Glyn Morgan at the Chron

Bi is pretty much right. Europe has decided through its inaction to take a passive stance whereby terrorists are free to train and arm overseas with impunity in the hopes that they can always be stopped at the border. That is why the international commitment to Afghanistan is less than 10,000 troops even though every European country paid lip service to the idea that Afghanistan was the obvious case in the war on terror. This of course won’t work (see for example Spain) but that is the current approach.

It would be nice to have another military superpower, though, otherwise when a bunch of deranged messianic megalomaniacs manage to take over the solo superpower there’s nothing to stop these bastards. Europe would be nice, but it seems that we might soon get something else instead – Sino-Russian axis:

The joint statement says that countries must be allowed to decide autonomously on their internal affairs while international issues should be solved through dialogue and consultations on the basis of multilateralism.

The international community should completely renounce the mentality of confrontation and alliance; there should be no pursuit of monopoly or domination of world affairs; and countries of the world should not be divided into a leading camp and a subordinate camp, said the joint statement.

Every country must be assured of the right to choose its own path of development that fits its national realities, the right toparticipate in international affairs as an equal, and the right todevelopment on an equal footing, it says.

Differences and disputes must be solved through peaceful means rather than through unilateralism or coercion. There should be no use or threatened use of force, says the joint statement.

Only on the basis of universally recognized tenents and norms of international law, and under an impartial and rational world order, can problems facing mankind be solved, says the document.

All countries should strictly observe the principles of mutual respect for each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual non-aggression, non-interference in each other’s internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence, it says.

Amen, brother Hu.

Sebastian claims that the small troop deployment from Europe to Afghanistan shows that they don’t take terrorism there seriously. Well maybe. On the other hand, as “a White House official said last October”:http://www.whitehouse.gov/ask/20041015.html

bq. America has 16,000 troops on the ground in Afghanistan and our allies have nearly 12,000 troops there. They are doing an excellent job in difficult terrain. President Bush, his advisors, and the Coalition partners will make decisions on whether there need to be increases or decreases in the number of troops.

It’s not like there’s an order of magnitude difference between American commitment to Afghanistan and European, and it certainly doesn’t sound like Bush is asking for more troops there. (In Iraq on the other hand…)

I bet many European countries have a higher proportion of their population in Afghanistan than America does, and a *much* higher proportion of their military forces. It’s really very hard to use that as an example to show that America takes international terrorism seriously and Europe doesn’t. If America had stayed to secure Afghanistan before moving on to other adventures, I might be inclined to take this argument a little more seriously.

Short answers to John Quiggan:

(i) Re: his point: “the EU doesn’t want to be like the US.” That’s certainly true at the moment. But then Europeans must be willing to pay the price of remaining dependent for their security on the US, a situation many Europeans currently find intolerable.

(ii) Re his point: “a tight Franco-German military alliance as the desired counterweight to the US.” That wouldn’t work, because it would result in other European states balancing againt the Franco-Germans. A disaster.

Europeans are dependent on the US for their internal security?

“If (touch wood! touch wood!) it’s the US that launches a large-scale invasion on Europe, now that’ll be a good reason to 100% unify…”

Posted by bi

Except what will matter then is nukes, pure and simple. Several hundred missiles, with the ability to absorb a US first strike and deliver an annihilating return blow.

Assuming, of course, that the USA doesn’t deploy a working missile defence system, which seems to be a good be for the next decade.

Kevin Donoghue: You are right. It would be tremendously silly to embark on a project of European political integration merely to ward off, as you put it, “a few crazies” flying in from the far side of the earth. But that’s not my argument. Rather my argument is a more general one about security and dependence. At the moment, Europe remains dependent for much of its external security on the United States. I imagined (in the concluding chapter) how Europe would fare if the US were to become isolationist. I then imagined a variety of scenarios where Europe in either its present intergovernmental set up or in a post-sovereign multi-level set-up–the aspiration of many Euroenthusiasts–would face insuperable problems.

Obviously, I’ll have to read the book, or maybe rely on Henry’s judgement when he reads it.

But I’d be interested to see it spelt out what threat the US defends Europe against. Clearly not nuclear attack (no defence feasible and European nuclear powers can retaliate) or conventional attack (most major European countries are individually stronger than Russia or any other potential attacker now).

So I’m inferring that what is really meant is that Europe relies on the US for long-distance force projection as in Afghanistan. There’s something to this but only in a limited range. European powers can do this kind of thing on a small scale, and Iraq shows that the US capacity is bounded at quite a low level. The EU is currently planning a modest expansion of this capacity, which will probably, like most EU things, develop slowly but arrive in the end.

So, like other commentators, I don’t buy the claim that Europe depends on the US for defence. Without this, and assuming zero probability of actual military conflict between Europe and the US I don’t see where the need for a unitary state comes from.

Maybe Glyn Morgan can tell me if I’m on the wrong track here

So, I thought that the thing that all the cool kids in the blogosphere were saying that a volunteer military check on imperial misadventure, because not that many people are willing to sign up to die in pointless foreign wars. It seems to me that you get a similar, more powerful, institutional check on the EU’s ability to start wars because you’ve got to coordinate 25 of them (well, 3 of them).

Now, if you believe that American foreign policy is over-inclined to use military force, then why would you want to make the EU more capable of making the same kinds of mistakes the US is? A post-sovereign multilevel fudge that serves as a glorified free trade and immigration zone seems like a better thing than a big state.

The history of the past few decades (and I suspect the history of the next few as well) shows that massive projection of force overseas does more to create terrorism than to stop it. Good police work can stop it, Europe needs to integrate that cross-nationally but I suspect in many ways they already have.

What military threat will Europe face in the forseeable future that some combination of France, Germany, and Britain working together can’t easily handle?

And what percentage of Sebastian’s comments (like the first one in this thread) are clearly silly and open to immediate disproof?

I don’t think Holsclaw’s comment (nr 21) is silly at all. It’s spot on. I agree with Quiggin that scale is more important than range wrt to defensive issues (as opposed to global-scale hegemonic aspirations), but the ERRF is at the moment largely unproven vapourware.

There’s a large gap between US policy re independent EU military policy, which has been to thwart it at every available opportunity, and US rhetoric on the same, especially the red meat thrown at the local conservative audiences, which is the exact opposite. Unless this gap is resolved one way or the other, or else explicitly acknowledged in EU defence policy, the ERRF will essentially be NATO-lite, and remain just as ineffective.

Belgium, indeed. And need I mention Ireland, whose population is divided among speakers of English, Gaeilge and Cavan?

—
It would be nice to have another military superpower, though, otherwise when a bunch of deranged messianic megalomaniacs manage to take over the solo superpower there’s nothing to stop these bastards.
—

It only takes one bunch of deranged messianic megalomaniacs in charge of a superpower to make the world an arbitrarily bad place.

Two superpowers, twice the chance of there being one or more DMMs. If the DMM has a 50% chance of beating the other superpower, there’s no net gain in expected number of people not ruled by a DMM, but still increased likelihood of war.

And that’s ignoring the possibility of a WWI-style war between two non-DMM superpowers.

soru

…and Iraq shows that the US capacity is bounded at quite a low level.

Not to quibble, but Iraq proves quite the contrary. If the US had decided to leave Iraq after the first month of the war, Iraq would not have been a threat to anyone, the Iraqi military would not have been able to put down a US armed Kurdish rebellion, and the US would have required few assets to make sure Iraq stayed in chaos. The only thing tying down the US in Iraq is humanitarian causes, the military’s main job in Iraq was mostly finished in two weeks, proving the contrary to your statement.

Jet, this gets back to the earlier question – what was the justification for the Iraq invasion? What goal was the US army trying to achieve, such that it could have withdrawn after a month and been successful?

Goal 1: Remove the threat of Saddam using WMDs?
My granny could have done that as well as the US army, and she’s dead.
Goal 2: Remove the possibility of Iraq supplying WMDs to terrorists?
Ok, assume that there were WMDs in Iraq. Unless the one-month occupancy managed to destroy all the WMDs, a civil war makes it more likely, not less, that any WMDs will fall into the hands of terrorists.
Goal 3: Remove an odious regime?
Would a one-month campaign have been successful, given that Saddam wasn’t found for six months? Even if it was, how much of an improvement would the succeeding regime have been?
Goal 4: Create a democratic beacon of light and hope, rescuing the poor Iraqis?
Not noticeably successful after 2 years, let alone 1 month.

The US and UK govts publically stated that their goal was not just to get Saddam out of power, but that’s the only job that the army could have done in one month.

Did I miss the bit where a combined military capability necessarily implies a “Superstate”? Or does this “Superstate” malarkey begin and end as an International Relations pipedream?

(Which is not necessarily sillier than the old pipedream of a Federal European state predicated on the hegemony of French bureaucrats, I suppose. My own plan of reunifying the Holy Roman Empire under my own leadership doesn’t seem so silly anymore, by comparison. Although admittedly I have yet to be invited to do a colloquy at the “Chron”, whatever that is.)