essays What Libya says about the future of the transatlantic alliance By Tomas Valasek
★ Libya is the first war fought according to Barack Obama’s rules: the United States is taking a back seat, while the Europeans absorb most of the risks and costs. So it is puzzling that so many Americans see the operation as reason to despair about the state of the transatlantic alliance. ★ In fact, Libya is cause for cautious optimism about NATO. In contrast to the Balkan operations in the 1990s, the 2011 campaign demonstrates that the European allies can take decisive military action to maintain the stability of their neighbourhood, provided they have access to US equipment. ★ The allies have arrived at a new division of labour for European operations, which should be encouraged and developed further. That will require a conscious effort from the Obama administration to challenge overly negative assumptions about NATO in the US. For their part, the Europeans need to make more common and efficient use of their military budgets and equipment if the transatlantic alliance is to remain credible.
Most US officials and pundits think of the current NATO-led mission in Libya as yet another proof that the transatlantic alliance is decaying. One hears two lines of complaint: many, such as Secretary of Defence Robert Gates, see the war as affirmation that Europe has lost its capacity to fight. “The mightiest military alliance in history is only 11 weeks into an operation against a poorly armed regime in a sparsely 1 Robert Gates, populated country – yet many allies are beginning to run short of munitions”, Gates said ‘Reflections on the status in a widely-reported valedictory speech in Brussels in early June.1 Other US officials and future of the complain that NATO has failed to function as a proper military 2 transatlantic alliance’, alliance since many member-states have failed to send forces.2 To this, Unless otherwise Brussels, Belgium, attributed, quotations Europeans add their own bit of self-criticism: that Libya has been a come from personal June 10th 2011. disaster for Europe because EU countries disagreed on how to interviews with the author respond to Muammar Gaddafi’s violence. This has made it impossible for the EU to do between April and July much more than send humanitarian aid and impose sanctions. 2011. This gloom is only partly warranted. Europe does face a shortage of troops and weapons, though the problem lies more in the future than the present, and there are remedies for it. Libya has indeed divided NATO – but the alliance has fought every one of its four wars (Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Libya) with fewer than the full complement of member-states. With the right policies, it can continue to be effective and strong, despite the lack of unity. And Europe has hardly ‘failed’ in Libya; European countries have made the greatest effort to stop Gaddafi’s forces. In fact, if the war ends well, Libya may yet come to be seen in hindsight as the moment when Europe assumed its rightful share of responsibility for the security of its neighbourhood.
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