Another methodological problem: overall spending figures do not necessarily reflect qualitative differences. Europe is often said not only to spend less, but to be far behind the United States in military technology. But while Europe certainly cannot match American assets, its deficiencies are not exactly technological. In such egregious cases as airlift or satellite intelligence, Europeans are not so much technologically backward as much more careful with their money. Because they are a confederacy of competing economies, launching big weapons projects involves complex negotiations over sharing the industrial costs and benefits. This often takes a great deal of time. But stinginess toward military spending is not necessarily a weakness. An unwillingness to let military spending wreck fiscal balance might even be considered a virtue. It depends on whether the resulting military forces are adequate to defend Europe at home and to meet a reasonable definition of Europe's ambitions and responsibilities in the world.

During the 1990s, Yugoslavia provided the most damning evidence of Europe's military incapacity. As Kagan emphasizes, not until the Americans took charge and put in large forces of their own did the killing stop. But Europe's weakness in the Balkans, deplorable as it was, was less military than political. Starting in 1992, when European forces were first deployed, there was little agreement among Europe's three major military powers. Germany, despite its diplomatic support for Croatia, was extremely reluctant to get involved militarily. Britain and France both put in substantial forces, but worked at cross-purposes: while France wanted to demonstrate a success for the EU and for European self-sufficiency, Britain feared that NATO might be thus rendered redundant. As a result, London worked to limit the mandate and means of the European forces. These limits were so effective that the European troops were at risk of becoming hostages.

Europeans drew diverse lessons from their experiences in Bosnia and Kosovo--some that American military power was indispensable, others that it could not always be counted upon to serve European purposes. Europe's poor showing did spur interest in a collective European military force. Chief among the proposals was the St. Malo initiative of 1998, proposed by the British to the Germans and the French. Plans were fashioned for a joint European intervention force of 60,000 by mid-2003. Some major European weapons orders also ensued, together with heightened industrial cooperation and even some transnational mergers. The project still goes on but is plagued by a lack of consensus among the European states, now exacerbated by their differences over the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq. Europe thus still remains unable to focus effectively the military power that its states actually possess.

This situation is likely to persist until European states find their debilitating divisions intolerable. This will happen when the Germans--and perhaps the British, as well--finally decide that the political cost of relying on the Americans for military protection is too great for Europe's own collective interest. Much will depend on whether events reinforce or diminish the sense of common European interest. The second Gulf War may well have a considerable effect, one way or another. Initially, it seems to have driven the French and Germans closer together and farther from the Americans and the British. Longer-term reactions remain to be seen.

Neo-conservatives lay Europe's military weakness not to its political divisions, however, but to its shared political culture--a preference for soft or civilian power so great that it amounts to a renunciation of hard military power. But this is at least partly wrong. Germany may still abhor hard power, but Britain and France do not. Nevertheless, it is true that Europeans prefer soft power. In other words, they prefer to stabilize and shape the world through economic blandishments and sanctions, diplomatic persuasion, cultural affinity and prestige as opposed to military force. Many disparage Europe's preference by noting that it depends on America's hard power to restrain the world's bullies and gangsters. Doubtless they have a point. Nevertheless, their faith in hard power ignores decades of Cold War strategic thinking about the limits of such power.

The main geopolitical conclusion drawn from Cold War strategic doctrine was that nuclear weapons do not lend themselves to a hegemonic world system. The doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction held not only that the bipolar giants were mutually unassailable, but that relatively small nuclear forces, capable of delivering hydrogen bombs to a dozen major cities, provided their owners with a high measure of protection, even though their antagonist might be a superpower able to launch thousands of warheads in retaliation. Neo-conservatives hate these doctrines of Mutual Assured Destruction and asymmetrical deterrence, but there is no reason to believe that the end of the Cold War has upset their logic. Such doctrines represent, of course, a great equalizer among nations. They suggest a world whose order can, of necessity, only be sustained by a cooperative balance of power--in other words a plural concert rather than a hegemonic, or unipolar, system.

The same logic presumably applies to most other "weapons of mass destruction." The Bush Administration's emphasis on preventing the spread of such weapons suggests that it has not forgotten this logic. The current spectacle of North Korea must surely refresh its memory. Hence we bear witness to its campaign to restrict pre-emptively the charmed circle of states that would make themselves exempt from easy application of American hard power.

But the campaign runs a high risk of being self-defeating. Relatively weak countries, targeted as "rogue states" and repeatedly threatened with military attack, are naturally desperate to achieve the deterrence that only weapons of mass destruction can provide. If rich and crowded Western countries want to discourage the spread of weapons of mass destruction, it seems unwise constantly to threaten weaker non-Western states with superior military power. Of all forms of power, hard military power is the most vulnerable, the easiest for rogue states to trump. By contrast, the Western states' soft power over the rest of the world is vastly greater and more secure. Today's preoccupation with terrorism makes the pluralist argument for soft power even more compelling. Terrorism is the natural refuge of the desperate and the weak, the natural way to overcome the superior hard power of the strong. The more powerful states exercise their hard power, the more weak states will seek refuge in terrorism. By contrast, soft power, applied with realism and generosity, trammels the weak and, with luck, promotes their transformation.

Why, therefore, should Europeans be reproached for emphasizing and developing their soft power? Major states cannot, of course, dispense entirely with the need for hard power. Europe doubtless needs more of it to deter violence in its own surroundings. But surely soft power provides more efficacious tools for shaping today's world. It is no doubt helpful to be able to bomb Taliban tribesmen in order to install a government less friendly to terrorists. But as the Russian misadventure in Afghanistan suggests, military superiority cannot by itself build a strong and stable nation that will remain inhospitable to terrorists. Given the growing reach of terrorism, not to mention the increasing ease of acquiring weapons of mass destruction, the constant exertion of hard power against weaker states seems predictably self-defeating.

The Future of Power

The virtue of soft power has long been a fashionable topic in liberal American circles. Those who have talked it up, however, have generally assumed U.S. superiority in soft as well as hard power. For a long time, the United States has enjoyed a great capital of respect and good will around the globe thanks to a half-century of enlightened leadership. That capital seemed intact so long as the Soviet Union provided a credible and extremely disagreeable threat to the world's other major countries. But recent events suggest that America's soft power is eroding fast. For the first time since the end of World War II, the United States has been unable to put together a creditable international coalition to support a major intervention. Indeed, we have found in Iraq a U.S. initiative vigorously denounced by a phalanx of Eurasian great powers--France, Germany, Russia and China. Nor was our flagrant and vehement cajoling, bribing and threatening of small states able to produce anything close to a simple majority on the Security Council, where two of our principal European allies--France and Germany--took the lead in forming a majority against us. Europe may be ruled by Venus, but Venus is evidently no pushover.

No one can say how the Iraq War will eventually turn out politically. It seems a fateful moment for Transatlantic relations. Few think it a promising time for Western solidarity. Unless the Bush Administration has deliberately aimed to destroy the Atlantic Alliance, as some half suspect, it has clearly made some major miscalculations about at least two of our major European allies. This suggests that neo-conservative views are seriously out of touch with public thinking in that part of the world, by far the closest and most important to us. The consequent rupture with France and Germany represents a severe failure of the American political imagination. Kagan, for all his brilliance and sympathy, illustrates that failure. He praises Europe, but perhaps he does not really understand it.

Essay Types: Book Review