The alliance in an Atlantic mirror

I went to Carnegie Hall last night for a panel discussion on US-German relations held as part of the current Berlin in Lights festival underway in New York City. Moderated by Richard Holbrooke, the discussion featured Henry Kissinger, Josef Joffe, John Kornblum (a former US ambassador to Germany), and Karl-Theodor Freiherr zu Guttenberg, a member of the Bundestag from the Christian Social Union (CSU).

In light of recent difficulties in the US-Japan relationship, I was fascinated, if not surprised, by how easy it would be to subsitute "Japan" for "Germany" in the discussion without skipping a beat. Indeed, Japan was mentioned one way or another by every speaker, including Dr. Kissinger, who as readers of Kenneth Pyle's Japan Rising will know has not exactly been appreciative of Japan. In fact, Dr. Kissinger made a point of saying that Japan is a country to watch, as he thinks it is quietly and slowly making itself a substantial player in international security. If by slow he means glacial, perhaps, but Japan's "normalization" is far from linear and is only impressive when compared to what Japan once was, not when it is compared with other countries.

Nevertheless, the discussion had a pessimistic edge to it, and all of the speakers made clear that the reasons for doubt about the relationship are structural and have little to do with George W. Bush. The problem is interests. Just as in the US-Japan relationship, there is a growing gap in how each country perceives its national interests. At the heart of the problem are the differences between global and regional powers. As a global power the US increasingly views the world holistically; few problems are too distant for the US, and thanks to the reach of its military, the US government is capable of considering action (military or otherwise) in response to a range of situations around the world. Germany (and Japan), on the other hand, are firmly rooted in their regions and near abroads. Their publics have a hard time understanding why campaigns in benighted corners of the world have anything to do with them. Indeed, as Karl-Theodor Freiherr zu Guttenberg argued, Germans have a hard time thinking in terms of national interests. (I would say the same thing about the Japanese people and their representatives in the Diet.) But even if they were better able to articulate their interests, the gap with the US would remain.

The US, as Dr. Kissinger argued, will have to change the way it interacts with its allies as a result. It will have to stop issuing orders to allies and start presenting them with problems in the hope of finding solutions. It will actually have to seek out the opinions of its allies, even if those opinions are different from Washington's. Because that is the other side of the "coalitions of the willing" coin. Just as the US is free to choose its partners for campaigns, so its allies are free to say no to the US (without Washington's throwing a tantrum).

The future of America's alliances it seems is one of standing organizations that facilitate cooperation between militaries, intelligence agencies, and other security organizations, but lack the political cooperation they had in the face of the Soviet threat. They will have some value as vehicles for defining international agendas, dealing with terrorism and other nonstate actors, and providing basic security in the form of nuclear deterrence, but it would be a mistake to expect (as the Bush administration seems to do) that they will continue to serve as vehicles for waging protracted wars in distant lands.

The shape of criticism to come?

US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, due to visit Japan in early November, criticized NATO members for failing to meet their Afghanistan obligations in advance of a NATO ministerial this week.

Secretary Gates said, "I am not satisfied that an alliance whose members have over 2 million soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen cannot find the modest additional resources that have been committed for Afghanistan."

If he's disappointed in NATO allies, just imagine what he'll say when he visits Japan, where — not surprisingly — in the first day of deliberations on the new bill authorizing the MSDF refueling mission in support of operations in Afghanistan more than half the questions concerned the unrelated Moriya scandal and the supposed cover-up of an error by a Defense Ministry (then Agency) official that misreported the amount of fuel provided to the US Navy.

Whatever his disappointment, however, I hope that he'll hold off from criticizing Japan (and the DPJ) publicly, unlike Ambassador Schieffer. US goading is part of the problem, not part of the solution, because it has made Japanese politicians and officials accustomed to framing security policies in the context of "what do we need to do to make Washington happy," not "what role should we play in the world." If the Japanese government would rather under-commit and thus free ride for as long as the ride's working, no amount of bullying and blustering by US officials will make it changes its mind, because Tokyo has learned to play the game of contributing just enough to placate Washington.

The only way to break the cycle will be the force Japan to be free, to force it to bear the bulk of the burden of its own defense and thus begin thinking seriously about what its national interests are and what capabilities it needs to secure those interests.

Recommended book: The End of Alliances, Rajan Menon

If there is one affliction that is all too common in all places and times, it is "presentism." People latch on to reality as they know, and refuse to even conceive that another way of doing things might just be possible and even likely. Inertia governs humanity.

Rajan Menon's The End of Alliances (OUP, 2007) attempts to reimagine American foreign policy by suggesting that the postwar alliances between the US and Japan, Korea, and the countries of NATO will break down sooner or later — and that the end of alliances is a good thing.

He is quick to preempt two arguments that critics would fling in his direction immediately. First, the end of alliances does not mean the beginning of antagonistic relationships with former allies. He is talking about breaking down alliances in a strictly formal sense: the military ties, grounded in treaties and entailing forward-deployed US troops and joint commands. Moving beyond formal alliance cooperation does not preclude close and cordial relations, and in the case of Japan, it is not hard to see that the end of a formal military relationship could in fact make for healthier US-Japan relations.

Second, Menon takes care to note that parting ways with allies does not mean the US would necessarily become isolationist. Instead, he characterizes the change as being consistent with the record of paradigm shifts in the grand strategies of the great powers. Great powers respond to changing international conditions, or they cease to be great powers (or states altogether). The US, throughout its history, has had the luxury of a certain degree of insulation from international change and thus its grand-strategic paradigm has changed more infrequently than others, but when the international distribution of power shifts nothing is sacred, and the US has reconfigured its domestic institutions as well as its foreign policies (as it did from 1945 to 1950).

Japan, of course, is no stranger to paradigm shifts of its own: this is the essence of Kenneth Pyle's Japan Rising, which despite the title actually looks at how Japan has changed strategies in response to systemic change. Accordingly, I actually think the Japanese are better prepared to countenance life after the alliance. Even Japanese politicians and thinkers supportive of the alliance recognize that it is useful only as long as it serves Japanese national interests. That seems to be a common thread in each of the sections in Menon's book. Elites and publics in American allies are increasingly capable of seeing that an alliance with the US might in fact not serve their interests. The Bush administration in particular has sparked fears that being close to a US intent on transforming the Middle East could have serious consequences at home (the Spanish argument).

Meanwhile, there are limits to how far the allies are willing to transform their alliances with the US, despite the best efforts of governments since the end of the cold war. NATO's commitment in Afghanistan has been disappointing at best; Japan, for all the hyperbole lavished on its recent policy changes, still is a ways away from cooperating with the US at the same level as NATO; and the US-ROK alliance seems to be ahead of the others in approaching its demise, with US troops being withdrawn, command reverting to South Korea, and Seoul pursuing an independent course with Pyongyang. In some way, each US ally is going to hedge against US entrapment, whether by underspending on defense, pursuing close ties with third countries independent of the US, or publicly disagreeing with Washington. The question is how the US will respond, because in the past the US has given considerable latitude to its allies — the US-Japan alliance would not have lasted if that hadn't been the case. Menon argues that conditions are such that the US will no longer be so tolerant of dissension from its allies, regardless of which party is in power in Washington. With growing commitments around the world, the US will increasingly expect its allies to share the burden in some form.

The problem is that inertia remains a powerful force, and that even if alliances appear increasingly obsolete, policymakers will be unwilling or unable to take the steps necessary to dissolve them. For all the facts and logic Menon musters to support his argument, he still must contend with the desire to leave things unchanged and muddle through, or to take the Lampedusan road and change so that things stay the same. Depending on the results of Korea's forthcoming election, Korea too may end up on the same path, allied to the US, but increasingly in name only. In other words, rather than the end of alliances, we may see the hollowing out of alliances — but as Menon shows, that need not be a cause for alarm.

Cyber war against Estonia?

This New York Times story, "Estonia Computers Blitzed, Possibly by the Russians," strikes me as pregnant with implications that reach far beyond the Russo-Estonian dispute over the removal of a Soviet monument commemorating the "Great Patriotic War."

The Times reports that Estonian officials have blamed Russia for a series of attacks on its government websites, although the Russian government has denied involvement.

I found this statement striking, however: "'If you have a missile attack against, let’s say, an airport, it is an act of war,' a spokesman for the Estonian Defense Ministry, Madis Mikko, said Friday in a telephone interview. 'If the same result is caused by computers, then how else do you describe that kind of attack?'"

What is the value of an alliance like NATO, designed to protect the people and physical infrastructure of an alliance member from attack, in an age when threats may increasingly be of the sort described in this story, attacks on the virtual infrastructure that are increasingly the source of prosperity for countries like Estonia?

If NATO — and other standing alliances among democracies, like the US-Japan alliance — are incapable of deterring new, unconventional threats that target a country's vehicles of wealth creation in ways short of what is recognized as war, can those alliances survive without substantial change?

While the details of the campaign against Estonia have yet to be elucidated, this incident strikes me as a harbinger of something with which all developed countries will have to contend: as the risks of interstate conventional warfare diminish, states will have to contend with new ways for states to flex their muscles in disputes with other states. Are existing alliances and international organizations up to the task?