The United States and its transatlantic Allies enter the 21st century as the strongest force for peace and freedom the world has ever known. By supporting democracy and freedom in places such as the former Yugoslavia, the people of Europe and North America have demonstrated the power of their shared values. In this report, the Department of Defense (DoD) outlines U.S. strategy to prepare ourselves and our Allies to meet 21st century challenges within the transatlantic community and to strengthen this community's contribution to global security.
Our strategy to preserve the security and stability of the transatlantic community in the future is based on certain overarching principles and realities:
- Transatlantic security is indivisible. The United States has a permanent and vital national interest in preserving the security of our European and Canadian Allies. Conversely, our Allies in Europe recognize that their security is inextricably tied to that of North America. While there are many dimensions to the transatlantic security relationship, the presence of significant and highly capable U.S. military forces in Europe will remain, for the foreseeable future, a critical linchpin. Behind that presence stands the full array of U.S.-based conventional forces, America's unsurpassed nuclear deterrent, our formidable economic power, and our demonstrated political will to defend democratic ideals and values.
- The transatlantic community should include all of Europe, and multiple institutions and relationships will be necessary to unite that community. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU)-the leading pillars of this community-have enlarged their respective memberships in recent years. We are fully confident that they will enlarge again. Throughout these separate but mutually reinforcing enlargement processes, Americans and Europeans also must work together to strengthen cooperative security, economic, and political relations with countries that, for a variety of reasons, might not become NATO or EU members in the next few years. Complementary American and European efforts will be particularly important to achieve stable, positive relations with the Russian Federation and Ukraine, since it is in our mutual interest to bring these countries steadily closer to Euro-Atlantic structures.
- The United States welcomes European efforts to increase their contribution to collective defense and crisis response operations within NATO and to build a capability to act militarily under the EU where NATO as a whole is not engaged. These efforts are part of Europe's longstanding and natural trend toward greater cooperation and deeper union in economic, monetary, social, and political matters, a trend supported by the United States since the early post-World War II period. America's leadership role has adjusted before to changes in Europe, and we are prepared to adapt ourselves in the future to work with stronger, more versatile, and more united European partners.
- To ensure transatlantic security in the future, the United States and its Allies must improve defense capabilities in the fields most relevant to modern warfare. Operation Allied Force reinforced the fact that we need more deployable, sustainable, interoperable and flexible forces to engage effectively in a wide variety of situations. The United States is already moving to address these requirements, and we look to the rest of NATO to do its share. This effort will not be cost-free. All Allies have the responsibility to match their rhetoric with real resources. In many cases this will require increased defense budgets as well as smarter spending and pooling of resources.
- In this era of globalization, America and Europe have common interests in dealing with security challenges on the periphery of the European continent and beyond that can have important ramifications for democracy and prosperity within our transatlantic community. Globalization and the information revolution bring enormous benefits to the transatlantic community, including its security structures, but they also increase its vulnerabilities. They facilitate efforts by potential adversaries-both hostile states and increasingly sophisticated terrorists-to develop or acquire nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) weapons and the means to deliver them. Humanitarian disasters beyond Europe can have an important impact on transatlantic interest and require joint U.S.-European responses.
Looking ahead, we need to address several challenges:
- We must have international structures where countries within the transatlantic community work together to help build security and prevent conflict, deter and defend against any external threat, respond effectively to crises, and rebuild war-torn societies after the shooting stops. To meet tomorrow's challenges we will need to adapt multiple existing structures-including transatlantic, regional, sub-regional, and bilateral arrangements-and, where necessary, create new ones.
- We must ensure that these international structures have the necessary capabilities to perform their missions. This is true not only for structures focused primarily on military cooperation, such as NATO and the Partnership for Peace (PfP), but also for those structures best suited to mobilize diplomatic or other nonmilitary assets (e.g., expert assistance to police and judiciary institutions, civilian teams to monitor human rights and elections, and targeted economic and humanitarian assistance) that will help shape the security situation in unstable regions.
- We must pay special attention to certain key regions adjacent to NATO. For example, destabilization in the Caucasus region, the area around Turkey, and the Mediterranean's southern littoral could have huge consequences for transatlantic security. The transatlantic community as a whole must engage effectively to shape a more stable security environment in these key regions.
- Our future strategy must set a course for ensuring the long-term success of our significant crisis response operations currently underway in the Balkans. We also must better prepare the transatlantic community to conduct such operations, if necessary, in the future.
This report is intended to offer a clear vision of U.S. policy goals in building transatlantic cooperation as a continuing force for freedom. Working with the Congress and our Allies, we will vigorously pursue this comprehensive agenda to strengthen our international security in the years ahead.
William S. Cohen
Secretary of Defense
 |
 |