation to a recognition that the world really can be a dangerous place, and that sometimes the only way to combat that danger is by force. "Domestic politics has enslaved foreign policy to the point where it is endangering Germany's alliances," says Jan Techau, of the German Council on Foreign Relations. "German political élites need to speak about repositioning foreign policy. Germans will understand. They are not stupid." In such getting of wisdom lies the reinvigoration of the Atlantic alliance.