The Last American

“Far away in the west, the New World has begun to tire of the Old.”

March 1918. Commander-in-chief Ferdinand Foch, France’s prime minister, Georges Clemenceau and General Philippe Petain stood leaning over maps of the front in Foch’s highquarters. The men were worried, very worried.

The Germans, under Erich Ludendorff’s command, had launched a powerful offensive which pushed back the French and British.

Suddenly two unexpected visitors appeared. It was General John Pershing, chief of the newly arrived [American] expeditionary forces and his chief-of-staff, Tasker Bliss. Pershing explained that his troops were at Foch’s disposal: “All we have is yours.”

Tasker Bliss felt that even he ought to express something magnanimous, and from him escaped:

“We have come here to die.”

But now this finally may have come to an end.

The Americans only fought half a year before the ceasefire came in to force on November 11, 1918, but during that brief, decisive phase of the World War I, 81,000 Americans were killed in action.

They inspired their exhausted allies and helped to stop Ludendorff’s relentless offensive: It was mainly U.S. forces at Chateau-Thierry that stopped German advances towards Paris. And in the Battle of Belleau Wood, the Marines fought with such furious determination that the Germans called them Teufelhunden, the hounds from hell.

After the war ended and the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919, the United States chose the road to isolationism. Europe had to cope on its own. With appalling consequences.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and Adolf Hitler declared war against the United States, it was time for the Americans to return. This time they were involved in the war for several years and the losses were greater. More than 400,000 Americans fell during World War II, most of them in Europe.

They didn’t win the war militarily; it was on the eastern front, where two murderous totalitarian regimes clashed, that the German war machine was pulverized. But in Normandy and Ardennes, the Americans brought freedom to half of Europe: No European democracy would have survived if the war had been an exclusive showdown between Nazism and Stalinism.

At the end of the war in 1945, the Americans remained in Western Europe, which was rebuilt thanks to Marshall Plan aid. Defense was organized through NATO, with the United States in a leading role.

Time and again, as with the recurring crises in Berlin, Europe seemed to teeter on the brink of a new major war. But it never got that far.

Europe, so often torn apart, has since 1945 experienced an unprecedented period of peace. The exception is the bloodbaths in the Balkans in the 90’s, but even then, in Bosnia in 1995 and in Kosovo in 1999, it was the Americans who bore the main responsibility when ethnic cleansing and mass murder of Muslims was to be stopped.

The Americans, just as Tasker Bliss said, have been prepared to die for Europe ― including the formally non-aligned Sweden. Most recently, it was Svenska Dagbladet’s security policy reporter, Mikael Holmström, who in his impressive book The Hidden Alliance, revealed the shocking extent to which Sweden, in the greatest secrecy, anticipated and planned for American help in the event of war.

But times change.

Europe now finds itself in the midst of a crisis so complex and multidimensional that it can be described as existential.

It is economic: the debt crisis, the current Greek tragedy, the Euro’s future. It is political: reestablished border controls, the success of xenophobic parties, integration problems. It is strategic: an energy rich and revanchist Russia in the east, the Arabic uprising in the south, and in the south-east, Turkey, which has been alienated from Europe.

And as if that wasn’t enough:Far away in the west, the New world has begun to tire of the Old.

In several days, Robert Gates steps down as U.S. Secretary of Defense. Gates was appointed in 2006 by George W Bush. When Barack Obama took over as president in 2009, he allowed Gates to remain to evince continuity. But now Gates will leave the government. CIA director, Leon Panetta will head the Pentagon.

At a security policy conference in Brussels on June 10, Gates held his farewell speech before a European audience. The speech did not quite make the impact in Europe that it deserved. Perhaps Europe chose to suppress the message. For what Gates had to say was blunt:

“The United States cannot continue to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources … to their own defense.”

He continued:

“Future U.S. political leaders — those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me — may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.”

NATO, Gates emphasized, has developed into a two-tiered alliance between nations who ”are willing and able to pay the price” and “those who don’t want to share the risks and costs.” This is, he added “unacceptable.”

The NATO-led Libya campaign illustrates the problem. Germany, Europe’s economic powerhouse, refuses to participate. And just hours after Gates’ speech, NATO member Norway announced that due to cost they will be pulling their forces out of operations.

The background to Gates’ bitter statement is America’s strained economy, with huge deficits and a soaring national debt. In addition, the United States has been in armed conflict for 10 years: in Afghanistan and then Iraq. To these, Libya can be added, where the cost of America’s limited participation is approaching one billion dollars.

In plain speech: The United States can no longer afford to be the world’s policeman and at the same time pick up the bill.

All gaze of course then turns to NATO. The United States answers for three quarters of NATO’s total military expenses. Great Britain’s military spending is equivalent to 7.7 percent of the United States’, France’s 6.6 percent.

In Afghanistan, where America has now commenced a phased withdrawal, a number of European nations, including Sweden, have made military contributions within the framework of the ISAF. However, the Americans bear the brunt of the work and say, with gallows humor, that ISAF stands for “I saw Americans fighting.”

American opinion is becoming decreasingly internationally-engaged. A poll from Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted in May, shows that 58 percent of people believe that the United States should “care less about what happens abroad,” an increase from 49 percent in 2004. The shift is particularly marked among conservative voters.

This in turn is evident in what potential Republican candidates say in the run up to next year’s presidential election. The former Massachusetts governor, Mitt Romney, who has established himself as a favorite, recommends a forced retreat from Afghanistan. And in Congress, criticism of Obama’s decision to involve the United States in Libya is growing. Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner considers that the campaign is in violation to the War Powers Resolution, a law from the Vietnam era which stipulates that the president must get approval from Congress before the United States goes to war. Otherwise, forces must be called home after 90 days. The Obama administration counters that the Libyan operation is not an outright war.

Furthermore, a demographic shift is underway in the United States: The proportion of Americans who can trace their roots to Latin America, Asia and Africa is growing. After World War II, there was a liberal northeastern elite with family ties to Europe, which built a new world order with the U.N. and NATO as cornerstones. Now that elite is fading away.

The process is inevitable. Europe must take greater responsibility for its own security. An embryonic European defense policy, highly relevant to the EU country Sweden, is the Lisbon Treaty article 42:7 concerning “assistance by all the means in their power.” But it lies within Europe’s interest that development happens in an orderly manner so as not to compromise transatlantic cooperation.

Europe will, for the foreseeable future, be dependent on the United States’ military assistance. The Libyan campaign, for example, could not continue without American munitions and surveillance provided by American AWACs aircraft. And although the United States must increasingly respond to rapidly growing rivals in Asia, it doesn’t lie in the nation’s interest to completely turn its back on Europe. Even a superpower needs friends. Especially a superpower on the decline.

It is high time that we Europeans let go an unexpressed mode of thought which for all together too long has shaped the perception of our own security: That we are prepared to fight. To the last American.

Tasker Bliss probably didn’t realize the extent to which he would be taken at his word.