Research, ideas, and leadership for a more secure, peaceful world
Related
Nicholas Burns
By MATTHEW KARNITSCHNIG
MUNICH — For decades, the Munich Security Conference served as a powerful symbol of the strength of the Western alliance. The 2020 installment offered a testament to its accelerating decline.
If the three-day event, which drew to a close on Sunday, illustrated anything, it was that the divergence between the U.S. and the dominant European powers — Germany and France (the U.K. was MIA) — is greater than ever. Those who thought last year’s tense gathering represented a low point in the relationship left Munich this year chastened.
The two sides aren’t just far apart on the big questions facing the West (threats from Russia, Iran, China), they’re in parallel universes.
Most alarming: The biggest disconnect concerns the U.S. commitment to Europe, the very essence of the transatlantic alliance itself.
In speech after speech, whether in public or private, European leaders lamented what they perceive as the U.S.’s disengagement from both the region and the world at large.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier opened the conference — one of the largest annual gatherings of political leaders, military chiefs and top diplomats from around the world — by accusing the Trump administration of “rejecting the idea of the international community.”
“Every country should fend for itself and put its own interests over all others … 'Great again' — even at the expense of neighbors and partners,” Steinmeier said, offering a précis of how he views U.S. foreign policy.
French President Emmanuel Macron, speaking at the forum for the first time, echoed Steinmeier the next day, noting that “what Europe wants is not quite the same as the U.S.”
U.S. officials were dumbfounded.
“I'm here to tell you the facts,” an agitated U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the assembly on Saturday after quoting Steinmeier and similar comments other Western leaders have made in the recent past. “Those statements do not reflect reality.”
Pompeo, who served as an Army soldier protecting West Germany in the 1980s, offered a detailed rebuttal, noting the U.S. was devoting more resources to defend Europe, both in terms of personnel and money, than at any time since the end of the Cold War. He reminded the audience that he had been to Germany three times in the past four months alone.
“Is this an America that rejects responsibility?” he asked. “Let’s be straight up: The U.S. is out there fighting for sovereignty and our friends.”
Aside from representatives from Poland and the Baltics, who consider the U.S. the guarantor of their sovereignty, few of the Europeans in the room seemed open to being convinced. After the speech, a consensus formed among the Germans and French that Pompeo’s audience wasn’t the Europeans in the room, but Donald Trump. Pompeo’s insistence that the “West is winning, we’re collectively winning,” was registered by many attendees as “the U.S. is winning.”
The reaction to Pompeo reflects the toll Trump’s aggressive, often abusive, rhetoric toward European allies has taken on the relationship. Even when confronted with facts that disprove the narrative of American disengagement, European officials simply don’t believe it. In private, U.S. representatives tell their European counterparts to “ignore the tweets,” but that’s proved to be a tall order.
Confronted with that disconnect between how they see the U.S. role and how the Europeans see it, many in the American delegation, which included one of the largest Congressional contingents in the conference’s history, were nonplussed.
Republicans were particularly offended by the title the organizers gave the event — “Westlessness” — which they viewed as a taunt intended to reinforce the suggestion that the U.S. has abandoned its traditional role.
“I was a little taken aback by the tone,” said Mike Turner, a Republican congressman from Ohio and a member of the House armed services committee. Turner, who has been attending the conference for a decade, said he was surprised the U.S. should have to defend its commitment to Europe in Munich even as it was spending billions more to do just that.
Europeans "should focus on what we're doing here," he said.
Turner said he was particularly frustrated by Germany, which despite repeated prodding by Trump and other American officials remains far from fulfilling its pledge to increase defense spending to 2 percent of its GDP. Berlin has said it won’t meet that target until 2031.
“John F. Kennedy made a commitment to go to the moon in half the time,” Turner quipped.
Even avowed American critics of Trump in Munich were dismayed by some of the signals coming from Europe’s leaders on other fronts.
Nicholas Burns, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO and longtime diplomat who is now a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, said he was concerned by Macron’s overtures toward Russia. Onstage, the French president repeated his call for Europe to pursue a rapprochement with Moscow.
Burns lamented a lack of strong condemnation of Russian bombing of the Syrian province of Idlib. Macron mentioned that crisis only briefly, saying Paris disagrees with Moscow on "what is happening in Idlib, which is unacceptable."
Burns described the bombings as "barbaric" and noted that "they have produced 800,000 refugees, the greatest number in the Syrian civil war.”
“There’s almost a silence here in Europe about that and that’s tragic,” he said.
In fact, neither Macron, who received an enthusiastic response from the Munich audience, nor Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who also spoke, faced any tough questions on Syria.
The other major issue that divided Munich was China. Neither Pompeo nor U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who also spoke, left any doubt that Washington considers China to be a nefarious force in the world. That’s a view not shared by many countries in the EU.
The recent focus has been on whether the West should risk installing next-generation telecommunications hardware from China’s Huawei, a step the U.S. argues would expose countries to espionage and sabotage. But the underlying question of what posture the Western alliance should take toward China is a more fundamental one with far-reaching consequences. While there’s a bipartisan consensus in Washington that China represents a significant long-term threat — a view articulated in Munich by both Esper and Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives — Europe is deeply worried about the consequences that spurning Beijing would have on trade.
“You need to figure out when you need to cooperate with [China] and when do you need to compete,” said Burns. “The Europeans have not succeeded in any way shape or form in forming such a strategy.”
Sounds a lot like Europe’s relationship with the world’s other great power.
