UACES Study Group S014

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Security Strategy in Theory and Practice

Organisers: Prof John Peterson and Dr Roland Dannreuther, University of Edinburgh

Meeting 1: 25 February 2005, University of Edinburgh
Meeting 2: 16-17 September 2005, Brussels

This study group has two related aims:

To gauge the actual policy effects of the European Security Strategy agreed as the doctrinal basis for EU foreign and security policy in December 2003. Put simply: in policy debates, does an ability to cite the ESS in support of an argument help win the argument?
To gauge the transatlantic alliance effects of the ESS. Specifically, will the creation of a European analogue of the US National Security Strategy (2002) – and the similarities and differences between the two documents – encourage strategic convergence or divergence?

The study group will also aim to bring together senior and junior scholars as well as practitioners from both Europe and America.

The purpose of the September 2005 workshop is to allow contributors to present draft chapters for a book to be published in 2006 entitled Security Strategy and the Transatlantic Alliance. The focus is on US National Security Strategy (NSS) and European Security Strategy (ESS).

Contact: Prof John Peterson, University of Edinburgh, (T: +44 131 650 3023, john.peterson@ed.ac.uk) or Dr Roland Dannreuther

Conference Report

The UACES-supported Study Group on ‘Security Strategy in Theory and Practice’ based at the University of Edinburgh (Politics) has produced a lively and thought-provoking volume to be published in Spring 2006 by Routledge entitled ‘Security Strategy and Transatlantic Relations’. Edited by the group organisers, Roland Dannreuther and John Peterson, the collection includes contributions from Ronald D. Asmus (German Marshall Fund), Alyson Bailes (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute), Fraser Cameron (European Policy Centre), Anoushirivan Ehteshami (Durham), Jolyon Howorth (Yale), Annika Bergman, Luke March and Chad Damro (Edinburgh), Sean Molly (Glasgow) and Jim Wyllie (Aberdeen). Professor Michael E. Cox of the London School of Economics has described the book as :

Security Strategy and Transatlantic Relations in the first major assessment of the impact on transatlantic relations of the US National Security Strategy of 2002 and the European Security Strategy of 2003. The new security strategies are analysed as attempts to reconceptualize the radically changed post-9/11 nature of international security and redefine post-Cold War security doctrines. They also provide insight into transatlantic tensions, particularly during and after the 2003 Iraq War.

The Study Group first met in November 2005 and all the contributors were asked to address three key questions in relation to their particular topics:

To what extent the US and EU Security Strategies signal strategic convergence or divergence
What tangible political and policy impacts can be attributed to the new security strategies, particularly in relation to the ‘war on terror’?
What are the implications of the security strategies for US and EU policies towards their specific regions, particularly the Middle East, Russia and China.

The Group did not agree on all points of substance and there was a lively debate with many differences in opinion but a number of conclusions were drawn. The most important of these include:

Why the Security Strategies are Important

The study group did not start with the assumption that the 2002 US National Security Strategy (NSS) or the 2003 European Security Strategy (ESS) were necessarily strategically important documents. Indeed, it was recognised from the start that they are merely paper documents as opposed to statements with anything close to the power to bind. As such, they are statements of intent, expressing aspirations as to how the US and EU should meet the challenges of a changing security environment. But they do not dictate particular policy outcomes or necessarily constrain the strategic autonomy of decision-makers on either side.Nevertheless, the clear conclusion from this study is that these security strategies are different. Both strategies expressed ambitions to doctrinal innovation and strategic permanence. Ronald Asmus described the authors of the 2002 NSS as seeking to encapsulate a ‘Trumanesque moment’ where the changing nature of security is revealed and the new rules for US foreign and security policy are cast for posterity. It is the radically changed nature of security which demands such startling strategic innovations, such as those of military pre-emption and unilateral action.

The ESS, the first security strategy ever published by the EU, has a different, if just as ambitious, strategic ambition. The distinctiveness here is not so much about what the ESS says about the changed security environment but what it says about the EU. The ESS is the first attempt to give a concrete sense of what an autonomous European security actor might look like and what values it would seek to promote. Inevitably, the EU’s emergence as a ‘global player’ involves developing some degree of autonomy from the US and NATO, and in asserting a distinctively European rather than transatlantic identity. The emphasis in the ESS on multilateralism, diplomacy and international law, in such contrast to the NSS, is clearly indicative of a significant degree of strategic divergence.

Convergence and Divergence

However, the Study Group did not generally confirm the popular conception that the ‘Atlantic is growing wider’. A general consensus did emerge that the US and EU do converge on the key ambition of ‘transformational diplomacy’. What marks out both the NSS and ESS is their ambition, and impatience, for change. Both documents see the outside world, particularly the conflict-ridden regions of the Middle East, Asia and Africa, as in desperate need of transformation. The US and EU are also presented as both models of stability, freedom and prosperity and as agents of transformation with a vocation to change the world in their own image.

There is also a basic convergence on European and American assessments of the principal threats to these common values. Both the NSS and ESS converge on identifying terrorism, WMD proliferation, regional conflicts, and failing states as representing the major challenges. Where there are differences, they are more of emphasis and prioritization than of substance. The EU adds organised crime as a significant threat. The US places greater emphasis on the dangers of the conflation of WMD proliferation and international terrorism. The NSS is darker in tone, while the ESS has more recognition of the benefits of the post-Cold War peace. But, in essence, they describe the same external world and provide the same basic strategic threat assessment.

Divergences emerge most clearly in the means and tools for implementing essentially common goals. Europeans were considerably taken aback by the tone of the NSS and how it appeared to reflect a sense of American triumphalism and neo-imperialism. For many Americans, as Assumes pointed out, the ESS appeared to be unduly complacent, reflecting Europe’s failure to galvanise the requisite support for a wounded America, thus feeding into a growing mood of Euroscepticism in Washington.

There were also more substantive and deeper rooted sources of transatlantic divergence. The NSS is a broadly realist document, which above all seeks a ‘balance of power that favours freedom’, a goal mentioned no fewer than five times in the document. Such an outcome demands that preponderant power and military primacy be accorded to the US so that it can fulfil its special responsibilities as the enlightened global hegemon. These realist foundation are then overlaid by a Wilsonian commitment to the expansion of freedom. For its part, the ESS is imbued with a commitment to a progressive, some might say Panglossian, liberal internationalism, where socio-economic integration, dealing with the economic roots of conflict, is the most critical force for change. Meanwhile the model of European integration offers attractions, not least the EU’s commitment to transformation through persuasion rather than coercion.. These differences in ideology and conceptualizations of power have fed into multiple transatlantic disputes.

Time, however, has generally helped to act as a healer in transatlantic division. The US and Europe have come to converge in agreeing on the need to ensure stability in Iraq and in prioritising the pursuit of a diplomatic solution to the challenges faced by potential WMD proliferation in Iran and North Korea. Robert Cooper, who initiated the study group through a key-note lecture on transatlantic relations, emphasised that the NSS and ESS should not be seen as intrinsically diverging or contradictory documents. He argued that one of the key purposes of the ESS, to which he was a direct contributor, was to make the EU a more effective and capable strategic actor, which would enhance rather than weaken transatlantic cooperation and power projection.

Effectiveness of the Security Strategies

A number of contributors to the study highlighted that it is important not to accord excessive attention to the minutiae of US and EU interaction which might obscure how both powers are either impotent towards or struggle with some of the most important external challenges. Luke March argued how neither the NSS and ESS meets the challenge of Russia’s increasingly authoritarian direction under President Putin. Alyson Bailes argued somewhat similarly in relation to China that neither the US or EU strategies are capable of addressing fully the challenge of a China conquering markets rather than territories. And, as a number of contributors noted, neither the US or Europe have been showing much success in defeating the threat from al-Qaeda and international terrorism.

In terms of the NSS, the Iraq war necessarily colours any substantive assessment of its longer-term efficacy. Most of the contributors saw the success or failure of the NSS as linked directly to the ultimate success or failure of the intervention into Iraq. Anoush Ehteshami forcefully argued that Iraq will ‘continue to act as the security black hole of the region, with all the mysteries and uncertainties associated with a black hole’ The major, idf sometimes under-appreciated, legacy of the NSS is the upturning of the Sunni-dominated order in Iraq, itself an inheritance of British imperial rule, with the extremely complex consequences and implications that this had entailed for the region as a whole. The NSS’s rhetoric of extending freedom and exporting democracy has translated, in practice, into a considerable strengthening of the Shia community in Iraq, the expansion of the influence of Iran, and the greatly increased fears of the Sunni-dominated Arab regimes, particularly in the Persian Gulf. This essentially high-risk US strategy, and the unintended consequences that it has brought about, could possibly provide a critical impetus to the transformation of the region, as possibly prefigured by the evidence of political liberalization in Lebanon and Egypt. If so, the value and success of the NSS will be assured. However, if the more pessimistic prognoses of most of the contributors prove correct, the NSS would be severely tarnished. The reputation of the NSS will, in many ways, rise or fall in relation to the combustive and highly unpredictable politics of the Middle East.

For the European Security Strategy, the question is more about whether it will have any identifiable policy outcomes in the first place. Is the ESS merely an expression of intent, a set of pious aspiration, but which does not result in any enhanced European capacity for strategic thinking and action? Much as the NSS has been coloured by the Iraq war, so the ESS has been compromised by the French and Dutch rejections of the EU’s Constitutional Treaty which envisaged an institutional strengthening of the EU’s foreign and security policy. The EU’s crisis in its failure to sell its policies to its own citizens hardly augurs well for a more dynamic and pro-active European policy in countries and regions beyond Europe’s borders.

The key questions for the longer-term credibility of the ESS have three significant dimensions. First, whether the strategy represents something more than a lowest common denominator agreement between the various EU member states, which essentially papers over critical differences over strategic culture and outlook. Second, whether the ESS will actually translate into enhanced EU capabilities for action. Third, the credibility of the implicit argument of the ESS that military prowess is not the only tool for change that the EU possesses its own secret weapon – the EU’s unique experience of integration. But, there is a genuine question whether this European model is transportable to other more conflict-ridden or pre-modern regions of the world. Can stability and prosperity, the fruit of integration, emerge through exporting European traditions of incessant meddling?

Conclusion: Looking Forward

In March 2006, the US administration unveiled a new US National Security Strategy which, it must be admitted, caused a minor flutter of concern from the editors. However, in practice, NSS 2006 represents no substantial deviation from the main principles of NSS 2002. It did, though, shift in one direction recommended by our Study Group – the need to give greater attention than was provided in either the NSS and ESS to strong (instead of weak or failing) developing states such as Russian, China, Iran and India. It also gave greater recognition of the importance and salience of the transatlantic relationship and its key institutions, such as NATO and US-EU cooperation.

From the insights found in this book, it does not appear that al-Qaeda or China or other potential threats will replace the role played by the Soviet Union during the Cold War in ensuring strategic conformity across the Atlantic. As such, Europe and the United States are bound to have differing strategic views and priorities, which are driven by their differing geographical location, their differing cultures and varying power capabilities. Strategic drift is, to a lesser or greater extent, inevitable. But, there is also no reason to believe that such drift will change partners and allies into strategic competitors. The fact that, after the difficulties of the Iraq War, the US and EU have made great efforts to reconstitute the transatlantic relationship highlights the continuing importance both sides give to that relationship. In general, the longer-term challenge is to provide a more effective and relevant institutional framework for this relationship which transcends the generally recognised limitations of NATO. As Asmus notes, it is in the area of Homeland Security and Justice and Home Affairs that the US and EU are surprisingly finding themselves in the most intensive area of potential cooperation. Ultimately, it will be such dynamics emanating from the ground, reflecting those areas where transatlantic cooperation are most needed, that the prospects for a more durable and institutionalised Atlantic Alliance can be founded.

The Study Group on ‘Security Strategy in Theory and Practice’ would like to give thanks to support from UACES – as well as the University of Edinburgh, the German Marshall Fund and the European Policy Centre (Brussels). Thanks to this support, the study group was able to hold two workshops in Edinburgh and Brussels, which brought the contributors together with invited guests. Including Robert Cooper (Council of the EU), Sven Biscop (Royal Institute for International Relations) and Sir Brian Crowe (Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House).