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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Ben Rhode for invaluable research assistance for this article.
Notes
1 Richard Perle, ‘Don't Let Germany Run the Alliance’, Washington Post , 28 May 1989, p. B1; Willy Brandt letter to President Kennedy, cited in Alfred Grosser, The Western Alliance: European-American Relations Since 1945 (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), p. 196.
2 Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), pp. 413–15.
3 For an extended account, see Dana H. Allin, Cold War Illusions: America, Europe and Soviet Power, 1969–1989 (New York: St Martin's, 1988).
4 Yet even this anger carried an implicit assumption, which came to be articulated more or less explicitly by French left-wing intellectuals and German Greens, that American military power was still needed to confront genocide in the middle of Europe. For a general survey, see Dana H. Allin, NATO?s Balkan Interventions , Adelphi Paper 347 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the IISS, 2002). On the evolution of attitudes on the German and French left, see Paul Berman, Power and Idealists, or, The Passion of Joschka Fischer and its Aftermath (Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2005).
5 Walter Russell Mead, ‘The Case Against Europe’, The Atlantic Monthly , April 2002, p. 26.
6 NATO commander Wesley Clark was also frustrated, but gleaned very different lessons, recognising as he did the immense importance of alliance legitimacy: ‘in the end, the strategic adaptation was all the more powerful because it represented a unified Alliance, not a single nation … We paid a price in operational effectiveness … but the price brought significant strategic benefits that future political and military leaders must recognize.’ Wesley K. Clark, Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Future of Combat (Oxford: Perseus, 2001), p. 426.
7 ‘Secretary Rumsfeld Speaks on “21st Century Transformation” of U.S. Armed Forces’, 31 January 2002, http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/2002/s20020131-secdef.html.
8 See William Kristol and Robert Kagan, ‘The UN Trap? What Does the Iraq Resolution Really Mean?’, Weekly Standard , vol. 8, no.10, 18 November 2002. Donald Rumsfeld justified the use of pre-emptive force by arguing that the ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence of weapons of mass destruction’. See G. John Ikenberry, ‘America's Imperial Ambition’, Foreign Affairs , September/October 2002, p. 51
9 Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (London: Allen Lane, 2006), p. 99.
10 François Heisbourg, ‘American Hegemony? Perceptions of the US Abroad’, Survival , vol. 41, no. 4, Winter 1999–2000, pp. 5–19.
11 Robert Kagan, ‘Power and Weakness’, Policy Review, no. 113, June–July 2002.
12 Author interview with Joschka Fischer, Bonn, February 1996. See also Berman, Power and Idealists.
13 Among other things, this gave impetus to broad European support for the Anglo-French St Malo initiative for an autonomous European defence capability. See J. Howorth, ‘Britain, France and the European Defence Initiative’, Survival , vol. 42, no. 2, Summer 2000, pp. 33–56, and C. Kupchan, ‘In Defence of European Defence: An American Perspective’, Survival, vol. 42, no. 2, Summer 2000, pp. 16–32.
14 Francis Fukuyama, ‘Invasion of the Isolationists’, New York Times , 31 August 2005.
15 More than three years after the Iraq war, only 37% of Germans held a favourable opinion of the United States, compared to 78% of those surveyed in 2000. The corresponding figures for France were from 62% down to 39%; for Spain, 50% to 23%; for the UK, 83% to 56%; and for Turkey, 52% to 12%. ‘America's Image Slips, But Allies Share U.S. Concerns Over Iran, Hamas’, Pew Global Attitudes Project, June 2006, http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=252.
16 The Independent Panel to Review Department of Defense Detention Operations: Final Report of the Independent Panel to Review DoD Detention Operations (‘Schlesinger Report’) (Arlington, VA, August 2004).
17 See Jeremy Shapiro and Daniel Byman, ‘Bridging the Transatlantic Counterterrorism Gap’, Washington Quarterly , vol. 29, no. 4, Autumn 2006, pp. 33–50.
18 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group 1 draft report of February 2007 argues that climate change is now unequivocal, and that it is highly likely that this change is anthropogenic: see http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf. The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change (October 2006) claims that climate change could ‘create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the 20th century’, http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/8A8/C1/Summary_of_Conclusions.pdf.
19 The Stern Review disputes this argument, instead positing that immediate investment could reduce the eventual costs of climate change to around 1% of global GDP per annum, as opposed to losing 5–20% of annual GDP in perpetuity if no action is taken. Stern Review, p.vi
20 Fareed Zakaria, ‘Hope Amid the Ruins’, Newsweek , 10 January 2005.
21 Of the four suicide bombers in the London attacks of July 2005, three were second-generation British citizens. One of them had worked as a learning mentor, and another was academically successful and played for a local cricket team. Only one of the four could be said to have come from a deprived background. See Report of the Official Account of the Bombings in London on 7th July 2005 , pp.13–18, http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/documents/7-july-report.pdf. On the general link between democracy and terrorism, see F. Gregory Gause III, ‘Can Democracy Stop Terrorism?’, Foreign Affairs , vol. 84, no. 5, September–October 2005.
22 Kishore Mahbubani, ‘The Impending Demise of the Postwar System’, Survival , vol. 47, no. 4, Winter 2005–06, p. 17.
23 ‘By the time of the Iraq war … the idea that non-Americans would react favourably or at least acquiesce in an American assertion of benevolent hegemony was more a hope than a fact … The violently negative feelings that emerged after the war had their roots in developments that preceded the Bush administration, signs of which could and should have been picked up in the years preceding.’ Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), p.103
24 David P. Calleo has made similar arguments, most extensively in a soon-to-be-published book manuscript. G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
25 Mark Danner, ‘What Are You Going to Do with That?’, New York Review of Books , vol. 52, no.11, 23 June 2005
26 Al-Qaeda spokesman Sulaiman Abu Ghaith once argued that al-Qaeda has the right to kill four million Americans, ‘including one million children, displace double that figure, and injure and cripple hundreds of thousands’. See Graham Allison, ‘Not If, but When: Imagining a Nuclear 9/11’, In the National Interest , vol. 1, no. 7, 23 October 2002.
27 Charles Krauthammer, ‘The Curse of Legalism’, The New Republic , 6 November 1989
28 In an interview in March 2003, Jacques Chirac said that ‘it is indeed thanks to the pressure of British and American troops that the Iraqi authorities and Saddam Hussein himself have changed, have shifted their position and have had to agree to cooperate with the inspectors’. ‘Chirac: A Lot of Progress has been Achieved’, CNN.com, 16 March 2003, http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/03/16/sprj.irq.amanpour.chirac/index.html.
29 See ‘Remarks by President Bush and Senator Kerry in the Third 2004 Presidential Debate’, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/10/20041014-1.html.
30 For example, the EU at the latest NPT conference was a united group of 25 countries, with candidate members also following its line. A series of formal papers tabled by the EU included new rules on restricting access to fuel-cycle technology, plus the famous French non-paper on tough treatment of countries that withdraw from the NPT, which was put forward as an EU proposal. The EU now sees itself as the only bloc of countries that are true and consistent advocates for the treaty, including such concessions to the disarmament agenda as the ‘13 steps’. The United States, by contrast, is no longer willing to accept the 13 Steps, is more likely to differentiate between ‘rogue proliferators’ and the more acceptable kind, and at least flirts with the argument that the NPT and other multilateral regimes are flimsy Maginot Lines. The public in France, Germany and the UK all strongly oppose Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons: Germany 97%, France 92%, UK 89%. See ‘America's Image Slips, But Allies Share U.S. Concerns Over Iran, Hamas’, Pew Global Attitudes Project, June 2006, http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=252. In another area, an overwhelming majority of Europeans agree that humans are contributing to climate change, and would be prepared to accept changes to their lifestyles in order to mitigate global warming. See Ed Crooks, ‘Europeans “would accept climate change curbs”’, Financial Times , 19 November 2006.