Getting It Wrong: Conservatives, NATO, and the Iraq crisis.

Every day furnishes another news report to confirm that a massive realignment of the West is under way. Just the latest -- itself likely to be superseded by the time you read this paragraph -- is that France's President Chirac rebuked the new democracies of eastern and central Europe for their support of the U.S. position on Iraq. He spoke in terms so petulant and undiplomatic -- "they missed a good opportunity to remain silent" -- that he looked like a railing demagogue rather than a serious politician. His threat to deny these countries admission into the European Union unless they start toeing the Paris-Brussels-Berlin line on foreign policy itself looked vain and foolish that same night, when the EU's joint statement substantially backed the U.S. position. One European parliamentarian pointed out that Chirac had committed a terrible faux pas: He had asked someone to choose between the U.S. and "Europe" (which, in this context, means a federal European state that would be a counterweight to America in world politics).

I say: Thank goodness for his undiplomatic petulance! For, in this gaffe, Chirac has blurted out the choice that underlies and explains all the disputes now raging within Europe. Within Europe, note -- not "across the Atlantic." Despite the incorrigible habit of headline- writers of keeping "U.S.-Europe Split Widens" in permanent type, the story below it almost always describes how Spain, Britain, Italy, and Eastern Europe are united with the U.S. against France, Germany, and Belgium. And almost all the joint statements, communiques, and demarches issued in recent weeks are designed to give an advantage to either the Atlanticists or the Europeanists in the vital struggle for control of the institutions of the post-Cold War West, in particular NATO and the EU.

Conservatives are supposed to have a special commitment to preserving the West. Yet they have been curiously blind to the threat to Western unity and American leadership posed by Europeanism since the Soviet threat imploded. And as the current realignment of Europe takes shape before our eyes, some of them have stepped forward to propose solutions that would weaken America's friends, strengthen its rivals, and divide the West.

Take, for instance, the Wall Street Journal editorial responding to a Franco-German-Belgian veto on NATO military aid to Turkey: "If this is what the U.S. gets from NATO, maybe it's time America considered leaving this Cold War institution and re-forming an alliance of nations that understand the threat to world order."

A few days later, George Will hinted broadly at the same solution: "Americans are increasingly wondering why they are in Europe. . . . With France fomenting worldwide opposition to a U.S. military action deemed by the U.S. government to be vital to national security, and with Germany drawing France into the embrace of semi-pacifism, NATO is becoming what Donald Rumsfeld warns the U.N. is becoming -- a thing of ridicule."

Now, it is a longstanding aim of French policy to construct a single security system for Europe that does not include the U.S. Thus far, they have not succeeded. Other European countries -- the 15 nations that supported the U.S. proposal to help Turkey in a 16-3 vote -- have insisted that the U.S. should remain the leading European military power, that NATO should be the main European security organization, and that any EU force should be clearly subordinate to NATO. Yet if the U.S. were to leave NATO, the Franco-German bloc would get exactly what it wants -- instantly.

It is at this point that Mark Steyn enters the argument, in Canada's National Post. Steyn sees very clearly that the kind of Europe sought by Chirac would divide the West and damage the U.S. He even thinks that I am insufficiently worried about this threat; he describes as "the O'Sullivanite tendency" a belief that when the dust has settled the U.S. and "the Continentals" will be allies once again. This mystifies me somewhat, since my much-reiterated defense of "the Europeans" was built on the argument that they were not monolithic, that the Brits, Spaniards, etc. were generally made of sterner pro-American stuff than the Franco-Germans (this has surely been confirmed by now). It is true, as even Steyn concedes, that the French may end up fighting alongside us in the Gulf, but that would be merely a tactical feint designed to disguise their long-term hostility to an Atlanticist Europe.

I am at one with Steyn's analysis; where we differ is on prescription - - or rather, on implied prescription, since he does not set out a detailed policy. What Steyn does is argue that Tony Blair may be even more dangerously hostile to the Europeanist strategy than Lady Thatcher was, precisely because he is both an Atlanticist and a European. Hence, under Blair's influence, "it's possible that Europe will develop in ways that are not in France's interests." Perhaps I am over- interpreting Steyn here, but this sounds very like the old State Department orthodoxy that Britain will prove a very useful American "Trojan Horse" within Europe -- with the added twist that, unless Chirac really does veto the entry of the east Europeans next year, Britain will soon be strengthened by a new wave of pro-American recruits. The Wall Street Journal editorial page takes essentially the same view.

The boldness of this approach -- stealing the EU from the Franco- Germans -- is appealing. And it may well be that this is the approach that Atlanticists will have to adopt if the U.S. will not encourage a more fundamental reshaping of Atlantic relations. But it is fraught with difficulty and danger.

The EU was established to be a regulated market internally and a counterweight to the U.S. in world politics. Its bureaucracy is staffed with Europeanist ideologues sympathetic to the Franco-German vision. Its legal system is built on the principle of encouraging "ever-greater union" and thus the erosion of national sovereignty. New member-states have to accept all previous Euro-regulations, however damaging to their economies. The EU is designed to enable its bureaucracy and most powerful members to bribe, bully, and manipulate the relatively poor new arrivals into going along with initiatives such as an intrinsically anti-American common foreign policy in return for subsidies from Brussels. Even if such tactics do not succeed in creating a rival European superpower -- which they might -- they would probably frustrate the emergence of a clearly Atlanticist Europe under U.S. leadership. And, in either case, Europe and the U.S. would be going in different directions.

To strategist Robert Kagan, that would simply be facing up to reality. Kagan's Policy Review article -- now expanded into a book, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order -- advanced the notion that "Europe" embodied a commitment to settling all disputes through multilateralist rules and negotiations, whereas "America" represented the enforcement of world order through power politics and the exercise of national sovereignty. Kagan's theory was the Big Idea of 2002.

The ink was scarcely dry on Kagan's thesis, however, when two factors emerged to demolish it. First, a series of polls showed U.S. opinion to be considerably more favorable to multilateralism -- and more attentive to the need for allies -- than he allowed for: More than 40 percent of Americans regularly demonstrated "European" attitudes. One poll suggested that fully 41 percent of U.S. women trusted the U.N. more than the Bush administration to safeguard American interests -- a claim even Kofi Annan would probably shrink from making. The second factor was the letter of the eight European leaders -- subsequently endorsed by twelve east European leaders -- in support of U.S. policy towards Iraq; apparently, most European nations are run by people with "American" philosophies. So there is every prospect that the U.S. will usually be able to obtain from Europe the political and diplomatic support that the American people demand as the price of military intervention -- unless Europeanist institutions thwart the peoples and their leaders.

And President Bush can forestall the Europeanists quite readily through some simple measures. First, he should insist that NATO remain the monopoly provider of European security. Second, he should call for reform of NATO's procedures so that a small minority of member-states cannot veto collective decisions. Third, he should encourage America's friends in Europe to make the EU a more flexible free-trade area rather than a more rigid federation. And, fourth, he should seek to establish a Transatlantic Free Trade Area -- open to European states, whether they are inside or outside the EU -- that would eventually become the principal Western trading bloc.

Yes, I know it's more complicated than that. But if conservatives don't unite around a practical plan for Western unity under American leadership, they can hardly complain if determined opponents of U.S. power like Chirac shape a different West and a worse future.