MAKE MINE MAHAN:

American might is sailing away from Europe (William Richard Smyser, March 2 2003, Financial Times)

The shrillness of the debate about French and German opposition to war on Iraq has concealed the change in fundamental American strategic thinking that lies at its heart. The Pentagon is returning the US to its traditional role as a maritime power. In that strategy, western Europe, indeed Europe as a whole, will matter less than it has done.

Gerhard Schroeder and Jacques Chirac are serving as a convenient excuse for President George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, to slash the American presence in Europe. The US has always been primarily a sea power, from the days of the privateers to Theodore Roosevelt's "Great White Fleet" and Ronald Reagan's 600-ship navy. Now that it no longer needs a massive land presence in western Europe it wants to return to that strategy.

Sea powers behave in predictable ways. Strategically, they try to dominate the oceans (and now the skies). They abhor large and fixed land deployments, preferring to use local auxiliaries. They like to control or at least to neutralise the opposite shores of contiguous seas and oceans. [...]

Washington may not announce this new strategy for some time, if ever, because that might reinforce Europe's wish for its own security and foreign policy. Like all traditional naval powers, Washington prefers to keep a balance of power between various states on other continents. That is one reason Mr Rumsfeld called upon "new Europe" to balance "old Europe". But the maritime strategy will become clear over time.

This could create some problems for Tony Blair. The US wants to cut its role in Europe but does not like an independent-minded European foreign and defence policy. Mr Blair will have to resolve that contradiction and may be asked again to choose sides.

Some Europeans believe that Mr Rumsfeld is as guilty of "irrational exuberance" today as the New York stock exchange was in the bubble years at the end of the last decade. He has certainly done all he can to annoy the Europeans. But he is preparing for a new and different strategic environment and western Europeans should understand their diminished role.

Reasonable people may even ask whether current US policies will serve the new American strategic objectives. Such questions are, of course, legitimate but only if they are posed in terms of the new strategy. They should not be posed - as many now are - on the basis of what the new breed of Pentagon planners would regard as terminally obsolete sentimentalism about superannuated cold-war relations.

This seems to us to be much closer to the true American strategic goal, especially because, as Mr. Smyser says, it's always been our goal. Here's Walter Russell Mead from his fine book, Special Providence:

The Monroe Doctrine was not only not isolationist, it was anti-isolationist.  It amounted to the recognition that American safety depended on the balance of power in Europe.  With that doctrine's promulgation, the first era in American foreign policy came to a close.  The strategic principles of the Monroe Doctrine have continued without interruption to shape American foreign policy from that day to this.  American interventions in the world wars as well as the Cold War were not a series of revolutionary departures from Monroe's statecraft; they were examples of the same thinking that led Monroe to proclaim it.  Just as Monroe and his talented secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, were prepared in the last analysis to help Britain prevent the French or the Spanish from reestablishing dynastic empires in the Americas in 1823, twentieth-century American presidents were prepared to step in to keep Germany and the Soviet Union from overturning the European power balance and spreading their power through the rest of the world.  If another antidemocratic power should threaten to unite all Europe under its dominion tomorrow, we would step in and resist again.  We would do the same thing in Asia, and for the same reason.  Our policies have changed over the decades and centuries to reflect changing circumstances; our basic strategic posture has not changed since 1823.

When seemingly strange things like the "sudden" split between America and Old Europe occur, it seems always wiser to look for the reasons in continuity rather than to imagine a radical change. It is in at least this enduring sense that France must be said to be our historic enemy, because its goal is always to dominate the continent.

MORE:
The Jacksonian Tradition (Walter Russell Mead, The National Interest)

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 5, 2003 9:26 AM