Chapter Two: Confronting Proliferation

Abstract

The damage that has been done to the transatlantic alliance will not be repaired through grand architectural redesigns or radical new agendas. Instead, the transatlantic partners need to restore their consensus and cooperation on key security challenges with a limited agenda that reflects the essential conservatism of the transatlantic partnership during the Cold War and the 1990s. There will inevitably be big challenges, such as the rise of China, where transatlantic disparities in strategic means and commitments preclude any common alliance undertaking. Yet such limits are nothing new. The absence of a common transatlantic commitment to counter-insurgency in Iraq may cause resentments, but so too did the lack of a common commitment to counter-insurgency in Vietnam.

This paper suggests ten propositions for future transatlantic consensus that is to say, ten security challenges for which the allies should be able to agree on common approaches. These run the gamut from an effective strategy to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear-weapons capability to transatlantic leadership for international cooperation against global warming. If pursued with seriousness and a reasonable degree of transatlantic unity, these propositions could constitute the foundations of an effective partnership. They are, in the authors view, the basis for a consensus on the most pressing security challenges of the twenty-first century.

The time is right for this kind of serious re-dedication to alliance purposes. There has already been some effort to repair the damage; moreover, new leaders are in place in or coming to the countries that were major protagonists of the transatlantic crisis: Germany, France, Britain and, in 2009, the United States. It is possible that these four new leaders will be better able to put the disputes of the recent past behind them. This extended essay is a guide to the possibilities, and also the limits, of a new start.

Notes

1. Francis Fukuyama, ‘Invasion of the Isolationists’, New York Times, 31 August 2005, p. A19.

2. Charles Krauthammer, ‘The Unipolar Moment’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 70, no. 1, Winter 1990–91, pp. 23–33.

3. For more on the A.Q. Khan network, see the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Nuclear Black Markets: Pakistan, A.Q. Khan and the rise of proliferation networks: A net assessment (London: IISS, 2007). IISS, 2007).

4. Chapter Seven of the UN Charter concerns Security Council ‘action with respect to threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression’. Article 41 covers non-violent measures available to the Security Council, such as economic sanctions and the interruption of diplomatic relations; Article 42 covers the use of force and other military measures.

5. Marc Weller, ‘The US, Iraq and the Use of Force in a Unipolar World’, Survival, vol. 41, no. 4, Winter 1999–2000, p. 89.

6. Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006).

7. Gareth Evans, ‘When Is It Right to Fight?’ Survival, vol. 46, no. 3, Autumn 2004, p. 65.

8. See ‘La dissuasion nucléaire comme outil de prévention’, speech delivered by Jacques Chirac, President of France, Brest, 19 January 2006, http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/actu/bulletin.asp?liste=20060120.html#Chapitre1.

9. Richard K. Betts, ‘The Osirak Fallacy’, National Interest, no. 83, Spring 2006, pp. 22–5.

10. The E3–Iran diplomacy is a good illustration of the organic development of EU foreign policy in general. It cannot be effective as a committee or consensus project of 25 (now 27) members of equal voice. So core groups – to some extent self-appointed but enjoying the tacit acquiescence of the EU membership as a whole – take the lead, acting to some extent as proxies for the rest. This works best when the proxies occupy the EU's centre of gravity for a given problem area. Thus Germany and Poland formed a natural core group to push for a democratic resolution to Ukraine's Christmas 2004 elections crisis. Likewise, in previous ‘contact groups’ of leading European states pursuing Balkans peace initiatives along with the US and Russia, it eventually was deemed important to add Italy to the troika of France, Britain and Germany, because of Italy's geographical proximity to the Balkans, hosting of US airbases, and other entanglements of interest. For the EU's Iranian diplomacy, having Berlin as part of the core group along with the relatively more hawkish London and Paris was important, not only because of Germany's economic clout and relations with Iran, but also because Germans are good representatives of the ‘softer’ views of some other EU member states. The involvement of Javier Solana, High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy, which today is an integral part of the E3, reinforced this approach. One often-overlooked fact is that since June 2006 Solana has been acting as executive agent, not only for the EU as a whole in his discussions with the Iranians, but also for Russia, China and the US.

11. Iran thus unilaterally terminated the so-called Paris Agreement, reached between the E3 and Iran, which gave a comprehensive and detailed description of activities to be suspended.

12. Transatlantic Trends, Key Findings 2006, 6 September 2006, http://www.transatlantictrends.org/trends/doc/2006_TT_Key%20Findings%20FINAL.pdf.

13. KEDO was established in 1995 by the US, Japan and South Korea (other states later joined) to provide North Korea with heavy fuel oil and light-water reactors in return for the freezing and eventual dismantlement of its nuclear programme under the terms of the Agreed Framework. The light-water reactor project was terminated in May 2006.

14. The PSI's ‘Statement of Interdiction Principles’ was adopted at the Paris meeting of participants in September 2003, http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/proliferation/#statement.

15. ‘Physical protection controls’ are physical measures such as perimeter fences and guard patrols for safeguarding nuclear assets against theft and smuggling.

16. See Paula A. DeSutter, US assistant secretary for verification, compliance, and implementation, ‘The New U.S. Approach to Verification’, remarks to Carnegie International Nonproliferation Conference, Washington DC, 7 November 2005.

17. Christopher F. Chyba, ‘Biological Terrorism and Public Health’, Survival, no. 43, no. 1, Spring 2001, p. 99.

18. Shankar Vedantam, ‘WHO Assails Wealthy Nations on Bioterror; Coordination of Defenses Poor in Simulation; U.S. Support for Agency Questioned’, Washington Post, 5 November 2003, p. A8.

19. EU Strategy Against the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), adopted by the European Council in December 2003, see http://ec.europa.eu/external_relations/us/sum06_04/fact/wmd.pdf.

20. The 2002 G8 Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction committed G8 states to raising up to $20 billion over ten years for cooperation projects to address non- proliferation, disarmament, counter- terrorism and nuclear safety issues. The initiative also included a commitment to a set of six principles designed to prevent terrorists from gaining access to weapons or materials of mass destruction. See http://www.state.gov/e/rls/rm/2002/12190.htm.

21. See ‘Remarks by the President on Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation’, speech delivered by George W. Bush to the National Defense University, 11 February 2004, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/02/20040211-4.html.

22. ‘Concept for a Multilateral Mechanism for Reliable Access to Nuclear Fuel’. Mentions can be found at http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Statements/2006/ebsp2006n009.html and http://www.state.gov/t/isn/rls/rm/85176.htm.

23. Pierre Goldschmidt, ‘Priority Steps to Strengthen the Nonproliferation Regime’, Policy Outlook, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, no. 33, February 2007, http://www.carnegieendowment.org/files/goldschmidt_priority_steps_final.pdf.

24. Ibid.