US: At a time when the United States should be mobilising and reinvigorating its alliances in Europe and Asia, President Bush is dismantling them, writes Ronald D. Asmus.
Harry Truman must be turning over in his grave. The planned withdrawal of US troops from Europe and Asia which President Bush announced last week, if allowed to stand, could lead to the demise of the key US alliances across the globe, including the one which President Harry Truman considered his greatest foreign policy accomplishment: NATO.
President Bush proposes something which generations of US diplomats and soldiers fought to prevent and that our adversaries sought unsuccessfully to achieve: radical reduction of US political and military influence on the European and Asian continents.
The Bush message, delivered at a campaign rally, also smells of political opportunism. Under pressure but unable to withdraw troops from Iraq, the president has instead reached for what his advisers hope is the next best thing politically - a pledge to bring the boys home from Europe and Asia.
Whether this is good or bad politics remains to be seen. But there is little doubt that it is bad strategy and bad diplomacy, for which the United States is likely to pay a heavy price. The reasons are fairly simple.
In Europe after the Cold War, the United States decided to reduce its former troop levels significantly but to leave sufficient military forces on the ground to accomplish three objectives: help ensure that peace and stability on the continent would endure; have the capacity to support NATO and European Union expansion and project the community of democracies eastward, and provide the political and military glue to enable our allies to reorient themselves militarily and prepare, together with the United States, to address new conflicts beyond the continent's borders.
Each of these goals remains important. Each will be undercut by the president's plan. With transatlantic relations badly frayed, Russia turning away from democracy and the United States facing the challenge of projecting stability from the Balkans to the Black Sea, Washington should be putting forward a plan to repair the transatlantic alliance, not ruin it.
In Asia the stakes are just as high and the challenges perhaps greater. There the United States faces the long-term challenge of managing the rise of China as a great power.
North Korea's eventual collapse and the unification of Korea will raise the question of that country's future geopolitical orientation. Such seismic events will undoubtedly have a considerable impact on the evolution of Japan's role and orientation as well.
US diplomats will have their hands full over the next decade or two trying to win the war on terrorism and help manage these multiple strategic transitions - and will need every ounce of US political and military leverage and muscle if they are to get it right. In an act of diplomatic hara-kiri, the president proposes to destroy one of the key pillars of US influence just when this kind of leverage and influence is likely to be needed the most.
The president's plan is unfortunately further evidence of the strategic myopia which has afflicted this administration and is undercutting the United States's standing in the world. At a time when we should be mobilising and reinvigorating our alliances in Europe and Asia, we are dismantling them.
Instead of creating multilateral structures to mobilise the world in a common struggle against terrorism and new anti-Western ideologies and movements, we opt for a unilateral course that leaves us with fewer friends.
As opposed to balancing the political and military requirements of a new era and coming up with a new troop deployment plan that meets both needs, the administration allows the Pentagon to ride roughshod over broader US strategy and diplomacy and destroy the work of generations of diplomats and soldiers.
Is there room for reconfiguring the US military deployment plan overseas and modernising it for a new era? Of course there is. But such a review must also be part of a new strategic approach to alliance-building to confront the new threats we face. It must take into account our political and military requirements and the views of our allies. The president should have given a speech in Ohio on how he planned to repair the United States's alliances for the future - and our new global military posture should reflect that goal as well.
Why has no administration official come forward with any ideas on repairing the United States' alliance relationships? Senator John Kerry has recognised that the lesson of September 11th is that the US need for allies is going up, not down. He has pledged to make the reinvigoration of US alliances a foreign policy priority. He has claimed that his election would allow for a "fresh start" and close a remarkably divisive chapter in relations with many of our close allies.
There is little doubt that Kerry's election would be enthusiastically welcomed in both Europe and Asia, but it is time for him to take the next step and lay out a concrete plan for how his administration would reverse the damage done by President Bush and reinvigorate the United States's alliances to meet the dangers we face. Part of that plan should be to freeze and review the ill-conceived plan the president put forth this week in Ohio.
Ronald D. Asmus is senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and served as deputy assistant secretary of state for European affairs from 1997 to 2000. He is writing in a personal capacity. - LA Times-Washington Post)