Global Endeavors

In Of Paradise and Power, author Robert Kagan argues, in brief, that Western Europe’s longest continuous peace – the fifty-plus years following World War II – is largely a product of two things: the lessons learned from World Wars I and II, and the blanket of security the United States offered Western Europe in the face of the communist East. In Kagan’s view, the latter point is the most important: without a standing American military force, Europe would surely have suffered under the constant threat of unwanted Muscovite influence. To be sure, Kagan believed the United States was the sole guarantor of Pax Europa.

Today, however, the tides have shifted. The Soviet threat is the property of historians, and Europe’s future belongs to revitalized ideas of collective security, economic integration, and “soft” borders. To Americans, however, the Soviet threat – rather, our treatment of it – sparked an entirely new approach to foreign policy, where unilateralism and “preemptive warfare” have replaced more traditional notions of international consensus followed by collective action. Indeed, as Kagan notes, the time has to come “to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world…Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation,” while the United States “remains mired in history, exercising power in an archaic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable.”

Kagan’s observation, his placement of the United States and Europe on polarized political extremes, is quite provocative. The policy implications suggest an American break with Europe (or, perhaps, a European break with America), and a resulting shift in the international distribution of power. Once the self-inflicted, proud mission of the English Empire, the task of balancing the world’s power construct has since fallen on Europeans, who, whether they know it or not, have established a political order running counter to American foreign policy objectives.

But Kagan’s comments beg the question as to whether or not the political divergence of the United States and Europe can withstand the common threat of global terrorism. As Osama bin Laden has gladly attested to in the past, the West is the ultimate target of al Qaeda, but other targets, the United States included, exist along the way. Terrorism is a “war of ideas,” where Islamic fundamentalists are diametrically opposed to Western notions of secularism, pluralism, transparency, and social liberalism. To many scholars and policy-makers alike, Islam and Western Liberalism cannot coexist. Famed political theorist Samuel P. Huntington offered this conclusion in The Clash of Civilizations, where he argued Islam and the West were inevitably bound for conflict. But like Kagan, Huntington’s work offers no discussion of relationships. Is this “clash” one versus one? Could it be one versus two?

The present geo-political climate suggests the United States is generally doing its own thing. The so-called “Bush doctrine” is most obvious in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran – all fronts in the “global war on terror.” Europe, on the other hand, is addressing terrorism on a case-by-base basis. Spain and Portugal have insulated themselves, Germany and France are yet unfamiliar, and Britain, having suffered the most, has furthered its “special relationship” with the United States. In other words, there is no Western consensus on how to battle terrorism as a violent action, let alone an effective political exercise.

Consensus – not necessarily the multilateral use of force – is absolutely necessary among the United States, Europe, and other liberal democracies. In order to properly mitigate terrorist threats, the West needs to accept terrorism as a communal problem that requires collective action and a unified front. To achieve this end, however, action is required primarily on the right side of the pond. Europe must acknowledge the seriousness of global terrorism, reject it simply as a thorn in Bush’s side, and take a larger role in combating it on an international scale. The idea should be to internalize the threat before it hits close to home. Once Europe demonstrates its good faith in the United States, America can subordinate its immediate political objectives to a larger need for global integration.

Iraq demonstrated the shortcomings of “going at it alone.” We must learn from this lesson, and apply it to future ventures. Lebanon is a great place to start.