As Prepared:
Note for IISS conference, Geneva, Sept 2011
My role on this panel is to give the European view of emerging US foreign policy.
The problem, of course, is that there is no European view.
Europe is an exhausted and fractured place: witness the failure of governments to get to grips with the crisis of the eurozone, the divisions provoked by Nato’s Libyan operation when Germany preferred the company of Russia and China to that of Britain and France, and the failure of the Lisbon treaty to galvanise foreign policy Co-ordination.
So what I offer you today is the view of a "despairing" European - despairing that is to say of his own continent.
I want, like any good Frenchman, to make trois points.
The first is that is seems self-evident to me that the US will draw back from the world and, as it does so, the retrenchment will be felt most acutely in Europe.
The opening years of the present decade saw many Europeans resentful of US power. The French referred to the hyperpuissance, but they were not alone. Remember how Gerhard Schroder joined Jacques Chirac in cuddling up to Vladimir Putin.
Well the next decade or so will see the Europeans lamenting America’s relative - I underline relative -weakness.
The second is that a hobbled America makes it far less likely that we will see a remodelling and refurbishment of the postwar multilateral order. More competition in global affairs is inevitable as new powers emerge. One might of hoped that it would be matched by great Co-operation. That seems unlikely.
Without determined US leadership -the US is still what Madeleine Albright called the indispensable power even if it also now an insufficient power -the present nexus of international institutions is likely to fall into further disrepair.
The third is that Europe is unlikely to rise to the challenge of a hobbled America. This augurs il1 for the future of the transatlantic alliance.
Even as many European governments -particularly in the eastern side of the continent -worry about a diminished US presence, they are busy cutting their defence budgets.
Libya has been a political and diplomatic success for Britain and France. But only seven or eight of the European members of Nato agreed to operate at the sharp end of the operation.
And Britain has now joined the ranks of the defence- cutters.....its military chiefs Say that if the Libyan uprising had been 6 months or a year later they would not have had the wherewithal.
Two minutes more on each of these three points
1. We have heard from my fellow panellists about the economic and political constraints on the projection of US global power in coming years.
I am not an American declinist. Nor do I expect the rise of China to be linear or trouble-free.
But is does seem clear that the US is both weary of foreign entanglements and will be unable to afford its present level of overseas commitment at a time when its power will be increasingly contested.
American presidents - this one and whoever follows - have things to fix at home. In their broadest sense, politics and economics are aligned on this issue.
I have been struck recently by the way the Republicans have accepted almost without a protest the prospect of defence cuts. The preservation of tax cuts, it seems, is prized above military spending.
It is also striking that President Obama’s plans for the drawdown from Afghanistan attracted little more than a murmur - and that the White House failed to get Congressional support for the intervention in Libya.
By everyone else’s standards, of course, the US will retain a huge capacity to intervene. No-one has comparable reach. But that reach is being contested -in the diplomatic as well as military arenas.
It seems inevitable that the US military will want to concentrate its resources. We will see a shift eastwards - from Europe and from the greater Middle East to the area of greatest contestability - East Asia.
2. The second point - we know the world is becoming multipolar, but how multilateral will it be?
With visible US strength and leadership it was possible a few years ago to see Washington leading a strategy to refurbish global institutions.
The tragedy of Iraq and Afghanistan is that they have sapped the energy, prestige and moral authority the US needed for a venture. The US could have taken great strides to remake the international order during the 1990s or in the opening years of the present century, but the opportunity was lost.
Barack Obama says al1 the right things about leveraging US influence to widen and deepen global governance but, in truth, Washington has neither the political will nor the international authority to do so.
So the world is going to become more fragmented, more regionalised and more Hobbesian.
That means more unstable and unpredictable. As the IISS points out in its latest Strategic Survey 201 1, we will witness more regionalisation of security policy and more coalitions of the willing and available.
This landscape will more closely resemble that of late 19th century Europe than that of the second half of the 20th century.
3. Which brings me back to Europe -and the cause of my depression.
At first glance, the Franco-British cooperation in the Libyan campaign is an encouraging sign. It is not often that you hear a French president lauding Nato.
But the operation looks to me more like a last Hurrah than a harbinger of a more coherent European defence capability.
As everyone knows, even as President Obama professed to be taking a back seat, the US provided all the vital infrastructure for the campaign.
The Europeans ran out of ammunition, the French carrier had to hobble back to port, and the British were stretched to deploy enough planes for what was a very modest operation.
Earlier this year I wrote a column for the FT which carried the headline "The Yanks are going home –Hooray"
The "Hooray" was there not to convey any sense of anti-Americanism, but was an expression of hope that the Europeans might at last be shaken out of their inertia and think more closely about sustaining their own military capabilities.
Not a bit of it.
