The Atlantic Partnership After Iraq: A Structural Analysis.

The Atlantic partnership was severely strained by the Iraq war of March-April 2003, and even more by the diplomatic wrangling that preceded the military conflict. But it is far from clear that policy towards Iraq was the source of these strains. This paper assesses recent changes in international politics and how these changes differentially affected the Atlantic partners. In so doing it provides a structural account of the present crisis, arguing that the transatlantic bargain consolidated in the 1950s rested upon a particular constellation of interests that was deeply undermined by the end of the Cold War as well as by the security implications of globalization. The stability of the Cold War Atlantic partnership rested upon an unusual balance between the interests of its most significant members: the US, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Once West Germany had been firmly enmeshed in the western security and economic systems, the central political problem of the transatlantic relationship was muting Franco-American rivalry. Two factors tended to mitigate Franco-American antipathies. The first was self-restraint on the part of successive US governments, who regarded NATO as the leading security arrangement, and Europe as the most important theatre of operations, of the Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union. The second mitigating factor was the restraining influence exercised by the Federal Republic of Germany on French policy, since realization of the Federal Republic’s dual objectives of security (in the present) and unification (in the future) depended on a careful balancing of political relations with Paris and Washington. The end of the Cold War substantially weakened both these buffers on Franco-American relations. The structural foundations of the Atlantic framework were further undermined by the eventual realization that America’s chief post-Cold War security concerns had more to do with transnational terrorism rather than with traditional interstate rivalry. The result is a system now in flux, but in which a re-emergence of the previous framework is unlikely; that framework has no basis in underlying political realities, and, despite widespread pretensions to the contrary, it holds little genuine appeal for the principal governments on either side of the Atlantic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]