Of all of the threats and challenges that have shaken the international order over the past five years, it is the disorder in Europe that may be most shocking. True, the unraveling of the Middle East has killed many more people and China’s rise may be the more difficult problem in the long term, but nothing quite matches Europe for a reversal of fortune. In the mid-2000s Europe seemed well positioned for the twenty-first century. As American reliance on hard power ran into trouble in Iraq, Europeans felt vindicated in their skepticism of U.S. foreign policy. In 2003, the European Union produced its first National Security Strategy. It began: “Europe has never been so prosperous, so secure nor so free.”1 Leading foreign-policy experts wrote books about how Europe would rule the world in the twenty-first century or how the European Union was the world’s second superpower.2 When the financial crisis broke in 2008, it was widely viewed in Europe as the inevitable consequence of unbridled American capitalism and deregulation, to which the social democratic European model compared very favorably.
Americans regarded Europe as a region where the business of history was finished. The threats of the twentieth century—fascism, communism, and belligerent nationalism—had been dealt with, and European countries had transcended the nation-state to create a postmodern system that eschewed violence and was seeking an exemption slip from the normal challenges of world politics. Europeans would not do much to help the United States in the world’s trouble spots, but they would not require much attention either. Europe would be a postmodern haven from the trials and tribulations of the twenty-first century. This zeitgeist was perfectly captured by Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, in June 2011 in an article titled “Why Europe No Longer Matters”: “Europe’s own notable successes are an important reason that transatlantic ties will matter less in the future. The current Eurozone financial crisis should not obscure the historic accomplishment that was the building of an integrated Europe over the past half-century. The continent is largely whole and free and stable. Europe, the principal arena of much 20th-century geopolitical competition, will be spared such a role in the new century—and this is a good thing.”3
President Obama evidently agreed. He effectively canceled the 2010 EU-U.S. summit, the first time an American president had done so. He had an “unromantic” view of the transatlantic relationship and was focused elsewhere.4 The message was clear—Europe could and should take care of itself.
Today, the very existence of the European Union is in doubt. Most attention focuses on the return of Russian nationalism, but Europe’s general strategic situation has deteriorated rapidly over the past five years. The European Union faced its worst-ever integration crisis over the euro. Then the order in its east (with Russia) fell apart, followed swiftly by the order to its south in the Middle East. Britain voted to leave the European Union. And then, America’s seventy-year commitment to the transatlantic alliance was thrown into doubt by Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president.
The effects of these events have been dramatic and extensive. The euro crisis has weakened the political center and sapped the public’s appetite for European integration. Russia’s revisionism has destroyed any hope of a Europe whole, free, and at peace. The refugee challenge and terror threat have overwhelmed national governments’ efforts. Brexit has put the European Union on the brink of a breakup. And Trump’s election raised questions about the credibility of the NATO alliance and U.S. support for European integration. The pileup of crises has also led to terrifying negative synergies. Russian actions in Syria have exacerbated the refugee flows. Economic stagnation and rising populism have created the political climate in which the British voted to leave the European Union while providing fertile ground for political interference by Moscow in Europe’s domestic politics.
It is an ugly picture. A weakened European Union teeters on the brink of dissolution and faces a deeply insecure, revisionist, and dangerous Russia while the United States reconsiders its role. But to understand the dynamic, we must first go back to the moment when cracks began to appear in the European Union.
European integration may well be the greatest political accomplishment of the twentieth century. Out of the rubble of war, European statesmen, with the support of the United States, pooled their sovereignty and created a functioning political and economic union that transcended the modern state system. The European Union is difficult for non-Europeans to understand. It is imperfect and incomplete, and its story is one of incremental steps toward union, often prompted by the crisis of the day. Each generation of leaders, from the 1950s on, moved the ball a little further down the field. Sometimes the European Union can seem hopelessly dysfunctional, and member states often assert their own interests to the detriment of the common good. But the European Union exerts enormous influence over the daily lives of European citizens. It has also been a powerful force for spreading and consolidating liberal democracy—first in Western Europe, then in Central Europe and to the east. By 2008, European integration remained incomplete, but much had been achieved. Europe had a single market and customs union, a common currency, populations that could move freely among member nations, rules for how to handle refugees, and a foreign-policy chief. Few people would have guessed the European Union was on the eve of a series of interlocking crises that would rock its foundations to the point of fracture.
THE EUROCRISIS
After the Cold War, French President François Mitterrand encouraged the German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, to embark on a bold step of integration to reassure Europe and the wider world that a reunited Germany would be firmly anchored in the European Union. The result was monetary union. Fiscal union (a common taxation and spending system) and a banking union (whereby bank debts would be shared by all member states, not just the country where the bank was headquartered) were judged to be too politically difficult. Europe’s leaders believed that they were necessary—Kohl said that monetary union would remain “a castle in the air” without political union—but they were confident these steps would follow in time.5
Many economists pointed out the dangers of monetary union without a fiscal and banking union, but for much of its first decade, the euro looked like a tremendous success. It soared past the dollar in value. In the 2008 James Bond movie Quantum of Solace, one villain, a corrupt Bolivian general, demanded his bribe in euros since the dollar was not what it used to be. But beneath the surface all was not well. The member states of the European Union had vastly different growth rates. Some countries, like Ireland and Spain, were growing at over 5 percent a year. Others, like Germany, were stagnant. But there is only one interest rate in a monetary union, and in the European Union it was set to suit Germany. The result was predictable and predicted—cheap interest rates were like rocket fuel to already fast-growing economies and drove asset bubbles, especially in property.
When the music stopped after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, the German finance minister, Peer Steinbrück, said the financial crisis was “above all an American problem” and that the United States would “lose its superpower status in the global financial system.”6 This reflected a widespread view in continental Europe that its economic and financial system was in far better shape than the “unregulated” Anglo-American model. This view could not have been more mistaken. The crisis would exact a greater toll in Europe for two reasons: Europe lacked the necessary institutions to cope with the crisis, and Germany insisted on imposing austerity on the Eurozone with catastrophic consequences.
The massive property crashes in Spain, Ireland, and Portugal, along with poor public finances in Greece, made some national banks bust overnight with their governments not far behind. The markets took notice and charged much greater rates for loans to the periphery than to the so-called core (countries like Germany that were judged to be economically sound). The rate spread—the term to describe the range between the price of a loan to Germany and to the periphery countries—fluctuated widely. During the Eurocrisis, the peak yield for ten-year bonds was just over 3 percent for Germany, 14.76 percent for Ireland, 17.36 percent for Portugal, and a prohibitive 46.8 percent for Greece.7
Thus the financial crisis very quickly became a Eurocrisis. Europe was divided in two. The Eurozone core believed that the crisis was a Lutheran morality tale. They had behaved morally by not spending more than they had, while the periphery countries had spent like there was no tomorrow. Now that the periphery was bust, it was manifestly unfair that well-behaved countries should pick up the bill. Indeed, such charity could be dangerous by encouraging repeated bad behavior in the future. By this line of thinking, the sinners should be punished and made to mend their ways. As German Chancellor Angela Merkel told French President Nicolas Sarkozy, “Chacun sa merde” (To each his own shit).8
The view from the Eurozone periphery—Ireland, Portugal, and Spain—was very different. They believed that low interest rates in the 2000s, which were a function of a single currency tailored for Germany and other large economies, had led banks in the core to lend enormous amounts to the periphery, where investors sought a higher return. When the crisis struck, and the asset bubble burst, the core banks were thus partially to blame and all European banks were at risk—not just those on the periphery but also those in core countries including Germany, Belgium, and Austria. The German government disagreed with this view, insisting that the periphery governments pick up the entire bill. They also sought to punish the periphery for their mistakes by insisting that the European Central Bank provide them with punitive loans with interest rates far beyond what the International Monetary Fund recommended. This step was salt in the wound for the Spanish, Irish, Greeks, and Portuguese, who believed they were being forced to bail out Germany and its allies for mistakes the core banks had made.
This divide defined European politics for five years. Ever so gradually, Germany supported new institutions to prevent future crises and ease the current one. This included steps toward a limited banking union, new powers for the European Central Bank to backstop the Euro, and fairer bailouts. But the German government also insisted on harsh austerity measures that stymied growth and resulted in a prolonged period of deflation and stagnation. Some austerity was required, but there were no offsetting policies to create growth. Moreover, there was to be no mutualization of debt and the banking union remained incomplete. Leading economists warned that these missing elements would cripple institution building, making the institutional backstops insufficient to prevent or deal with a future crisis. But the leaders pointed out the unforgiving politics they faced at home. The suspicion of “Europe” was so high that European voters would never agree to transfer the most sensitive fiscal and financial powers (taxation and mutualization of debt) to a central authority.
Much of the frustration had to do with protracted stagnation and no end in sight. What made the politics particularly toxic is that the German economic model has no real plan for growth. The Germans believed that their own experience with structural reform in the early 2000s was a model for others to follow even though the analogy was badly flawed.9 German Chancellor Wolfgang Schäuble has made it clear that he opposed any increase in the nominal levels of German debt even if the interest rates were effectively negative.10 This is a logic that no private-sector businessperson would think rational—after all, if you can borrow money for free and invest it for a modest return, you come out better off. The German model envisages all EU member states running current account surpluses, meaning that they would save more than they spend. But if everyone did this, the result would be another Great Depression.
The fact that the Eurozone survived intact is little cause for comfort. Early in the crisis, economists recognized that it would be irrational for a state to leave the Eurozone even if it was suffering badly inside it.11 Any advance notice, or even expectation, of an exit would cause a massive bank run, leading to the collapse of the departing country’s banking system. If the government managed to conduct the process entirely in secret or was able to establish capital controls in advance of any such expectation, those with savings in national banks would be devastated as the new currency plummeted in value. The country would have to default on its debts because it would remain denominated in euros. As a consequence, it could be locked out of international financial markets for years to come. Businesses would also fall victim to the devaluation and would likely owe money to foreign suppliers. Many would go bankrupt, thereby deepening the recession. Because all of these consequences would be attributed to the government’s decision to leave the euro, this is a political risk no leader would voluntarily take. Even the Cypriot government in 2012 and the Greek government in 2015 proved unwilling to leave the euro despite powerful economic and political incentives to do so.12
The Eurocrisis delegitimized Europe in the eyes of many of its citizens. They felt trapped in an economic straightjacket that was nevertheless suicidal to take off. It also left Europeans marooned in an extended lost decade that is worse than the stagnation Japan had dealt with in the 1990s and 2000s. As financier George Soros put it: “The European Union was meant to be a voluntary association of equals but the euro crisis turned it into a relationship between debtors and creditors where the debtors have difficulties in meeting their obligations and the creditors set the conditions that the debtors have to meet. That relationship is neither voluntary nor equal.”13 As one former senior European official put it, the European Union used to be a win-win proposition but the euro made it win-lose, which fundamentally changed the politics.14 As we shall see, Europe’s lost decade exhausted the political capital of the pro-EU camp and empowered populists and nationalists. When other crises hit, the defenses of the European Union would be stripped bare.
RUSSIA’S QUEST FOR REVENGE
As Europe was suffering through its economic crisis, Vladimir Putin had problems of his own. In 2011 and 2012, tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets to protest his return to the presidency. The drop in commodity prices had undermined his ability to deliver economic growth.15 And the West was continuing its push to expand its borders, this time by means of association agreements with Ukraine and Moldova. As Putin saw it, the international situation was as bad, if not worse, as it had been in 2007 when he made his Munich speech. The reset had been a ruse for the United States to get what it wanted from Moscow while Russia’s core interests were ignored. The situation was, he believed, untenable.
Putin would later tell a group of journalists that talks with the West were a waste of time. He had hoped to broker a compromise on thorny issues like NATO or EU enlargement but “all we heard was the same reply, like a broken record: every nation has the right to determine the security system it wants to live in and this has nothing to do with you.”16 Putin’s frustration was not with his American or European interlocutors per se but with basic principles of the liberal international order. The West would not suppress democracy in Russia’s neighboring countries to make an autocrat feel more secure. Nor would it cede a country to Russia’s sphere of influence without the consent of the people affected. Compromises of the sort that Putin envisaged represented a very different type of international order.
For most leaders, sovereignty means that every country in the world has certain rights. But that is not Putin’s definition. Putin equates sovereignty with autonomy, which means being able to provide for your own security and welfare without becoming tethered to allies or relying on larger nations.17 Thus there are only a handful of truly sovereign nations in the world. The United States is sovereign. China is sovereign. Russia is once again sovereign. And that’s about it. Many other nations have outsourced their security to the United States. Some of these, like France, the United Kingdom, and Japan—could reclaim their sovereignty if they wished. The rest could not even if they so desired. They are too small to take care of themselves. Putin does not understand why Russia, a sovereign nation in this sense, ought to be treated on a par with states like Estonia, Latvia, and even Poland. Surely, he believes, Russia ought to have a special role, one at a level equal to that of the United States and a handful of other large states.
In this sense, the European security architecture offends him: it elevates the influence of the smallest members. Russia’s only formal role is as one of fifty-four members in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). It is excluded from NATO and the European Union, where tiny states have a seat at the table. Russia had proposed a new regional security architecture to replace NATO but it was immediately dismissed out of hand by the West, which recognized it for what it was—an effort to undermine the principle of sovereign equality.18
Russia’s long-term goal is to bring about a transformation in the European security order so it more closely accords with Russia’s notion of a hierarchy of sovereign states. It has no interest in further legitimizing NATO or allowing it to consolidate its current membership even if it did not expand further. Russia wants to be consulted, and to have a veto, over all major decisions for European security, including over NATO—which it would like to see disbanded—and over EU expansion. Ultimately, Putin would like to see the European Union reduced to a customs union incapable of projecting a unified diplomatic power. Globally, Russia sees the UN Security Council as the ideal forum for managing peace and security. The structure of the council, whereby five nations are given a permanent seat with a veto, means that no decisions can ever be made without Moscow’s approval.
In the aftermath of the Ukraine crisis, many people criticized the European Union for not foreseeing and forestalling Putin’s reaction. While it is true that the European Union should have recognized Putin’s true position, the break between Putin’s Russia and the West was all but inevitable. He would challenge the status quo. It was just a matter of time. Preparations were well under way.
In late 2012, Putin appointed Valery Gerasimov, formerly a tank commander who had fought in the Chechen War, as the new chief of the Russian general (army) staff and tasked him with revising the country’s defense and mobilization plans. Shortly after taking on his new role, Gerasimov gave a speech to the general meeting of the Military Sciences Academy where representatives of the government and the leadership of the armed forces of the Russian Federation were in attendance. Gerasimov’s theme was the nature of modern warfare. He told the audience that Russians should not continue to expect that threats will come in the traditional form of an invading force:
In the twenty-first century we can observe a trend of blurring of the differences between the states of war and peace. War is not declared, and once begun, it does not follow familiar patterns. Experience of armed conflicts, including those associated with the so-called color revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East, have confirmed that a thoroughly prosperous state can in a matter of months and even days turn into an arena of fierce armed struggle, fall victim to foreign intervention, and be plunged into the abyss of chaos and humanitarian disaster, and civil war. Of course, the easiest thing of all is simply to say that the events of the “Arab spring” are not a war, so there’s nothing here for us, the military, to study. But perhaps it’s the opposite: maybe it is precisely these events that represent the typical war of the twenty-first century.19
This new type of war requires a more holistic approach to fighting than does one involving conventional military force. As Gerasimov explains, “The emphasis in the methods of confrontation being employed is shifting toward widespread use of political, economic, information, humanitarian, and other non-military measures, implemented by means of engagement of the protest potential of the population. All this is supplemented by covert military measures, including implementation of measures of information struggle and the operations of special forces. Overt use of force, often under the guise of peacekeeping and crisis management, occurs only at a certain stage, primarily to achieve definitive success in the conflict.”20
Gerasimov was telling Putin what he believed: the West was already at war with Russia—or more accurately his regime—and had been for some time. It was an unconventional or irregular war. But this did not make it any less dangerous. Russia could respond to a conventional invasion with nuclear weapons but it had fewer defenses against this type of subversion. Russia, Gerasimov concluded, “should not copy other people’s experience and try to catch up to the leading countries. Rather we should try to overtake them and ourselves be in the lead.”21 There are signs that Russian forces were doing exactly that. As four senior U.S. Army officers told the U.S. Senate in testimony on Russia’s military challenge, “It is clear that while our army was engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq, Russia studied US capabilities and vulnerabilities and embarked on an ambitious and largely successful modernization program.”22
Putin put Gerasimov’s advice into effect in Ukraine in 2014. He saw the European Union’s Association Agreement with Kiev as the latest manifestation of the external threat to Russia. When he pressured Kiev to pull out of the accession agreement, there were massive protests that toppled the government. Putin was then faced with a dilemma. He could watch as Ukraine was “lost” to Russia forever, or he could act. And act he did. Russia’s swift military action stunned those Western observers who had dismissed Russia as a third-rate power in decline. These observers had focused on poorly trained conscripts and rusting naval vessels but missed a concerted effort to strengthen Russia’s deployable power in specific areas, especially in highly trained special forces. This began after the invasion of Georgia in 2008 when the Kremlin was surprised with how poorly its forces performed. Moscow had the military cut the number of conscripts, improve training, streamline command and control, and purchase new equipment.23 In Crimea, it deployed special forces to create the illusion of a popular revolt against Kiev and gain control. The United States and the European Union were stunned but expected Putin to maintain deniability and a distance. He surprised the West again, however, by announcing that he was annexing Crimea. It was the first such act in Europe since World War II.
Russia’s invasion of Crimea has been referred to in terms implying novelty—the Gerasimov Doctrine, hybrid war, special war, little green men, and grey zone warfare. But in truth it is not new and such labels can be misleading.24 Military powers have long made use of fifth-column organizations composed of their ethnic minorities in neighboring states. They have also used infiltration, political subversion, and aggressive intelligence operations. The United States, the Soviet Union, France, Great Britain, Israel, Hezbollah, and many others have used these tactics. It would be wrong to suggest that this is Putin’s innovation. But it is equally wrong to dismiss it as old hat. The fact that Russia is using such tactics in post–Cold War Europe is in fact new. NATO has not had to cope with such provocations for some time. And this type of calibrated aggression poses special challenges.
Putin took the opportunity afforded to him by his operation in Crimea to press his case against the United States and its liberal order. In a speech on March 18, 2014, announcing the annexation of Crimea, Putin said:
After the dissolution of bipolarity on the planet, we no longer have stability. Key international institutions are not getting any stronger; on the contrary, in many cases, they are sadly degrading. Our western partners, led by the United States of America, prefer not to be guided by international law in their practical policies, but by the rule of the gun. They have come to believe in their exclusivity and exceptionalism, that they can decide the destinies of the world, that only they can ever be right. They act as they please: here and there, they use force against sovereign states, building coalitions based on the principle “If you are not with us, you are against us.” To make this aggression look legitimate, they force the necessary resolutions from international organizations, and if for some reason this does not work, they simply ignore the UN Security Council and the UN overall.25
For Putin, the United States had destabilized the Middle East and unleashed new generations of Islamist terrorists. It was holding international institutions hostage for its strategic ambition. It had brought the global economy to the brink of ruin. Putin would make this argument repeatedly in the years that followed. He sought to rally the non-Western world to his cause. As Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy observed, “Putin made it a priority to seek out and associate with countries that wanted to chip away at the unipolar system and dilute the influence of the United States regionally and globally.”26 And he had some success. He persuaded the other BRICS nations (Brazil, India, China, and South Africa) to abstain on a UN General Assembly resolution condemning the annexation. Although Russia had been expelled from the G8, Putin attended the BRICS summit in Rio in July 2014 and was greeted as a friend with nary a word of criticism leveled against him.
As we shall see in Chapter 5, the European Union and the United States would retaliate against Putin with sanctions. The sanctions were imposed shortly before a dramatic drop in the price of oil, which magnified the impact of the sanctions on the Russian economy. Putin is nothing if not a retribution-oriented player. For Putin, the sanctions were further confirmation of a declaration of war. From that point forward, he would take every opportunity to weaken the European Union. He would use internal subversion, covert funding of anti-EU political parties, and information warfare. The stage was set for a protracted period of conflict during which Putin would use all the means at his disposal, including force, to advance his agenda.
Putin did not neglect more conventional forms of hard power. In fact, he saw hard power as his key advantage against the European Union, which was a soft-power superpower with little stomach for real combat. Thus Russia has massively increased its probing of Western defenses, such as buzzing NATO ships and flying over NATO airspace. Russia has also invested in its nuclear forces for the past decade—especially by building smaller and more usable nuclear weapons—to offset NATO’s conventional superiority. It has adopted the “escalate to deescalate doctrine,” which envisages the early use of nuclear weapons in a limited war to demonstrate Russia’s superior willpower and to compel NATO to back down.27 Russia has also carried out massive military exercises that involve the first use of tactical nuclear weapons.28 These high-risk policies are a marked departure from the fragile stability provided by mutual assured destruction during the Cold War.
Meanwhile, Russia has slid into authoritarianism and increasingly into dictatorship. The Russian government has cracked down on the media, brought criminal charges against investigative reporters, and launched a major propaganda campaign. Putin’s government also has suppressed political opposition, with leading opponents of the regime killed under mysterious circumstances in Russia and even abroad, or imprisoned on trumped-up charges. Throughout the Russian government, power has become increasingly centralized and corruption has become pervasive. Immigrants, ethnic minorities, and the LGBT community all face discrimination and widespread harassment.
Putin also has a political strategy to weaken democracy and advance authoritarianism overseas. He is oddly embraced by fellow strongmen the world over—including Abdel el-Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an before the two had a falling out over Syria—as the de facto leader of a counter-revolutionary alliance against American-style liberal democracy. He has cast himself as the protector of traditional values against a decadent West. As we shall see later in this chapter, he is covertly funding far-right populists throughout the European Union, including the National Front in France, and is stoking the flames of nationalism and xenophobia. And he has pioneered the use of innovative cyber attacks, such as the selective hacking of American political actors in 2016 to influence the course of Western elections.
Putin understands that to advance his agenda in Europe he needs new friends and partners. He has sought to diversify Russia’s foreign relations away from the West and build ties with other nations. He has worked with the BRICS, he has tried to build a partnership with Beijing, and he has explored openings to Japan and several other countries. These initiatives have not compensated for the loss in wealth from economic war with the West, and have not been without their difficulties, but they have nevertheless helped reduce pressure on Russia and advance Putin’s agenda.
The unmistakable fact is that the European Union now faces a troublesome, well-resourced, revisionist power on its border. Putin’s Russia may appear locked into a long-term economic decline, borne out of its inability to reform and modernize and its poor demographic outlook, but it will not go quietly. The combination of acute domestic insecurity, an external soft-power threat, and an exposed underbelly has produced a nationalist and aggressive Russia that is determined to use its hard power to revise the European security order.29
Some argue that Russia’s trajectory of decline and Putin’s own insecurity show that these are not long-term threats but a continuation of Russian imperialism’s association with Russian insecurity. As Henry Kissinger writes, as far back as the seventeenth century, prior to the modern state system, “Russia’s failure to dominate its surroundings … had exposed it to the Mongol invasions and plunged it into its nightmarish ‘Time of troubles.’” Indeed, when asked to define Russia’s foreign policy, a mid-seventeenth-century minister to Czar Alexei answered, “expanding the state in every direction.”30 In the second half of the eighteenth century, Catherine the Great saw authoritarian rule as the only means of holding together the vast Russian state; any other form of government, in her view, would lead to “its entire ruin.”31 In May 1944, as the Soviet Union began to plan to dominate Eastern Europe once the war ended, George Kennan wrote, “Behind Russia’s stubborn expansion lies only the age-old sense of insecurity of a sedentary people reared on an exposed plain in the neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples.”32
Putin’s challenge to the European order has ebbed and flowed. By the summer of 2015, it seemed to be ebbing. Europe appeared to have come to grips with the Ukraine crisis, at least in the short term. The unified front on sanctions held together. Europe also dodged an economic bullet in June 2015 when it averted a Greek exit from the Eurozone. The deal reached was flawed and exacerbated many of the fault lines in the European project, but catastrophe was avoided. So European leaders could have been forgiven for allowing themselves to think the worst was over. But it was still to come. The third shoe was about to drop, and drop hard.
By the summer of 2015, the Syrian civil war had raged on for over four years with more than 200,000 dead (the figure now well exceeds 400,000).33 Europe had had to cope with the return of foreign fighters and some refugee flows but these challenges had never topped the political agenda. In July and August, however, the refugee flow began to pick up. Violence and disorder escalated, making a normal life impossible. Some destinations—Lebanon, Jordan—began to tighten their borders, while others, like Libya, became more dangerous. Consequently, refugees ventured west and across the Mediterranean. Europe tried to stop the flow, especially at sea. They ceased search and rescue operations, in the hope that migrants would be deterred by the dangers of the journey. But most were not. Thousands died.
Few noticed this crisis until September 2, when the body of a three-year-old Syrian boy named Aylan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach near Bodrum. He was one of twelve people who had died after a boat of refugees capsized on its way from Turkey to the Greek island of Kos. Aylan was discovered face down in the sand, dressed in a red t-shirt and blue shorts, as the waves lapped around his head. The powerful picture shocked the world. His death caused a change in public opinion. Western governments suddenly found themselves under great pressure to do more. In the United States, even Donald Trump, then in the throes of his presidential campaign, said the situation was “so horrible on a humanitarian basis” that he would consider letting Syrian refugees in to the country (Trump would reverse himself within a couple of weeks).34 Aylan would be one of 3,770 refugees who died at sea in 2015.35
The day after Aylan’s image captured the world’s attention, Merkel gave a speech at Bern University that would help secure her position as Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. She promised that Germany would take in Syrian refugees and dispense with the normal legal requirements. Merkel’s catchphrase “Wir schaffen das” (We can manage this) would become famous in Germany and define her approach. Refugees interpreted her speech as a green light and turned up in Germany in unprecedented numbers. By November, Germany was receiving 10,000 refugees a day. The number for 2015 would reach 800,000—four times the figure for 2014—with another million expected in 2016 if the rules did not change.36
The refugee crisis would quickly dominate European politics. It was not obvious why. After all, the Syrian refugee flows are large but not unprecedented. The flows from the Balkans, Rwanda, and Somalia in the 1990s were greater. So why is this a crisis when previous flows were manageable? One reason is that the Balkan refugees were more widely dispersed—many went outside of Europe and those who came to the European Union settled in a number of countries. But there is another, more important factor. The 2015 refugee crisis came at a moment when the European Union was gravely weakened from the Eurocrisis and from its renewed rivalry with Russia. The institutions of the European Union had reached breaking point. Domestic politics had taken a turn for the worse, with populists well situated to take advantage of a new crisis. And Europe had to deal with unhelpful external actors, especially Russia and Turkey, both of which tried to exploit Europe’s vulnerabilities for their own ends.
It did not help that European institutions were woefully inadequate to handle the challenge. The EU member countries had abolished many of their internal borders—by means of the Schengen Agreement—but they had not established common external border controls. Refugees to the European Union were governed by the Dublin Convention, which stated that refugees were the responsibility of the EU state in which they first arrived. The Dublin Convention was utterly overwhelmed by the Syrian crisis. States on Europe’s southern border—Greece, Hungary, and Romania—were unable to cope with hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers. There were calls to reform the system so that all European countries would share the burden fairly, but this effort failed for one simple reason: no leader could afford politically to bail out the others. German diplomats would admit privately that they stopped asking for EU burden sharing because they knew there was no chance it would happen and worried that it would undermine public support for European integration.37
The refugee crisis underscored that costs—whether banking debt or the burdens of taking in refugees—are nationalized in the European Union. There is no solidarity. The state that gets left holding the can has to keep it. In this context it could come as no surprise that governments began to act unilaterally to stem the flow to their states. In early 2016, the Danish government announced that refugees would have to give up their possessions or savings in exchange for state assistance. The world was outraged, especially since Denmark is usually held up as a model of social democracy, but the government achieved its objective—namely, to send a message that Denmark is not an attractive destination.
The refugee crisis was bad enough by November 2015, but it soon became much worse as it merged with another element of the collapse of the southern order—terrorism. Europe was already on edge. The year 2015 had gotten off to a bloody start when three armed men invaded the Paris office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and killed eleven people. This was merely prologue for what was to follow.
Shortly after 9:00 p.m. on Friday, November 14, a man wearing a suicide vest tried to enter Stade de France, where French President François Hollande was attending a friendly soccer game between France and Germany. A security guard detected the vest and the man blew himself up outside. A sense of uneasiness descended on the stadium as spectators tweeted the unusual sound. The game continued while the president was rushed out. Meanwhile, two other attacks were unfolding in popular Paris nightlife spots, which were packed with young people out on a Friday night. Shooters opened fire with semi-automatic weapons on Le Carillon bar in the 10th arrondissement, killing fifteen and injuring another fifteen. Three other restaurants and bars—Café Bonne Bière and La Casa Nostra pizzeria, which were beside each other, and La Belle Equipe bar to the south—came under attack, with terrorists killing another twenty-four people there.
The last of these shootings was reported at 9:34 p.m. Six minutes later, three terrorists in their twenties wearing suicide vests entered the Bataclan Theater in the 11th arrondissement where the American band Eagles of Death Metal was playing to a packed house of 1,500. They opened fire on the crowd, killing eighty-nine. By the end of the night, 134 people would be dead. French President François Hollande said, bluntly, that France was at war.
But at war with whom? France’s problem has less to do with radical Islam and more to do with what the French scholar Olivier Roy calls the Islamization of radicalization.38 What Roy means is that France’s terrorism problem derives from alienated second- and third-generation young Muslims who feel detached from French society and have fallen in with a radical ideology offering purpose and meaning. Their radicalization process is similar to that experienced by members of the Baader-Meinhof Gang in the 1970s or by other radicals. Most are not particularly pious. Indeed, one of the Paris attackers was a twenty-six-year-old woman named Hasna Aitboulahcen who was described as a former party girl and recreational drug user until she became radicalized only six months before the attack. Syria and ISIS gave these alienated and disaffected youths a mission and a purpose.
In Berlin, Merkel was out on a political limb. Days after the Paris attack, German authorities foiled an assault on a German football game in Hanover at which members of the German cabinet, including Merkel, were due to attend. The game was abandoned after credible intelligence of an attack was received. On New Year’s Eve, Germany faced another problem when more than a thousand young men of North African and Middle Eastern descent assaulted dozens of women in Cologne. Because they were operating in large groups, police were overwhelmed and it proved very difficult to identify the individuals involved. According to an internal police report, “women, accompanied or not, literally ran a ‘gauntlet’ through masses of heavily intoxicated men that words cannot describe.”39 In the following days, details were slow to emerge as the media and authorities were reluctant to hype the incident out of concern that it could lead to a backlash against migrants. If this was the strategy, it backfired. Merkel found herself under increasing pressure from all sides.
After the attacks in Paris many Europeans saw Russia, and the Russian September 2015 intervention in Syria, as part of the solution. In fact, it quickly became part of the problem. Russia’s pretext was ostensibly about fighting ISIS, but the driving motivation was to protect Assad’s regime and deal Russia in to any negotiations about the future of Syria. From the European Union’s perspective, the Russian move made the refugee crisis much worse. The single most important cause of refugee flows from Syria has been Assad, not ISIS. Russia helped shore up his power and created thousands more refugees every week. In early February 2016, Russian tanks, artillery, and airpower helped lay siege to Aleppo, resulting in over 70,000 people leaving the city with tens of thousands poised to follow. The refugee inflows into Europe actually served Russia’s interests and Putin may well have seen the increase in these flows as an added benefit of his intervention in Syria—the refugees made European countries more desperate and more open to working with Russia and to accepting Assad’s demands. Meanwhile, Russia played both sides of the fence and exacerbated populist sentiment. The state media hyped up stories of refugee crimes in Western Europe. EU officials suspected that Russian intelligence was directly involved in steering refugees to EU member countries while it also covertly funded and backed anti-immigrant far-right parties including the National Front, Pediga, and the Euroskeptic Alternative for Germany (AfD).40
The crisis to Europe’s south is not primarily a humanitarian problem although it has a significant humanitarian dimension. It is also not primarily a terror problem although that is an important element of it. Europe’s exposure to its southern neighborhood is, at its heart, a geopolitical problem. It is rooted in the collapse of the Middle East regional order. Russia’s intervention was one part of that drama. The changing stance of the United States in the Middle East was another. Washington’s reluctance to intervene in Syria would greatly complicate Europe’s options.
BREXIT
The fourth crisis was the culmination of a decades-old problem that had hitherto been brushed under the carpet. Euroskepticism has deep roots in Britain, especially in the Conservative Party. Divisions over the European Union contributed to the downfall of Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major and bitterly divided Conservatives during their years in opposition. Euroskepticism was also a constant thorn in the side of other European leaders who found their project of integration disrupted, thwarted, and stymied by a recalcitrant Great Britain. Yet the European Union always found a way to muddle through. The euro even seemed to make things easier, at least for a while, because it showed that the rest of the European Union could proceed without Britain.
David Cameron was determined to avoid the fate of his predecessors and sought to put an end to Conservative divisions on Europe. He did so by embracing Euroskepticism. Cameron was a critic of the European Union and a strong opponent of joining the euro. He hoped this would be sufficient, and if the past was any guide it should have been. But the goalposts began to shift during the Eurocrisis. Euroskeptics were no longer campaigning against membership of the euro; they increasingly wanted to leave the European Union altogether. Facing an additional challenge from the UK Independence Party, Cameron tried to head Euroskeptics off at the pass and proposed to hold a referendum on membership if he was elected to a second term. Some people believe that Cameron never intended to have to hold a referendum because he believed he would be the prime minister of a coalition government and that his governing partners, the Liberal Democrats, would insist on abandoning the pledge. In a classic case of being careful what you wish for, Cameron unexpectedly won an outright majority in the general election of 2015 and had no way of avoiding a referendum. He would have to win it.
Cameron’s strategy was straightforward but flawed. He accepted the premise that membership in the European Union was a bad deal for Britain but he promised to negotiate better terms that would make membership worthwhile. Everybody knew that the negotiations were designed to provide Cameron with a fig leaf to justify his change of heart. He won some new concessions but was hamstrung by the fact that Britain already had a good deal—it had exemptions from the passport free zone (known as the Schengen zone) and the euro. Cameron trumpeted the negotiations as a great triumph but after hearing the government lambast the European Union for years, many voters were unconvinced. The refugee crisis and concerns about immigration were the primary issues in the campaign and worked in favor of Leave. The weakness of the Labour Party, which normally could be counted on to campaign strongly in favor of EU membership; the hostility of the press; and continued stagnation in the European economy all played a role in the outcome.
The result—a Leave win by 52 percent to 48 percent—was a surprise. Betting markets had estimated a 90 percent chance of a Remain win just before the polls had closed.41 Most people expected a shift toward Remain out of an abundance of caution, but it was not to be. The result shocked Britain and Europe. Cameron resigned and six weeks of political bloodletting in the Conservative Party followed, which ended with Theresa May becoming prime minister. It quickly became apparent that there was no plan about how Britain could leave the European Union. It was also clear that the European Union’s framework for a country to leave was woefully inadequate. Drafters of the Lisbon Treaty provided for a two-year negotiation under Article 50, but the timeline they chose was completely arbitrary and did not allow for parallel negotiations about future relations between the exiting state and the rest of the European Union.
Brexit worsened the crisis of European integration. It showed that a country can leave if it wants to. It made it less likely that the European Union would be able to act as one against Russia, because Britain was a leading voice for tough sanctions. It tilted domestic politics throughout the European Union toward stricter limits on immigration and refugees. It raised the prospect of an economic downturn in Britain and the rest of the European Union. Moreover, it all but guaranteed that Europe’s leaders would spend much of the next five years locked in extremely difficult negotiations about the European Union’s future.
AMERICA’S DECLINING INTEREST IN EUROPE
Europe has long complained about U.S. strategy in the Middle East, seeing it as overly militaristic, simplistic, and ineffective. But the great paradox is that Europe, despite these complaints and its long-standing associations with the region, has outsourced its Middle East strategy to Washington. For years, Europe avoided developing the capability to influence developments in the region. European states cut back their militaries, assuming that the Americans would take care of any threats. But Europe has been hugely vulnerable to the effects of the Syrian conflict, while the United States is far less directly exposed. Syrians—whether refugees or fighters—cannot easily travel the approximately six thousand miles, including across the Atlantic Ocean, to reach the United States. As the situation in the Middle East deteriorated, President Obama decided that the instability in Syria and Iraq did not directly threaten U.S. interests in a way that merits the costs of a greater intervention, which he thought would likely not succeed in any case. The infamous red line episode of September 2013 when Obama called off air strikes against Syrian regime targets was greeted with dismay in Paris. The consequent worsening of the situation, however, actually reinforced Obama’s calculus.
The Syrian civil war does directly threaten vital EU interests, as we have seen with the massive refugee flows in the autumn of 2015 and the ISIS attacks on Paris and Brussels. Europe found itself in the position of having to rely on the United States at precisely the point when many Americans questioned whether stabilizing the Middle East is possible or worth the cost. The inconvenient truth may well be that U.S. interests are simply not at stake in the region to the degree that Europe’s are. Europe was left hoping it could persuade the United States to act in a way compatible with European interests, but there was little sign that it even knows what it wants Washington to do.
Obama also worried that greater U.S. involvement could increase tensions with Moscow and create a U.S.-Russia confrontation. In fact, the United States concentrated on the Russia angle in its diplomacy on Syria and marginalized Europe. The U.S. focus on ISIS meant that some in the United States believed the Russian offensive was compatible with U.S. interests, even though it made the refugee problem worse.
Frustration with the United States over the refugee crisis was just one element of a growing transatlantic divide. When the Obama administration announced its pivot to Asia, many Europeans felt that it was a pivot away from Europe. The administration, particularly senior officials working on Asia, went to great lengths to explain that it was a pivot with Europeans and not away from Europe. But while it is true that the architects of the pivot did not intend it to be a shift away from the transatlantic alliance, it is also true that President Obama reduced America’s engagement with Europe over the course of his two terms.
The prism through which President Obama looked at Europe was shaped by the principle that everyone ought to tend their own garden.42 According to this principle, Europeans are wealthy and well-equipped with the means to deal with their own challenges, if they show leadership and political will. Europe’s travails are its own fault and responsibility, and it must find its own way out. The United States can help, but it will take a back seat: Europe must lead. If the situation in Europe threatened core U.S. interests, Obama would make his views known—as his Treasury Department did over the question of Greek exit from the Eurozone, which could have destabilized the global economy, and as he did on Brexit—but otherwise, Obama felt that the United States should leave the European Union to Europe.
This was a significant shift. Previous American presidents have directly engaged Europeans on European integration. George H. W. Bush sat down with Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand to agree on German reunification. Bill Clinton worked closely with John Major, Tony Blair, and Gerhard Schroeder on NATO expansion and the future of the Balkans. Even George W. Bush built close ties to several European leaders, particularly Tony Blair, and he drove the expansion of NATO to include the Baltics. Prior to the end of the Cold War, American presidents always saw European integration as a core U.S. interest. Indeed, the United States was a pivotal player in the creation of the European Economic Community in 1956. Washington did not do Europe’s work for it; it was not a question of all or nothing. Rather, successive administrations believed that the United States had to make a steady investment in European integration to protect its interests over the long term.
The absence of the United States from the process of European integration has created a vacuum that Europe’s leaders have been unable to fill. The European Union has only one leader of any real stature—Angela Merkel. Merkel played a vital role in responding to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, but she also made several mistakes. As we saw earlier, the German government’s choices worsened the euro crisis and exacerbated the divisions within the European Union. She also reinforced Obama’s desire to remain aloof from the European Union, which deepened America’s disengagement.
European frustrations with Obama seemed to pale into insignificance in comparison with what would come next. Donald Trump was elected to the presidency after calling NATO’s original mission obsolete, questioning the mutual defense clause Article 5, criticizing Merkel directly for her handling of the refugee crisis, and embracing Nigel Farage, the UK nationalist who spearheaded the effort to extract Britain from the European Union. Trump’s presidency is likely to put great strain on the transatlantic alliance and will exacerbate all of the crises that Europe was already facing.
A PERFECT STORM IN EUROPE
This series of stunning events means that security competition has returned to Europe. The European Union finds itself weakened by several crises, both internally and externally driven, and faces a revisionist Russia and a growing terrorist threat. Meanwhile, the United States has reduced its engagement with its allies and appears to hold the view that they should handle their problems largely on their own. It is easy to point out that European nations could deal with these challenges by increasing their cooperation, deepening integration, and spending more on defense. Europe could build a real economic union—with common taxes, debt, and spending plans—and establish EU control of its borders with an equitable distribution of refugees throughout its member nations. It could take a common position toward Russia and speak with one voice on critical foreign-policy questions. In effect, European countries could create a United States of Europe. But this will not happen because the politics are too toxic. Calling for such a union is only marginally less fanciful than calling for world government. As these crises continue, the domestic politics become even less hospitable to a great leap forward in integration, even if it could help. Trust is gone. Voters are turning to those politicians who promise to defend the national interest. Even if nationalists do not make it into government, they are powerful enough to stop major treaty change in its tracks. At best, left to its own devices, Europe is doomed to a prolonged period of drift and introspection.
As it struggles to cope with its problems, the European Union will face a motivated and able rival. Putin has shown himself capable of strategic surprise. As he told the Valdai Forum in 2015, “The streets of Leningrad taught me one thing, if a fight is inevitable you should punch first.”43 He annexed Crimea, invaded the Donbass, and intervened in Syria—each time surprising and wrong-footing Western leaders. His intelligence forces were more active still, interfering most notably in American and European domestic politics, but they left few fingerprints. As Putin’s position becomes less secure, he is likely to take great risks to advance Russia’s position and weaken its rivals. These could occur in any of a number of places—the Baltics, the Balkans, Cyprus, Lebanon, or Libya, to mention but a few. Putin sees the European Union as a threat to his vital interests and he would like to weaken it and the transatlantic alliance as much as possible. He certainly wants to work with individual European leaders, but on his own terms and preferably bilaterally. If Russia’s economic predicament worsens, he will grow more confrontational and more willing to embark on risky maneuvers.
The penny has certainly dropped in Europe that it is in trouble and needs help. In January 2016 the Guardian, a left-of-center newspaper that is frequently critical of the United States, ran an opinion piece—by the former executive editor of Le Monde, no less—headlined “Europe is in crisis. Once more, America will have to step in to save us.”44 The debate had come full circle. Ten months later, on November 8, 2016, America would give its answer—you’re on your own.
As we will see in Chapters 6 and 7, the United States has a fundamental choice to make about the role that it will play in Europe over the next decade. On the one hand are strategies of restraint. The United States can argue that it has enough problems of its own. European nations are wealthy and capable and should take care of their own neighborhood. On the other hand is a choice that I call “responsible competition”—a deepening of U.S. engagement in order to strengthen the European order and push back against Russia.
Responsible competition includes providing active support for European integration, playing an intermediary role to produce a Brexit agreement that results in a strong and independent United Kingdom and a successful EU, bolstering democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, strengthening deterrence of Russian aggression, countering Russian efforts to interfere in Western politics, and deepening economic cooperation with the EU through a reformed and much more expansive Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Success in Europe has been at the heart of America’s success internationally since World War II. For a while, that success seemed to have its own momentum, but now the United States must play an active, supportive role to keep it moving.