World Views: Looking Ahead to Obama's Second Term, Amb. Kurt Volker on NATO (Nov 09, 2012)

After Tuesday's election, President Obama still faces significant foreign policy challenges in his second term. Iran continues to enrich uranium, Afghanistan could unravel as the 2014 withdrawal deadline draws near, and Syria's civil war shows no sign of letting up.

Joshua Landis, the Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, says many people in the Middle East are disappointed President Obama has not taken a stronger show of leadership. But he says just as many are relieved that he is withdrawing from the Middle East.

"In many ways, what he's done is he's gotten us out of the business of occupation," Landis said. "Obama has stressed policing. And that means drone warfare from a distance, and getting the troops out, minimizing the cost."

Rebecca Cruise, a global security and comparative politics expert who's spent time in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, says while many Europeans are enthusiastic about President Obama's second term, the response is more muted than 2008.

"The Central European Bank just came out and said they're going to be facing economic woes well into the future," Cruise said. "Unemployment rates are going to be low, and they don't necessarily see Obama as being helpful in that regard."

Host Suzette Grillot said global markets remained flat in the immediate aftermath of the effect, so there's no real economic hope here attached to a second Obama term. Cruise said this isn't unusual.

"Those investors that participate in the stock market suggested they were more in line, or looking for a Romney victory, so this is a reaction to that," Cruise said. "This news about the European future also came out the same day, so that's playing into that as well."

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta have both indicated they plan to step down before the president's second term begins, and the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee could be a logical pick to replace Clinton.

"John Kerry campaigned very hard for Obama, so Obama owes him," Landis said. "He's been into foreign policy, and the other is the U.S. Ambassador to U.N."

Grillot argued that Susan Rice may be a controversial choice, given the administration's handling of the Sept. 11 attack on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Rebecca Cruise said several names have been floated to succeed Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, including Michele Flournoy, a top Pentagon policy official, and the Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter.

"But what we know about Obama, Hillary [Clinton] was kind of an odd choice, out of left field, so all this speculation," Cruise said. "He could pick someone else entirely."

Earlier this month, Grillot spoke with Former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker. He’s now the Executive Director of the McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University. He described the evolving role of NATO in the two decades since the end of the Cold War.

Volker said that even though NATO agreed on a new strategic concept in 2010, the document was too broad, outlining crisis management and collective defense, as well as dealing with old and new security threats.

“It didn’t really make any choices,” Volker said. “Meanwhile, no one’s funding it, or putting the troops in, and putting the commitment in, and I think NATO is again at a stage where it’s really going to think through where [it goes].”

Volker also said NATO should shift its 21st century focus to China, calling the country a “potential threat,” but not necessarily a threat at the present.

“They’ve got resources and they’re putting it into the military, and they have a sense of national strength, and they have territorial claims in the neighborhood that are against other countries,” Volker said. “At the same time, when I look at Russia, and I look at China, I see a huge difference. I have a lot of hope for China. I don’t have much hope for Russia.”

INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS

On the shifting roles of NATO between the 1990s and 2000s

“In Kosovo, we set a limit of U.S. troop contributions of about 15 percent. So 85 percent of that was done by other NATO allies. The U.S. is critical as a leader in NATO. We put in the largest share of the combined budgets, which is about 20 percent. Europe puts in 80 percent, but on a country-by-country basis we’re the biggest one. Afghanistan has been very different. In Afghanistan, the U.S. has done about two-thirds of the military effort, and one-third by other countries, so a very different proportion than what we ever had in the Balkans. As you look ahead, it’s becoming more and more of a concern. While we’re cutting our defense budget in the coming year, Europe has been cutting it for a long time, and going even further and deeper. Bob Gates, before leaving as Secretary of Defense, gave a great speech about where this is headed. Ten years before, the U.S. was spending about 50 percent of the combined total defense expenditures of all the NATO countries, which is not out of the question given the global responsibilities of the U.S. versus the regional roles of NATO. But that ratio has gone up to about 75 percent today. So it is becoming more and more unbalanced.”

On the differences between Cold War-era and 21st Century-Russia

“First off, in Western Europe, I don’t think there’s a soul that thinks about Russia as a security threat. It is far weaker than it was as the Soviet Union. It still has nuclear weapons, but no one in Western Europe believes nuclear weapons matter anymore. The conventional forces are relatively weak compared to anything that you’d find in the West. Russia doesn’t talk about going back into Europe against the West. That’s not what Putin talks about. So they don’t perceive much of a threat at all. Even on energy issues, there’s a high degree of complacency in Western Europe. This is not true of Central and Eastern Europe, especially the Baltic States, are very worried about what’s happening in Russia. Remember, these are tiny countries right up against Russia’s border, and geographically separated from the rest of NATO. And they think about this all the time. They don’t see a strong commitment and clarity of vision and thinking in Western Europe, or the United States right now, that gives them confidence. So they continually try to keep the Russia issue on the agenda.”

On the unique U.S. relationship with the Baltic States

“The United States had a policy after they were forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union – they were independent states gobbled up under Stalin’s Soviet Union – and the United States never recognized their incorporation into the Soviet Union. We had a little asterisk on all the maps. We had “captive nation” parades in lots of towns for their ethnic communities here, so we kept the flag up in the embassies around Washington. We kept the flame burning for these countries for 40 years while they were “captive nations.” And they regained their independence with the fall of the Soviet Union, and they have a passion for their own freedom, their own democracy, and they want to be a part of Europe, a part of the West, linked to the United States so that this never happens to them again. That’s a really compelling story, and those stories are coming out now in movies, for example, as well. You can see a few of those. There’s one recently about Latvia, there was one a few years ago about Estonia. It’s a really great story. Now, what you see in a country like that – these are very small countries, just a couple million people, I think the total population of the Baltic States is something like 6 million – but the thing they realized, they will never succeed if they are alone, and they know that. So their whole future depends on the degree to which they can be embedded in a bigger democratic community. So they learned how to contribute, and how to embed in Afghanistan, for example. We had these provincial reconstruction teams, PRTs, and some of them were in remote places, they’re difficult to staff, sometimes dangerous. We had one in the very middle of Afghanistan, a place called Chaghcharān, which no one wanted to pick up. The Lithuanians volunteered, and said, “We’ll do it!” What do they know about, or had done there? Relatively little. They did have a few people who had been in the Soviet military who had been in Afghanistan, but by and large, they did it mainly to be a team player. They realize their own security is going to be dependent upon NATO coming to them, if they ever need it.”

FULL INTERVIEW

SUZETTE GRILLOT, HOST: Ambassador Kurt Volker, welcome to World Views.

AMBASSADOR KURT VOLKER: Thanks very much for having me.

GRILLOT: So you have served in the past as the U.S. Ambassador to NATO. Now many people thought after the Cold War ended that NATO might cease to exist. Its whole purpose was to counter and contain the Soviet Union. So, nonetheless, it persisted. It has evolved. So what is the purpose of NATO today? Why does it still exist? What does it do, and why do we need it?

VOLKER: Well, I think NATO is asking itself this question, so it’s good that you’re asking it too. I think NATO’s purpose during the Cold War was more than just containing the Soviet Union. It was also providing a positive factor of security for Europe, for helping to integrate Europe, and ensuring there was a free democratic space in the world that was beyond the United States, that we were going to live in a better world. So it played a lot of those roles. After the Berlin Wall came down there were still security challenges in the world. Just because the Soviet Union went away, and the Berlin Wall went away, didn’t mean that security challenges were gone from the world, and NATO tried to adapt and figure out how to deal with that. It did, I would say, five principal things. It enlarged to bring in members from Central and Eastern Europe that had been behind the Iron Curtain, to help integrate them into Europe and to stabilize democracy in those country. That’s been very successful. It built partnerships with countries beyond that, so that it was trying to build cooperation on security. Taking on military operations – during the Cold War NATO had never conducted a military operation – but done planning and exercises, but never done anything. It went into Bosnia, it went into Kosovo, did some counterterrorism work, it did some humanitarian relief, so it took on operational roles. It improved capabilities. It had heavy ground forces in Europe that were aimed at a ground war there. It made lighter, smaller, more deployable forces, and it tried to build a relationship with Russia. It formed a NATO-Russia Council, and tried to reshape security in Europe. So I would say NATO adapted in quite creative ways after the end of the Cold War. The problem is that our publics didn’t follow along. They didn’t see a need for the military forces. Europe in particular has been slashing military budgets. Now we’re about to cut ours as well. We’ve already pulled half the forces we had in Europe out. People in Europe don’t really perceive a level of threat against their countries anymore like they used to, so there’s just not a willingness to keep investing. These operations that NATO has taken on – the ones in the Balkans mattered to people in Europe – but the others are kind of far away, and not really driving passions there. Capabilities, because of the defense budgets, are being slashed. Enlargement is no long on the table. No one is enthusiastic about that, partly because of the Eurozone and the Euro crisis, and the finances. So I think NATO is really searching for what do we do now? Two years ago, at the Lisbon Summit in 2010, NATO agreed on a new strategic concept that was supposed to define “What’s NATO Going to Be?” for the future. But the problem is it was a really technocratic document that said, “NATO’s going to do everything.” NATO is going to do crisis management and collective defense. It’s going to deal with old, traditional security threats, and new ones too. It’s going to deal with us in military means, but it’s also going to have a comprehensive approach to civil military things. It didn’t really make any choices, and meanwhile no one’s funding it, or putting the troops in, and putting the commitment in, and I think NATO is again at a stage where it’s really going to think through where [it goes].

GRILLOT: Well, you said no one’s putting funding in, but it’s the United State, right? I’ll bring in Joshua here, because I’ve heard him say in the past something like “NATO” meaning “the United States.” Is NATO more than the United States?

VOLKER: Sure, yes, it’s 28 countries…

GRILLOT: Well, it’s 28 countries, but in terms of putting in to the actual operations of NATO, what…

VOLKER: Sure.

GRILLOT: …is NATO really a collective agreement…

VOLKER: Well, yeah, no, it is…

GRILLOT: …or is it really the United States that’s carrying out…

VOLKER: …so if you take for example the Kosovo operation. In Kosovo, we set a limit of U.S. troop contributions of about 15 percent. So 85 percent of that was done by other NATO allies. The U.S. is critical as a leader in NATO. We put in the largest share of the combined budgets, which is about 20 percent. Europe puts in 80 percent, but on a country-by-country basis we’re the biggest one. Afghanistan has been very different. In Afghanistan, the U.S. has done about two-thirds of the military effort, and one-third by other countries, so a very different proportion than what we ever had in the Balkans. As you look ahead, it’s becoming more and more of a concern. While we’re cutting our defense budget in the coming year, Europe has been cutting it for a long time, and going even further and deeper. Bob Gates, before leaving as Secretary of Defense, gave a great speech about where this is headed. Ten years before, the U.S. was spending about 50 percent of the combined total defense expenditures of all the NATO countries, which is not out of the question given the global responsibilities of the U.S. versus the regional roles of NATO. But that ratio has gone up to about 75 percent today. So it is becoming more and more unbalanced.

JOSHUA LANDIS: To what extent is Russia still lurking in the back of Western European minds, and U.S. minds as ”the enemy” for NATO. It hasn’t really gone away. Twice before Russia has come back – the Russian Empire collapsed in 1917 of course – and it spit out lots of little states, but they were sucked back in under Stalin and the old Russian Empire dressed itself in red clothing and we were back again. Now, the Soviet Union collapses, but I think many people have expected that Russia will reconstitute itself and it will try to suck back in those little peripheral states. NATO has been busy getting the jump on Russia while Russia was weak, and sucking them into NATO much to the chagrin, I think, of Russia. But to what extent are people keeping the powder dry because there might be a strong Russia with new oil, so forth, that needs to be contained again, or at least balanced?

VOLKER: There’s a lot in your question, and I’ll try to take it out in different pieces. First off, in Western Europe, I don’t think there’s a soul that thinks about Russia as a security threat. It is far weaker than it was as the Soviet Union. It still has nuclear weapons, but no one in Western Europe believes nuclear weapons matter anymore. The conventional forces are relatively weak compared to anything that you’d find in the West. Russia doesn’t talk about going back into Europe against the West. That’s not what Putin talks about. So they don’t perceive much of a threat at all. Even on energy issues, there’s a high degree of complacency in Western Europe. This is not true of Central and Eastern Europe, especially the Baltic States, are very worried about what’s happening in Russia. Remember, these are tiny countries right up against Russia’s border, and geographically separated from the rest of NATO. And they think about this all the time. They don’t see a strong commitment and clarity of vision and thinking in Western Europe, or the United States right now, that gives them confidence. So they continually try to keep the Russia issue on the agenda. I think that one other aspect I would throw in is that Russia is a really mixed bag today. It’s not a monolithic system like it was under the Soviet Union. There’s a lot more space for people. There’s a lot more diversity in the economy. There’s the Internet. There’s social media. It has gotten worse over the last ten years or so under Putin – a lot of crackdown on democracy activists, on political parties, on NGOs. A huge amount of corruption and state control of “big things,” whether it’s resources, gas, major manufacturing, even in some cases, the media. So you have a pretty heavy state. And I think where Russia is drawing the line is the former Soviet Union, minus the Baltic States. So they see Georgia, or Armenia, or the Ukraine, and even parts of Moldova as, “This is really ours.” I don’t think that is the way Europe or the United States have looked at that part of the world since the breakup of the Soviet Union. We’ve looked at them as individual countries. – different nations, different peoples, and they have the same rights to their own governance, their own political system, their own freedom, their own culture, their own identity just as much as France or Germany or Italy did in the 1950s. So the effort has been to support those people. So when you say NATO “gobbled up” these other countries, it’s the other way around. These countries were running toward NATO in order to guarantee they would have a future, because it had been taken away from them so many times before.

GRILLOT: You mentioned the Baltic States. Tell us a little bit about that, because this is not something, I mean, people don’t really think about the Baltic States, and they have a significant role to play, in terms of learning lessons from them about foreign relations. What is it we can learn from them?

VOLKER: Well, the first thing, if people don’t know much about the Baltic States, I’d encourage you to learn something about the Baltic States. It is a fascinating history, and they are great people. The United States had a policy after they were forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union – they were independent states gobbled up under Stalin’s Soviet Union – and the United States never recognized their incorporation into the Soviet Union. We had a little asterisk on all the maps. We had “captive nation” parades in lots of towns for their ethnic communities here, so we kept the flag up in the embassies around Washington. We kept the flame burning for these countries for 40 years while they were “captive nations.” And they regained their independence with the fall of the Soviet Union, and they have a passion for their own freedom, their own democracy, and they want to be a part of Europe, a part of the West, linked to the United States so that this never happens to them again. That’s a really compelling story, and those stories are coming out now in movies, for example, as well. You can see a few of those. There’s one recently about Latvia, there was one a few years ago about Estonia. It’s a really great story. Now, what you see in a country like that – these are very small countries, just a couple million people, I think the total population of the Baltic States is something like 6 million – but the thing they realized, they will never succeed if they are alone, and they know that. So their whole future depends on the degree to which they can be embedded in a bigger democratic community. So they learned how to contribute, and how to embed in Afghanistan, for example. We had these provincial reconstruction teams, PRTs, and some of them were in remote places, they’re difficult to staff, sometimes dangerous. We had one in the very middle of Afghanistan, a place called Chaghcharān, which no one wanted to pick up. The Lithuanians volunteered, and said, “We’ll do it!” What do they know about, or had done there? Relatively little. They did have a few people who had been in the Soviet military who had been in Afghanistan, but by and large, they did it mainly to be a team player. They realize their own security is going to be dependent upon NATO coming to them, if they ever need it. So when you look at the Baltic region, and the Nordic region – which would include Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland – you’ve got some very successful states. They’re good economically. It’s a combined population of just about 30 million. They don’t have the fiscal problems that the rest of Europe has. They don’t have the debt and deficit problems. Latvia did for a period of time, and swiftly dealt with it. They have embedded in each other’s societies economically through businesses. They’ve linked their energy infrastructures. They have dealt with Russia as both an energy supplier, and a source of concern because of monopoly supplies that can exist. They have some very contentious issues with Russia, as I mentioned before, but they’ve also managed it quite well. They have some very good relationships with Russia, particularly at local levels. Norway, for example, recently concluded a border agreement with Russia that had been unresolved for many, many years. So there’s a lot that they’ve done that I think we can learn from if you look at NATO policy or EU policy. I don’t think NATO at the moment has a very coherent policy toward Russia. It doesn’t have an energy strategy for Russia, neither really does the European Union, although it’s maybe improving. I think we’re in a quandary about how much to support people in the East – the Moldovans, the Ukrainians, Georgians – there’s no quandary in the Baltic States. They’re all for it. They want to support these countries because they see a reflection of themselves.

LANDIS: What about China? We just talked about Russia, and nobody really sees it as a big threat. But people do see China as a potential threat. Their hoping it won’t be, but we’re looking at what’s happening in the South China Sea. We are seeing American weakness in Asia as America draws down and can’t keep all these bases. How does one contain China? I mean, we’re redoing the architecture of NATO, and we started out talking about redoing this old Cold War, but we have a new architecture that’s obviously going to emerge, or not going to emerge. Are people too frightened to really deal with this, because they don’t want to alienate China? Or are people moving ahead and not worrying about China?

VOLKER: Are you asking about the U.S., or about NATO? NATO is shrinking, not numerically, but NATO is…

GRILLOT: …in terms of its global role?

VOLKER: …in terms of its global role, NATO is pulling back to European collective defense, which makes good sense. It was good for 40 years, and there are still a lot of challenges to society, and I think that’s smart direction.

GRILLOT: So winding down its role in Afghanistan?

VOLKER: Right. The Libya operation I think was a squeaker for NATO (laughs). And I don’t see them anxious to pick that up again. In fact, I think they even did less than they should have done because of how difficult it was. But turning to Asia, there are several interesting things, and again, your question covers a lot of ground. So first off, I agree completely with the way you phrased it. China is a potential threat, not necessarily a threat today. They’ve got resources and they’re putting it into the military, and they have a sense of national strength, and they have territorial claims in the neighborhood that are against other countries. There are flashpoints there. At the same time, when I look at Russia, and I look at China, I see a huge difference. I have a lot of hope for China. I don’t have much hope for Russia. I think that they have a genuinely self-serving, arrogant, thuggish, brutal regime that is eventually going to preside over a declining country and collapse. And something will replace it again someday. China cares about health, about education, about infrastructure, about reducing poverty, about economic development. They don’t care about individual human rights, and human liberties, and that’s a problem. They don’t care about democracy other than to prevent it – to keep the grip of the Communist Party in power. But they do have a lot of human sensibility in the way they’re developing, which gives me a lot more hope than China. That being said, you can’t base a policy on hope, you have to have a strategy, and you have to look at capabilities. Here, I think the U.S., and I do give President Obama some credit for his articulation of strategy in Asia. Now, what you’re right about is starting to then look at, “Well, are we really backing that up with the resources, and the creativity, and the presence that you need to carry out that strategy?” Unfortunately, I don’t think we are. I think the much-criticized pivot, which got the Europeans all unhappy, is also criticized on the Asian side, for being hollow. And I think that we do need to have a look at how we actually back up what was expressed as a fairly sound strategy.

GRILLOT: Well, Ambassador Volker, thank you so much for being with us on World Views to talk about these…

VOLKER: Already?

GRILLOT: …very complicated issues.

VOLKER: It’s been a pleasure.

GRILLOT: Thank you.

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