It is Leon Panetta’s first week as the new US Defence Secretary. The UK and Europe shouldn’t join the inevitable chorus of people telling him how to do his job but rather we should ask how we can take the opportunity to work with the US in new ways to retain and strengthen our own global influence.
Our joint priority in defence is of course Afghanistan. We must secure the legitimacy of the Afghan government, end fear through enforced rule of law, overcome the grievances which feed insurgency, disrupt the poppy trade and support legal agriculture, and give meaning to the political process inside and outside the country with our neighbours.
But there are new threats on the horizon which demand similarly intense cooperation, for example, the implications of the Arab Spring. We must be on the side of the revolutionaries and help ensure that they succeed. Many will argue that our engagement is unnecessary because people themselves, without our involvement, have brought the ideal of democracy closer to being reality through their own actions. True, but if the wave of change breaks too early the implications will be global and lasting.
When administrations are forced to fall states cannot be allowed to fail. There is a risk of religious extremism filling the resultant power vacuums. If autocracy beats the would-be liberators, there is equally a risk that religious extremism is viewed as an alternative vehicle for defiance. Should either situation be realised, the threat would not just be to those who sought freedom but to our own shores. And here in particular I think of the situations in Syria and Yemen.
Our intervention must be to consistently coax the green shoots of democracy throughout the region to deny space for the extremism of others through investment in the foundations of liberty: civil society, independent institutions, political pluralism, free media and economic opportunity. The G8 aid package to the Arab partnership initiative is vital and the economic appeal of the EU can act as a further magnet for positive change in the region, linking, as is right, EU support with progress on political and economic reform.
Cooperation between Europe and the US is more important than ever in an era when it is going out of fashion. The cold war generation of politicians are exiting the stage. Some of the certainties of the cold war such as an instinctive attachment to NATO are less immediate today, but with new challenges NATO is no less important.
Robert Gates articulated the US psyche post Iraq and Afghanistan when he said ‘after a decade of conflict, the American people are tired of war’. The House of Representatives’ vote against authorising military action in Libya was symbolic of this, as is the phrase that the America would ‘lead from the back’ in that conflict. The death of Osama Bin Laden brings either the sense of mission accomplished or underlines the flaws of the original aims of the mission, but either way could help precipitate a new, if muted, US international reticence.
Viewed alongside the heightened protective and protectionist instincts in Europe arising from the economic crisis, this is dangerous because the new threats we face, whether cyber warfare, piracy, terrorism or energy security, all demand international collaboration. We need to lead from the front, and European countries must do so together.
There is an onus on Europeans to act, however, if we do not want the title ‘The Pacific President’ to stick. The transatlantic alliance will only be more meaningful if it is more reciprocal. That means greater burden sharing within NATO – France, UK and Germany represent 65 per cent of all defence expenditure in NATO Europe and 88 per cent of R&T investment; greater deployability of assets – the EU spends E200bn on defence a year, more than any country except the US, and have two million European troops in uniform, but only five per cent deployable at any one time; and nations aiming to meet the NATO expenditure targets.
How do we make this case to our squeezed publics? There is no alternative to acting to protect our own shores and the moral duty to do so is just as great as it is to protect those whose names and stories we do not know from tyranny. Equally, ‘smart defence’ must move from rhetoric to reality, with greater integration and interoperability leading to economies of scale. I would like to see promotion of cooperation as part of NATO’s remit.
There is now an inescapable global agenda. We cannot avoid the impact of events in Libya, Yemen or Somalia and myriad other nations. This demands new forms of leadership and ours should be to help others lead for themselves. The multilateralism we so value should not be exclusive, so we should demand more of the Arab League and African Union. Power shifting west to east, the thirst for self determination in the Middle East and north Africa, the limitations of our ability to bring about change through military intervention plus domestic financial pressures all combine to bring us to a position of needing to be the enablers of change not necessarily its instigator.
Leon Panetta has a daunting intray for his first week. Europe should step up to the plate and say how we will help him clear it.
green shots of democracy