Implications of the US Rebalance toward Asia: European Security and NATO

The US “rebalance” to the Asia-Pacific region, as confirmed in its military dimension by a January 2012 DoD paper,1 came as no surprise. It had been decades in the making. In reality, the United States had been recalibrating its global priorities since the 1980s. Despite the severity of the INF2 crisis that temporarily (1979–1983) refocused strategic attention on Europe,3 the shift in US activities and interests from those of an East-coast establishment to those of a West-coast establishment, which was consecrated under Ronald Reagan’s “Western White House,” was to prove durable. From the moment the Berlin Wall fell, a relative US military disengagement from the European theater was inevitable. This trend was to drive the entire 1990s process of trying to generate, by one means or another, appropriate European military capacity.4 The future of NATO was up for grabs. Considerable pressure was placed on the Europeans to offer payback for 40 years of US security guarantees by agreeing to extend the Alliance to other parts of the world, in short to give both political and material support to US global strategy.5 In 1993, Senator Richard Lugar, the Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee declared, provocatively, that NATO should go “out of area or out of business.”6 The US pressure for a global partnership with the Europeans was predicated on the US assertion that the two entities, given tight geostrategic cooperation, could set the global agenda for the twenty-first century.7