This year’s Munich Security Conference (February 17-19) brought together leaders from all over the world to discuss the current state of global affairs and the transatlantic defense partnership. Julianne Smith, Director of the Strategy and Statecraft Program at the Center for a New American Security, attended the conference. She spoke to The Cipher Brief’s Kaitlin Lavinder about the major takeaways for European and transatlantic security.
Julianne Smith: The top five main takeaways would be one, the administration was trying very hard to convince the European audience that it will remain committed to the transatlantic relationship, and many folks in the audience were skeptical that that message truly came from the President himself.
Two, I think that both the audience and the speakers were under the impression that the West is facing enormous challenges right now, both internally and externally. There are a number of weak economies in Europe, there are counterterrorism challenges, there is aggression from Russia, there’s the mass migration issue that still is ever-present. And so there’s this feeling that all of the institutions that we’ve created – institutions like the EU and NATO – are in trouble and national governments are in trouble, and that publics on both sides of the Atlantic have lost faith in those institutions and the ability for their governments to deliver.
Three, folks from London were there to try and calm frayed nerves over the future of Brexit. I think the British Foreign Minister was adamant in trying to convince the audience that while the UK is leaving the EU, we don’t have much to worry about. Britain will still be a partner to the European Union. I’m not sure that everybody found that terribly convincing.
Four, we had the Russians come – the Russian Foreign Minister – and they were suggesting kind of a new post-Western order. We don’t know what that means. But the basic message was everything you guys created after World War II is no longer relevant, and we need something new and different, and, by the way, Russia isn’t to be blamed for any of this.
And lastly, there were an array of other guests there from around the world. We heard from the Chinese, we heard from the Iranians. Many other corners of the world were represented, either to make the case that they should not be made out as bad guys and that they’re not causing instability in their neighborhood, or to send the message that they want to be a strong partner to Europe, they want to work with Europe and the United States. And again I think many of those messages were not taken that seriously.
TCB: Was there anything, besides those five points that you just outlined, that surprised you from the conference?
JS: No, nothing surprised me that much. I expected U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis to come and to tell Europeans to spend more on defense – that’s a message that we’ve been delivering to our allies for several years now, several decades even. So Europe was expecting to hear that.
I was hoping that more people would take questions. Vice President [Mike] Pence opted not to take questions, so that was disappointing.
I expected the German government to be a little more on message on the 2 percent target for defense spending. All NATO allies are asked to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense, and many of them don’t meet that target – in fact, most of them don’t meet that target. German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke and the Defense Minister from Germany spoke, and they both talked about how important it is for Germany to move toward that target, but their Foreign Minister, who’s from a different political party, seemed more skeptical. So you did see a little bit of a divide in terms of their messaging on that issue.
And I guess the last point I’ll make is Bono came this year, which was different. The conference doesn’t always attract Hollywood stars or rock stars, so it was interesting to see Bono address the audience. He was making the case for all of the good work he does in association with the One Foundation and talking about the need for us to deal with the needs primarily in the developing world.
But otherwise, it was fairly predictable in how it unfolded.
TCB: You mentioned the slight divide in the German message at the conference. Was there any divide in the message coming from the Americans? I’m thinking specifically of the speech that Senator John McCain gave. He didn’t directly address the Trump Administration, but he seemed to allude to issues with the Administration. How do you think participants took that?
JS: I think McCain’s speech was very well received. Senator McCain gave a very heart-warming speech about the value of the West, why we need to stand together, why we’re not in decline, how we have to challenge ourselves to do better. People really appreciated that, because while the Vice President, Mattis, and U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly were all saying reassuring things, there’s still this level of skepticism that what they’re saying does not reflect the views of the White House.
For McCain, it’s different. He’s representing himself, and yet people know that he’s widely respected in Congress and by many Americans on both sides of the aisle. It wasn’t that he was contradicting what Pence was saying, he was going beyond it. He was talking about values. Pence didn’t spend much time talking about values. He didn’t mention the European Union.
McCain did challenge the President. They asked him in interviews afterward what he thought about Trump’s tweets over the weekend that the press is the enemy of the people. He was very critical of those remarks and talked about how in his view that’s something a dictator or an autocrat would do.
TCB: Moving away from the conference, Germany and France seem to be the two countries in Europe that are really taking the lead in promoting more European security cooperation. Is this assessment accurate? And if so, why these two countries? Can these countries convince the other European allies, Hungary or Poland for example, to go along with an idea of more European security cooperation?
JS: The EU’s going to have a lot on its plate in the years ahead. The Brexit process is going to take at least two years, and it’ll be very hard to launch new initiatives inside the EU while it’s grappling with Brexit. I think Germany and France will try to make the case that Europeans need to focus more on their security, and they’ll try to do that both within NATO and European channels. But the European Union has been talking about enhancing its defense and security cooperation inside the EU for many years. And frankly it’s only made modest progress.
Now, that said, the Trump Administration and its disparaging remarks about NATO and the EU may serve as a tipping point and may inspire countries to do more and invest more in either institution – the EU or NATO – or just nationally, which would benefit both institutions. But I think we have to wait and see exactly how consuming Brexit’s going to be for the EU. They may find that that alone is going to keep them occupied for quite some time and prevent them from focusing on some sort of new big buildup in the security and defense arena inside the EU.
I’m not a total skeptic. I’m not prepared to say it won’t work. Just in past experience though, in other moments when the EU has been engaged with something, say the Lisbon Treaty years ago, it’s hard for the EU to build momentum behind other new initiatives when it’s grappling with something as big and existential as Brexit.
TCB: Do you think that within NATO, the Europeans could work more on security cooperation in the coming years? I ask this because I followed some of the NATO defense ministers’ meetings just before Munich, and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said NATO is going to review its command structure to meet a new external threat environment. To me, that almost sounds like maybe looking at the Framework Nations Groupings and figuring out how the Europeans can cooperate more closely on training and exercises. What do you think about that? What does that mean?
JS: NATO doesn’t get enough credit. NATO has done more to transform itself since the end of the Cold War than any other multilateral institution or military alliance that I can think of. And it has had several iterations. It had 1.0 of just dealing with collective security during the Cold War.
It had 2.0, which was more expeditionary and focused on counterterrorism operations in the wake of 9/11 and getting more engaged in places like Afghanistan. It also focused on training missions, like with Iraqi military forces, and conducting counter-piracy missions off the coast of Somalia.
And then it had 3.0, which was about enhanced partnerships with its enlargement process. This process has been ongoing since the 1990s, and NATO has enhanced its partnerships with countries like Sweden and Australia, but also Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.
And now there’s 4.0, which is kind of let’s do it all: let’s enhance the work we’re doing in collective security and pay attention to the needs within our borders, particularly in light of Russian aggression, but also let’s be out in the world and addressing southern threats and migration and counterterrorism and ISIL and all the rest.
NATO deserves a lot more credit than many people are willing to give that institution. It has shown an ability to change, and I think Stoltenberg’s exactly right to say it will continue to change. They have ideas on how to address readiness. They want to get to the heart of some of the counterterrorism challenges, they want to do more about the challenges in the south, and I believe many allies think they didn’t do enough at the Warsaw Summit. I think they will be more active in the Black Sea, update their maritime strategy, look at their counterterrorism initiatives, and try to move defense spending faster.
I have faith in the NATO alliance and in its ability to change. Sometimes, we get frustrated. We feel its too sluggish, too bureaucratic. We roll our eyes and crack jokes about its inefficiencies. But the reality is that’s an institution that has already proved to itself and to the world that it can reform and adapt, and we should look back on what it’s done since 1989 and expect that it is able to learn from a changing security environment and find new tools and capabilities.
It needs to do more in the area of cyber. It needs to do more in terms of intel-sharing. It knows where it needs to go and I’m confident it will. I think the only thing that could stop that progress is if the allies get the impression that Trump’s going to give up on the alliance. If America gives up on NATO, then it’s going to stop adapting and reforming. The reason it has been able to adapt and reform is because the Americans have been there to help push the alliance along and work with our allies to bring about change.
Without America’s support, it doesn’t happen on its own.
TCB: But the message from the Americans at the Munich conference was that, as of now at least, they are committed to the NATO alliance, correct?
JS: Yes, and that message was resoundingly clear: we’d like you to spend more on defense, but our commitment to the alliance is unwavering, and it will be here throughout this administration. You shouldn’t question our commitment. People heard that.
Again, they’re just not sure Trump believes it, and we won’t know until Trump shows up at the NATO summit in May. Until then, we won’t really know what he thinks.
It would have been nice if he tweeted over the weekend, “I sent Pence to Munich to deliver a message on NATO.” That would have gone far to convincing the Europeans that, in fact, that was his message, but he never said that. There were four U.S. Cabinet members in Europe at the same time – Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was also in Germany, but not in Munich – and Trump never once mentioned it on Twitter.
