As timing would have it, just months after the St. Malo declaration was signed, NATO began a three-month air-bombing campaign over Kosovo. As in the earlier military engagement in Bosnia, European forces proved to be inept, having to rely on American air power and command to win the day. Anxious to finally come to terms with the security deficit, the EU convened a summit in June 1999 in Cologne, Germany. At the meeting, it was decided to establish a European Security and Defense Policy (ESDP), whose mission would be to field military actions for humanitarian and rescue tasks, peacekeeping, and crisis management.
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The three mission objectives were called the Petersberg Tasks, named after a hotel in Bonn where Europeans had first laid them out back in 1992.
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The summit participants also agreed to establish a political and security committee to coordinate EU foreign and security policy, an EU military committee made up of national chiefs of staff of the member countries, and an EU military staff to help manage the deliberations and execute the decisions of the other two committees. In a follow-up summit in Helsinki in December 1999, the EU put teeth into its plan by agreeing to field a fully operational rapid-reaction force of sixty thousand soldiers capable of carrying out the three mission objectives by 2003.
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The Helsinki Agreement reiterated and formalized the earlier intentions set forth by the U.K. and France in St. Malo. It called for “the Union to have an autonomous capacity to take decisions, and where NATO as a whole is not engaged, to launch and then conduct EU-led military operations in response to international crises.”
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To reassure the United States, the signatories emphasized that “NATO remains the foundation of the collective defense of its members and will continue to have an important role in crisis management. . . . Further steps will be taken to ensure full mutual consultation, cooperation and transparency between the European Union and NATO.”
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The U.S. saw the EU initiative as a deliberate provocation designed to undermine the North Atlantic alliance and was particularly critical of the use of the term “autonomous” in referring to the new European rapid reaction force. U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen complained that if the EU were to create an independent defense structure outside the alliance’s control, NATO would become “a relic of the past.”
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U.S. senators Jesse Helms and Gordon Smith were less measured in their reaction. They cautioned European leaders to “reflect carefully on the true motivation behind ESDP, which many see as a means for Europe to check American power.”
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Then they took off the gloves and made a stern warning: “It is neither in Europe’s nor America’s interests to undermine our proven national relationship in favour of one with a European superstate whose creation is being driven, in part, by anti-American sentiment.”
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In November 2000, then secretary of state Madeline Albright voiced the official policy of the Clinton Administration on the matter, with the issuing of what were called the “3Ds.” The ESDP must not result in the
decoupling
of European defense from NATO; the new military organization must not
duplicate
NATO’s capabilities; and the European rapid reaction force must not
discriminate
against NATO member countries that do not belong to the EU.
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The reality is that for the American government, any European military operation is acceptable only on the condition that it be part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Then undersecretary of state Stuart Eizenstein made the U.S. position crystal clear to its European allies. He told them that the U.S. would “continue to celebrate the dream of a continent united through the European Union, but we must also hold before us another essential vision—that of the transatlantic partnership.”
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It’s important to note that these statements are coming out of a White House presided over by a liberal Democratic president. I say this because some critics of the Bush Administration hope that a regime change in the White House might invite a rethinking of America’s long-standing security policy vis-à-vis Europe and the world. They are mistaken. Even if a liberal Democrat were to become president again, it is unlikely that America would diverge much from its stated position of exercising hegemony in its foreign policy, which includes maintaining ultimate control over European security interests.
Despite vigorous U.S. objections, the European Union has forged ahead with its plans for a rapid-reaction force, but always with the caveat that NATO would remain the primary security organization for Europe. The sixty thousand troops are organized into five brigades of infantry, armor, and artillery, as well as combat engineers, with full command, control, and intelligence capabilities. When fully operational, the troops will be supported by fifteen warships and five hundred military aircraft. The EU member states have also agreed to purchase two hundred Airbus jet aircraft to be used as military transports.
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The rapid-reaction force is supposed to be capable of maintaining an expeditionary force in the field for at least a year. To accomplish this, 200,000 troops will have to be put on European command for standby to replace units in the field.
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With American troops stationed in Europe continuing to decline, from 335,000 in the late 1980s to less than 100,000 in 2000, Europeans are convinced that the defense of Europe and its immediate surroundings will increasingly fall to the EU in the coming century, regardless of what the U.S. says publicly about its continued commitment to defend Europe through the North Atlantic alliance.
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The idea of an EU armed forces enjoys widespread public support. Forty-two percent of EU citizens believe that European defense policy should be the responsibility of the EU, while only 24 percent believe the responsibility should be left to national governments, and a mere 20 percent believe that NATO should be in charge of European defense.
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On March 31, 2003, the EU launched its first military mission, committing peacekeeping troops to ethnic-torn Macedonia. The 400-member force replaced the NATO-led force that had been stationed in that Balkan nation since 2001.
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Just two months later, in June 2003, the EU committed its first troops outside Europe, dispatching 1,400 soldiers to the Congo, where tribal conflicts had led to more than 500 deaths.
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While there is likely to be continued wrangling between the U.S. and the EU over the prospects for a European armed forces, at least for the foreseeable future the reality is that the NATO alliance, which proved to be so important in protecting the vital security interests of the West during the forty years of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, is increasingly a military organization in search of a mission. Its relevance is difficult to fathom. The idea that a united Europe will continue to have to be dependent on NATO, and ultimately subject its security interests to U.S. conditions and permissions, is simply untenable. Europe, of course, will have to pay a price for its desire for military independence. It’s going to have to be willing to provide the necessary funds to secure its own defense. Many Americans welcome that prospect. Then again, if Europeans are going to pay their way, they ought to have their say. I suspect just as many of my countrymen are less sanguine about Europe making its own military decisions, independent of the long arm of American foreign policy interests.
We’re going to have to get used to the idea that the European Union has its own global agenda and its own dream about the kind of world it would like to fashion—that dream won’t always coincide with our own. Indeed, in many respects the European Dream is so utterly different from our own that the two superpowers are likely to find themselves, at times, at odds on the world stage, as we journey deeper into the century.
15
A Second Enlightenment
S
IR MARTIN REES is one of the world’s distinguished astronomers. The famed Cambridge University professor caused a brief ripple in scientific circles in 2003 with the publication of his book
Our Final Hour.
Rees warned that a new genre of high-risk scientific experiments and pursuits threatened the very existence of life on Earth and even the existence of the universe itself. He said he thought that “the odds are no better than fifty-fifty that our present civilization on Earth will survive to the end of the present century.”
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Ordinarily, such bombastic claims would be ignored altogether or dismissed as the ravings of a fool, but in this instance, the warnings earned a hearing in the media and became the subject of some controversy within the scientific community because of the impressive credentials of the messenger.
Questioning Unbridled Scientific Inquiry
Rees is an authority on black holes, and his theories on the origin and evolution of the universe are considered by many of his peers to be, if not the last word, at least the best word on the why and how of existence itself. So when Rees suggested that some current and proposed new avenues of scientific pursuit perhaps ought not to be entertained because of the great potential risk they pose to existence, his words blew through the scientific community like an ill wind, threatening the very canons of science. After all, the notion of unfettered scientific inquiry is the very foundation of modern science. Enlightenment science is based on the idea of relentless pursuit of nature’s secrets. To attempt to limit that pursuit or put constraints on avenues of inquiry is regarded by many in the scientific community as tantamount to squelching the scientific spirit itself. “Man’s” very nature is inquisitive, argued the architects of the Enlightenment. We are a Promethean creature in constant search of understanding the grand scheme of things so that we can amass power over the forces of nature and command our own destiny. The idea of progress, so fundamental to the thinking of the modern world, is rendered moot if human beings were to accept self-imposed limits on what the mind could explore. Moreover, the entertainment of doubt about our ability to use reason to control and direct the forces of nature and our own future would put an end to the cherished utopian dream of the perfectibility of life on Earth. For all these reasons, the scientific community has, from the very outset of the Enlightenment, argued that virtually all human inquiry is worthy of pursuit.
Rees well understood the implications of his statement. Still, he asked, do we have obligations that now transcend the Enlightenment catechism? Is freedom of inquiry, experimentation, and technological application sacrosanct, even if it means the possible demise of life as we know it, maybe even of existence?
Rees put this question to a real-life test on the subject he knows the most about. He pointed to a project begun at the Brookhaven Laboratory on Long Island in 2000. Physicists there are using a particle accelerator to attempt to create a “quark-gluon plasma,” a hot soup of dense subatomic materials that replicate conditions believed to exist at the time the “big bang” gave birth to the cosmos more than 13.7 billion years ago. Some scientists worry that a high concentration of energy of the type being pursued at Brookhaven could conceivably lead to three doomsday outcomes. A black hole might form—an object with such gravitational pull that even light could not escape. A black hole could “suck in everything around it.”
2
It is also possible that quark particles could form a compressed object known as a “strangelet,” which is “far smaller than a single atom” but could “infect” surrounding matter and “transform the entire planet Earth into an inert hyperdense sphere about one hundred metres across.”
3
Or even worse, the subatomic forces of space itself could be transformed by the experiment. If that were to happen, the effect might be to “rip the fabric of space itself.”
4
The result, warns Rees, could be that “the boundary of the new-style vacuum would spread like an expanding bubble,” eventually devouring the entire universe.
5
Rees and other scientists admit that the chance of any of these events occurring is exceedingly low. But while it’s “very, very improbable,” says Rees, “we cannot be 100 percent sure what might actually happen.”
6
Rees then asks the question, Even assuming that the odds of something going wrong on this scale are as high as one in fifty million, would the potential benefit be worth the remote possibility of destroying the Earth and the entire universe ?
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Rees goes on to warn of a number of current experimental pursuits that pose the threat of disastrous consequences for life on Earth, including the construction of small nanobots that replicate like viruses and that could race out of control, devouring matter and turning the Earth’s surface to a “gray goo.”
8
Rees worries about similar threats posed by genetic engineering and computer technology—especially as knowledge in the high-tech fields spreads, increasing the likelihood that someone will, by accident or intent, cause irrevocable harm. He concludes by saying that the risk attendant to these powerful new scientific and technological pursuits ought to engender a global discussion about the limits of scientific inquiry.
The immediate rejoinder by most scientists is that if we had entertained the same misgivings and fears about the harnessing of fire because it caused harm as well as good, we might never have enjoyed the vast benefits of progress and would instead have remained in a primitive state of being. The big difference, however, is that the effects of past scientific pursuits were always felt locally and were of limited duration. Today’s cutting-edge scientific technology is of a different ilk. The effects and consequences of computer technology, biotechnology, and, soon, nanotechnology are global in scale and potentially long in duration.