Jim Townsend, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for European and NATO policy during the Obama administration who is now an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, discusses the European Union, NATO and transatlantic relations with Defense & Aerospace Report Editor Vago Muradian.
Jim Townsend
Center for a New American Security
December 2018
Vago Muradian: Welcome to the Defense and Aerospace Report. I’m Vago Muradian here in Washington, DC at the Center for a New American Security, one of America’s leading think tanks to talk to Jim Townsend, who served in the Obama administration as the man in the Pentagon who had the Europe file at a very, very exciting time when everything was going on, obviously, with Russia, and you were key in terms of helping shape both the alliance and the administration response to that. You’re also an Adjunct Senior Fellow here at CNAS, so it’s great seeing you.
There was just an event here with Lieutenant General Esa Pulkkinen, who is the Director General of the European Union Military Staff; as well as Lieutenant General Jan Broeks who is the Director General of NATO’s International Military Staff. Two very, very important leaders from the alliance. Jan, a Dutch Army officer; Esa who is a Finnish Army general. Both of them were here to talk about NATO/EU cooperation, especially the PESCO, the Permanent Security Cooperation regime that the EU has adopted.
Is there a clear enough understanding in the United States for what this is about? There is a perception that the EU is just trying to recreate NATO, and pretty much every EU official I’ve talked to said no, it’s not, it’s about getting Europe’s act together to be a better contributor to NATO. Why is that initiative so important? And how do you perceive it as a former senior American official?
Jim Townsend: Well, it’s a complicated issue and it’s certainly not the Europeans trying to come together and create their own version of NATO or a competitor to NATO. There’s a couple of things at play.
One is European politics where there is a desire, and particularly now over the past year to have Europe able to stand on its own feet and there to be not such a reliance on the United States. Both of those military officers said that, that there was a need within NATO and within Europe as well to be able to not be so reliant. I think that’s what the President has been talking about too, in a sense, is this idea that Europe needs to be able to go off and do things without the U.S. being part of it, and that they need to be doing more in terms of burden-sharing anyway.
So the EU has been building, certainly since [Malo] in 1998 an institution within the EU that can provide the EU a military capability. The criticism has been that that’s been political, it’s been building institutions, there’s no capability there. In fact there’s duplication as some EU member nations want to score points against the United States and say we can build this and do it better than you.
A lot of that was in the past, a lot of that rhetoric. Some of that rhetoric still is around. You hear people from those days here in Washington echoing that. But I think what we saw today is that the EU certainly has gotten away from that politically driven military institution within the EU. They’ve gotten away from scoring points and they’re trying to make this work, both in terms of a credible EU military capability to do things, but also in a way to strengthen NATO too, because since the Russians went into Crimea I think it’s become obvious to the European nations that they have got to do more. There is a lot of pressure coming from the President but also from the Russians to do more. Most of the EU members are smaller countries, so it’s not necessarily that they can do it by themselves. You’ve got to do it together with others.
And the EU has now developed tools to do that. PESCO was one of them. The card system is, the defense planning process now that the EU has. So they’re starting to develop processes within the EU that are similar to NATO processes in terms of defense planning, this type of thing.
So these tools are going to be better used for cooperation and coordination between the two institutions. That helps to avoid the unnecessary duplication that there’s more mutually supportive planning going on. And I think the politics have gotten a lot less as the threat, if you will, has increased. And the need to do more militarily has increased.
So I think we’re actually on a pretty good trajectory. We have to be patient. PESCO is going to take a long time, and PESCO is not going to scratch all the itches that are out there in terms of capability shortfalls that need to be made good on. But I think what we’re seeing now is a much better potential for these two institutions to be working together to mutually support one another and more efficiently spend, hopefully, an increasing amount of defense funds in a way that benefit both institutions.
Mr. Muradian: The biggest potential disconnect is over hardware acquisition. There is the sense Americans have that Europe’s trying to create a Fortress Europe; the European perspective is hey, a lot of your programs, the F-35 for example, is designed to kill some of our important industries. To a degree it’s proven to be relatively successful. All of our allies have now bought a European jet. Most of them have bought the F-35 as a replacement capability, although often to replace an earlier generation of American capability. How do you see this? And as a former senior Pentagon official, how important was it for Europe to have an industrial capability? Right? I mean is it seen as a balance point on this? What’s the right way ahead here to avoid a transatlantic rift over equipment that then has a capability implication?
Mr. Townsend: It’s a great question, and I have to say after decades and decades of working in this field, transatlantic defense trade is one of the toughest — there is a need for balance, there’s a need for a strong competitive industrial atmosphere between the United States and Europe. Competition is good. There’s a need for Europe to have a good indigenous defense industry. It can’t just be reliance on the U.S. because U.S. industry is shaped towards what the Pentagon needs and what the Pentagon needs isn’t necessarily what a lot of European allies need. They just can’t depend on just the U.S.
So those are broad generalizations there. It’s much more nuanced and complicated than that. There’s a lot of rhetoric and scare tactics and have been forever about Fortress Europe on the one hand; Buy America on the other hand. Each side’s trying to screw the other. So that political froth is there and muddies a lot of the issues.
What I have found over time, though, is that really, it’s hard to look on the defense industries as either the U.S. or European. There’s a blend now. There’s partnerships, there’s ownership. There are ways that industry has found to work around the politics, work around the defense budgets, and for the European and U.S. industries to actually work together. I think that’s really the only thing.
Having a balanced transatlantic trade, two-way trade, just isn’t going to happen. Having a Fortress Europe or subsidies that are outrageous in Europe or in the United States, and subsidies can come in many different flavors, that is nothing but inefficiencies, and it’s politics, and it’s no good for anyone. But that’s also part of the theme, too. Whether it’s the European Investment Fund monies, or it’s U.S. contracting with our industry in ways that aren’t very competitive. You see these subsidies there, and it’s a fact of life.
But I think at the end of the day we’ve got to have strong industry on both sides of the Atlantic, and that strong industry can only happen if they work in a partnership. And the more the U.S. government or European nations, particularly the EU, jump in and try to legislate it or put it together artificially or protect it or this type of thing, it skews it, and I think, I’ve just determined that if you let business alone, have them do the work-arounds, have them figure it out, that’s the only way to get at any semblance of a transatlantic defense trade that doesn’t undercut one another.
The F-35, which used to be the Joint Strike Fighter, had lots of European partners in it. That was a great attempt to try to get at this so that you could have an aircraft that had work share among a lot of European allies who were taking part in it, tech transfer, there’s a lot of things that came with that. I thought it was a very creative approach. The F-35 is the result, and the nations are buying it because I think they were present at the creation. I hope we can get the price down and a lot of the O&M costs down and a lot of the other bugs that come with a new platform as sensitive as this one is, but I think it’s that kind of thinking that we have to do.
A final point, we’ve had in the past these big multinational projects. AGS, Alliance Ground Surveillance system in NATO was one. There’s been other examples. And as much as I appreciate the attempt to have everybody involved and let’s have a joint project, so many times those come in so late and so expensive and they’re outmoded a lot of times by the time they’re fielded. I think the days of that kind of big multinational project led by NATO or led by the EU, and PESCO was kind of close to this. Those are so difficult to pull off. I think we’ve got to find other ways in which nations can participate in a project, and I think an example of that is going to be the follow-on to NATO AWACS.
How are we going to go about a new NATO AWACS platform, or a new air command and control platform in a way that involves all the allies but doesn’t give us a huge bureaucracy at NATO? How can we do that? Maybe as a NATO/EU thing. Certainly we want it multinational. Is there a way we can do this that will give us better and quicker results? We’re on the very early stages of trying to figure out what the follow-on to AWACS looks like. I hope that NATO tries to figure a way around fielding something in the future that’s not going to give us the experience of AGS or even NATO AWACS.
Mr. Muradian: Is there a danger, there’s a big debate about some of the language, we want to build our own capability so we’re not as reliant on the United States. By some people that’s seen as something good and right and what even some of the founders of the Atlantic alliance would have wanted. Right? To have a Europe that has capability, that is not purely dependent on the United States.
Mr. Townsend: Absolutely.
Mr. Muradian: Even throughout our Cold War planning, I mean the bulwark was going to be all the allied forces and the German Army was going to be the number one thing that was going to stop the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact from coming across the line. Whereas now it’s been perceived, some of the comments that Angela Merkel, and I want to ask you about Merkel in a moment, has said is we can’t rely on the United States anymore. It’s for us to stand up. Some of the President’s rhetoric has played into that.
On the other hand, as we were talking before we started taping, about 99.9 percent of everybody else I’ve talked to in the alliance has said there’s not a lot of daylight between us. Hey, your President is helping us increase defense spending at home which ultimately gets us to where we have to get to.
You’ve been watching this space longer than almost anybody I know and actually playing in it as a key participant. Is there a danger of a transatlantic rift? Is that overwrought? At the end of the day is everybody sort of seeing through the rhetoric and getting to the right place?
Mr. Townsend: Yeah, I first became fearful about a rending of the fabric between the transatlantic sides during the George W. Bush days with Iraq and the renditions and the horrible things Abu Ghraib, that came with the War on Terror.
Mr. Muradian: Freedom Fries didn’t help in that whole thing.
Mr. Townsend: Freedom Fries, Chocolate Summit. There were a lot of things that happened politically in Europe too that were caught up in building that EU defense capability. The politics and the philosophy behind that. So you had a lot of irritants during those days.
We survived it. And also during the Cold War days we had problems too. You had détente and Aus Politik and capability issues all the time, not spending enough.
So I think a feature of a transatlantic relationship is one of turbulence. It’s like a big fractious family. But we’ve always survived it. I think as I look at what’s happening now, I felt it was much worse, as I said, with George W. Bush where our values were actually questioned. We were actually doing things, so it wasn’t just rhetoric, it was actually doing things that were disturbing, not just in Europe but in the U.S. too. Those days are behind us.
We’re in a day right now of high rhetoric coming out of the highest reaches of the White House. And said in such a way that it just, it’s not just the words but how it’s said. It’s striking.
But you don’t see the lieutenants going into the bureaucracy or into NATO with wrenches and screwdrivers and dismantling things.
I will say that a lot of good colleagues say well, it’s not just, they say that words matter. It’s not just what they’re doing, but it’s actually what they’re saying, and you can’t dismiss what they’re saying. Words matter. And I will agree with that in the sense that you don’t want to have a President sending up a self-fulfilling prophecy by putting doubt into the minds of a lot of people about NATO or about the transatlantic relationship or other aspects of foreign and defense policy. Planting seeds of doubt based on elections, creating a fear factor, this type of thing. That really impacts in the years to come how the nation looks on NATO.
No matter who the President may be in the future and no matter where the nation might be in the future in terms of foreign and defense policy, things said today create doubt and mistrust in the minds of Americans and Europeans too about one another. That’s what we have to worry about.
So I don’t think there’s going to be a transatlantic rift, but I think we can set up a transatlantic weakness if we plant seeds in the minds of young people and old alike, that there’s an issue or a problem or something that makes us not want to support what we have built since World War II.
Mr. Muradian: Is there, to pull on that thread a little bit. A mutual senior, relatively recently retired NATO friend of mine put it that the danger here was that the United States implicitly is telling Europe spend more, spend it on buying our weapons, give us economic concessions, and we’ll give you security in return, which is what he said was the most toxic element of the case.
There are others who say look, at a working level the relationships are still strong, there’s still a clear understanding.
You mentioned this about sort of a degree of separation or weakness. From the people you’ve talked to, is that their perception as well? Or is this sort of a one-off view of what the problem might be?
Mr. Townsend: Well, I think what I’ve seen is the latter piece in terms of the working level. And not just the working level, but even the mid-level political appointees I think are going along in a very traditional, tried and true approach with the transatlantic relationship.
Look at Trident Juncture, the big NATO exercise off of Norway. It’s led by an American admiral with a lot of American participation. Had the highest reaches of the White House said, I don’t like this, I don’t like this NATO thing, we’re not going to participate. You would have seen that with Trident Juncture, but you’re not. You’re seeing a very big U.S. participation in that.
But nevertheless, words do matter. So I think having the rhetoric set up a view such as this one-off view about it’s all about Buy America and this type of thing. You know, I think if you reduce down to essentials some of the rhetoric you’re hearing you can draw that conclusion.
I can tell you that if that is in the mind of some decision-maker or two in the White House, that it’s in fact that simple. They’re fooling themselves because the world doesn’t work that way. There’s not an automaticity where spend more money, buy our stuff. That might sound really great, but it’s not the way the world works. And not the way the process works either.
So if they’re banking on that, they’re going to be sorely disappointed because there’s not that kind of algebraic equation — A+B+C=D.
Mr. Muradian: Let me ask you one last question, because I know you’ve got to get over to your next thing. Angela Merkel, not necessarily a surprise. There was a lot of discussion she wasn’t going to run for another term. She has set the conditions for her departure so it’s not an abrupt abandonment. But her coalition has been dramatically weakened, and a lot of the classical major players, the CDU/CSU coalition. That’s weakened on the right. The SPD, the Social Democrats, they’re weak on the left. The Greens are much stronger. AFD, the nationalist German party is in the ascendancy. Talk to us about the German dynamic and what does it mean, because from a European security perspective and a European economic perspective and a European stability perspective and an EU perspective, Germany’s really been the lynch pin.
Mr. Townsend: Germany really is the lynch pin and their politics are important to all of us to see what comes about. I think for me, as complicated as that political situation is, as you laid out, what’s interesting is are we going to see a new generation of German leaders come out? A young German, are we going to see a generation coming to the fore that is going to look on the U.S. differently than we’re used to seeing Germans? Where usually we’re very close, and the German foreign and defense policy is focused on the relationship with the United States.
That could be, that as we see a new generation it might be even more focused on the EU and maybe even more focused on Germany as a leader within Europe. So we’ll see a distancing, maybe, between U.S. and Germany depending on that generation that comes to the fore.
Angela Merkel came from the Cold War days in the sense that she grew up in Eastern Germany. She became a young politician during those days, as I remember, certainly an academic. So her generation remembers what it was like in a divided Germany and she remembers what it was like to be a part of NATO when Germany was unified and East Germany came into NATO and a lot of important things happened, to the great relief of a lot of Germans and a lot of Europeans and she knew what it was like to have a Cold War and a post Cold War Period.
But a new generation of Germans, certainly that’s not their background.
It’s going to be interesting to see if we see from now on younger Germans coming into power with different views, different approaches, and a different outlook on their relationship with the United States.
Mr. Muradian: Let me ask one last question, which is to put you a little bit on the spot in the Obama administration. There are some European friends of mine who said look, the big challenge here is there’s this new message of buy from us, spend more and buy from us and give us trade concessions, you get security. But then they go back and say look, the George W. Bush, we felt you guys were really pushing us around. The Obama message of step up, the administration was very harsh. People have a tendency of forgetting that Bob Gates delivered one of the toughest speeches during his farewell tour to European.
Mr. Townsend: We started that, yeah.
Mr. Muradian: And Europeans perceived the whole pivot to Asia being like well, you’re turning your back on us, you’re abandoning us, even though I think the administration, and you and I spoke many times about this. No, no, no. We still love you guys, it’s just we have to focus on the Middle East, we’ve got to focus on Asia more. You guys have this. Step up and do more.
Do you think that whole narrative now that spans 20 years may distance some of these new generation of leaders from thinking about the transatlantic alliance, the way your generation, mine and earlier generations saw it?
Mr. Townsend: I think we were on a trajectory for a while of a changing transatlantic relationship. It was during the Clinton days as well, during the Balkans. We had a lot of tension within NATO and between the United States and European nations about the Balkans. Then you had the War on Terror and you had the George W. Bush administration which I think is when you first began to see inklings of what’s now called Make America First, or Make American Great Again. Either one. You began to see this inkling of a changing view in Washington about the relationship with NATO and the allies and burden-sharing and this type of thing. You began to really hear some pretty harsh rhetoric coming out of that White House.
With Obama, I think certainly you had the Bob Gates speech, which as I said, we were all a part of, and it needed to be said just the way he did. But I think with Obama it wasn’t so much a premeditated philosophical problem with Europe the way the George W. Bush administration folks had in a lot of ways. But I think there was a bit of a benign neglect in a lot of ways, or a feeling of hey, Europe is yesterday’s news. We need to be focusing elsewhere. And it wasn’t until the Russians went into Crimea that the heads snapped back and they realized you just can’t write off Europe, or you just can’t think that history doesn’t have an opportunity to come back and bite you as it did in Europe. What we thought was not a problem, i.e. Russia, in fact was. And unfortunately we didn’t hedge during those days. We were pulling forces out. It was during sequestration so there were very real problems with allocation of resources. Where do we take risk? Where’s the best place to put our funding? And China was becoming a real problem, so we had to focus. But I think we did so with a bit of a benign neglect of Europe particularly.
So yeah, I think coming out of even those days, there was a feeling among Europeans that the U.S. was drifting away. And when Trump came on, that certainly put that into hyper drive. So yeah.
Mr. Muradian: Jim Townsend, an Adjunct Senior Fellow here at the Center for a New American Security. The man at the Defense Department who minded the Europe portfolio during the Obama administration. Jim, it’s always a pleasure. And I could go back over the decades, recounting your long resume, but it’s always a treat talking to you.
Mr. Townsend: Well, it’s great seeing you, Vago. And I’m so glad that you’ve got what you’re doing here because your voice and your analysis is critical to educating Washington and the transatlantic world about these issues. So you do a wonderful job. So thank you for that.
Mr. Muradian: Thanks. Coming from you, it’s a real honor, Jim. Thank you so much.
Mr. Townsend: Thank you.
30
