Transatlantic Folly: NATO Vs. the EU

Abstract

Recent months have seen an explosion of commentary about the transatlantic relationship. Much of its content is familiar. Indeed, the same basic issues run through five decades of discourse about Western interdependence: Is the transatlantic relationship properly balanced? Are the West European allies treated as genuine partners? Do they carry their proper share? Do European and American basic interests diverge? Who, in fact, is exploiting whom? Significantly, throughout the Cold War there was no lack of loud complaints about transatlantic imbalance from the Americans. From one postwar decade to the next, successive administrations accused their European allies of free riding on American military power. The complaints were not merely financial about relative military spending but also diplomatic and political. The real American grievance was not so much that Europeans were militarily dependent. In many ways, American policy struggled to preserve that dependency through the Non-Proliferation Treaty, for example. More often, the grievance was that America's Western allies, despite their military dependency, remained remarkably independent politically and diplomatically. They disagreed with successive American administrations not only over such matters as the appropriate level of military contributions, or how to organize nuclear and conventional deterrence, but also over how to deal with the Russians, or manage the dollar's international role and the global economy in general. America's allies, moreover, were often able to impose their views or at least to force the United States into compromises that its various administrations would have