The French Way (36 page)

In fact, negotiations continued, because Washington believed there was room for compromise and Paris persisted. Levitte and Defense
Minister Charles Millon arrived in Washington in early 1997 with suggestions about finding a way to Europeanize AFSOUTH without making the Sixth Fleet subordinate.
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One such recommendation was to share the Naples command, leaving air and naval forces under an American and attaching only the land-based forces to a European. Levitte argued if Europe were to exist inside the military alliance it must benefit from an autonomous command and, he added, politically France could not rejoin without winning some concession. At home the government needed something to keep the Gaullists on board. Instead of a compromise, the Pentagon closed the door. In April General John Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, addressing his French military opposites, rejected the proposed European command because, he argued, the Europeans did not speak with one voice and France, given its independent role, could not assume command itself.
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By then Clinton's second term had begun and his new secretary of defense, William Cohen, declared to Congress that the southern command was nonnegotiable and the new secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, concurred: “Our position on AFSOUTH has not changed. We consider it essential for that to remain an American command….”
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The most the two sides could do was issue a statement of principles about restructuring AFSOUTH without addressing the hard issues; the American negotiators admitted they had postponed everything and made the European a “commander-in-waiting.”

What was on the mind of the Clinton team was NATO enlargement rather than structural reform. They wanted to extend the alliance eastward to Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary; Chirac accepted this expansion as a quid pro quo for reform, but he wanted to include Romania. In fact, he was wary of the Clinton administration's rush to expand the alliance from fear of, among other reasons, antagonizing Russia.
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The NATO conference in Madrid in July 1997 settled the issue—as usual, in Washington's favor. Three countries, not five, were added. One of Chirac's advisers complained, “What bugs me with the Americans is their tendency to say, ‘I have decided,
period.' Certainly one can discuss up to a point. Then they say ‘no' and it's no.” Once again the French found themselves isolated; one diplomat complained, “I have never seen such doormats as the Europeans at Madrid.” Chirac had to accept the decision, blaming the short list on Congress, but he had been humiliated. He told journalists that Europeans had only a secondary role in the alliance: they had subcommands and formal duties like attending receptions but no real power. It may have been a tactical error, Chirac admitted, to have announced reintegration without first specifying conditions.
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The return to government in 1997 of the socialists, who had no interest in the project, effectively killed it. But by then the affair had damaged French-American relations by reinforcing each side's suspicion that the other was inflexible and untrustworthy.
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The Americans did not trust the French: their Atlanticism seemed false. They were still suspected of trying to diminish America's power in Europe and taking charge of NATO for their purposes. The French did not trust the Americans: they had misled them about their willingness to share power and construct a European pillar within the alliance and in the process embarrassed them.

French policy, after the “new NATO” debacle, drifted until it found a new way forward with the construction within the EU of what came to be called the European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP). A major step in this direction had been inspired by the Americans who, like the French, aimed at making the alliance a more flexible, ad hoc, coalition-building organization that could meet a wide range of crises without mobilizing the entire apparatus. The solution was to transfer NATO assets, like satellite intelligence and airlift, to special missions designated as Combined Joint Task Forces (CJTFs) for tasks, especially out-of-area ones, in which Washington did not want to participate. Paris endorsed this extension of alliance functions but haggled over who would control the transferred assets. In 1996 an agreement stipulated the alliance could lend assets for operations conducted by Europeans, but such WEU-led CJTFs would be “separable but not separate” from NATO. The Clinton administration insisted that
SACEUR remain in control, although France at least succeeded in limiting NATO's day-to-day oversight of loaned assets.
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France had gained rather little. Chirac tried to put on a brave face by saying the CJTF compromise indicated “renovation” of the alliance was underway. Not all of his fellow compatriots accepted the president's posturing. A former defense minister, the socialist Paul Quiles, wrote that Chirac had ceded authority to Washington, making the United States “the sixteenth member of the European Union whenever it comes to decisions about defense.” How, Quiles asked, could France maintain influence in the world if, instead of sharing control of its military with the EU, it “squandered” it in NATO where the Americans would not relinquish real power.
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Pascal Boniface, an authority on strategic studies, likened the CJTFs borrowing alliance assets to an adolescent having use of the family car on a Saturday night: “That avoids the need for the head of the family to go out at night; nevertheless the latter retains the right to decide whether or not to lend the car, and monitors the destination, the time when the car should be returned, the conditions for its use, and so forth.”
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Such an arrangement did not go far enough for the French government, so it continued to try to reinforce a common foreign policy and security agenda for the EU. But, as usual, the British and several Nordic countries, who insisted on preserving the primacy of NATO, resisted. In 1997 the EU nevertheless took some small steps that strengthened its ability to articulate and implement a common foreign policy and make the Petersburg tasks—such as peacekeeping and humanitarian rescue—its responsibility. The European defense entity was still in its infancy when the British had a change of heart.

London began to warm to the idea of European defense after the troubles in Bosnia; British and French armed forces had fought together and they had quarreled together with the Americans, and London had come around to the view that a powerless Europe would not be a good partner for the United States, that “the way to save the alliance was via Europe.”
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The British now turned to creating a military and defense
capacity within the EU. In the French coastal town of Saint-Malo in December 1998, Prime Minister Tony Blair, along with President Chirac, orchestrated an Anglo-French declaration that spoke of giving the Union “the capacity for autonomous action, backed up by credible military forces, the means to decide to use them and a readiness to do so, in order to respond to international crises….”
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The turning point for the EU occurred at its meetings at Cologne and Helsinki during the summer of 1999. Washington's reluctance to intervene in Kosovo worried Europeans about American commitment to stabilizing the continent's periphery and spurred efforts at constructing a common defense capability.
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Europeans declared their intention of constructing an ESDP that would furnish the EU with an autonomous defense capacity. The EU adopted the Saint-Malo declaration, adding that the EU Council would assume responsibility for a range of conflict prevention and crisis management tasks. (At this point the earlier WEU/Eurocorps scheme was folded into the new EU project.) Europeans proceeded to provide some military muscle to the ESDP by creating military staff and planning committees, naming Javier Solana as high representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy and announcing plans to create a Rapid Reaction Force of up to 60,000 troops that the EU could deploy. But they were careful to point out that the “autonomous capacity” of the EU to launch and conduct its own military operations in response to international crises would be taken “without prejudice to actions by NATO.”
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They also called for full consultation, cooperation, and transparency between the EU and NATO. In other words, the ESDP remained embedded within the alliance. Unlike earlier proposals, these had the backing of the British. The United States was, nevertheless, concerned that ESDP and the Rapid Reaction Force would compete with NATO. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright responded with her famous “3-Ds,” saying ESDP had American support as long as there was no decoupling, duplication, or discrimination.
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Washington delayed reaching a compromise with the Europeans until 2003 when an agreement specified
that NATO and the EU would have separate, yet connected, planning staffs and that the EU would undertake operations “only if NATO as a whole…decided not to be engaged.”
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A bargain had been struck. The U.S. guaranteed lending NATO assets to future European-led operations in return for the ESDP submitting to prior NATO authorization. Thus the United States via NATO continued to preside over European security.

The project of creating a European defense capacity had crept forward a few steps at the very end of the decade, but even then the ESDP was more a promise of autonomy than a reality: any significant European military operation still depended on the loan of NATO assets and U.S. willingness to share responsibility. And for the ESDP to become a reality it required that Europeans increase their defense spending and halt their wrangling over security policy. After a decade of diplomatic maneuvering not much had been achieved from the perspective of France.

A frustrated Hubert Vedrine, the socialist foreign minister, let loose on the occasion of NATO's fiftieth birthday when he complained of U.S. high-handedness. “Since President Kennedy, we've been hearing from people on the other side of the Atlantic about a European pillar for the alliance,” the minister noted. “In reality, this pillar is never built” because the alliance itself was constructed on “a hierarchical foundation with a strict subordination of all participants” to the United States.
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Yet he was confident that the alliance would change. A year later he said of European defense, “I think the Europeans will end up imposing themselves as partners on a United States that will initially be reticent, but at the end of the day will be realistic.”
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France had been checked, but it had not surrendered.

Among the sixteen nations that composed NATO until the end of the 1990s, the United States and France—when it came to designing alliance goals, structure, scope, and especially the relative roles of Europe and America—were polar opposites. This transatlantic rivalry generated much of the debate about how the alliance should operate in
the post-Cold War era. And the postures of the two, as well as the issues, lived on into the new millennium. In 2008, as the analyst Frederic Bozo observed, the United States still objected to a European “caucus” within the North Atlantic Council that would challenge its leadership, and France still resisted efforts at politicizing the alliance and expanding its geographic scope at “the risk of seeing NATO become the cornerstone of an international order controlled by the United States.”
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France wanted the alliance to remain a Euro-Atlantic club confined to military and peacekeeping functions. Looking back, the gap between France and NATO opened by Charles de Gaulle was, in fits and starts, gradually narrowed in spite of the rebuff of 1996; at the same time, in a similar discontinuous manner, the Europeans, pushed forward by France, began to develop an autonomous defense capacity outside the alliance. It was not until 2009 that France resumed full participation in the alliance, but, as the past might have suggested, President Nicolas Sarkozy insisted that joining NATO was fully compatible with the ESDP: “Our defense has two pillars, the European Union and the Atlantic Alliance.”
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If the 1990s anticipated the future, harmony would not come easily.

Trade Warriors

Trade, which in theory and practice bridged the Atlantic, also contributed, like security, to rancor in the United States and France. Trouble peaked in the early 1990s over the negotiations of the Uruguay Round of talks on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

President Bush, it has been said, spent more time during 1991 on the Uruguay Round than any other foreign policy problem except for the Gulf War and the Russians. Fear of a breakdown of trade negotiations overlapped with concerns about the European Community's effort at launching a unified market through the Single European Act as well as with transatlantic security issues especially building a new architecture
around NATO. All of these projects interacted and seemed to focus on France. Bush officials, according to one insider, worried that the Europeans, led by the French, were ganging up on the Americans and wanted to shut them out, both economically and politically, forcing them to deal with “a Europe that was protectionist, exclusivist, inward-looking and difficult to deal with.”
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