Greg Austin wrote this piece for his weekly column in New Europe

According to the United States Defense Secretary, Bob Gates, Europe is afflicted with a “cultural and political trend affecting the [NATO] alliance”: the pacification of Europe has gone from being a blessing to being “an impediment.” “Large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it.” This is what he told a NATO Strategic Concept Seminar in Washington on 23 February.  In the same speech, Gates castigated his European allies for creating “very, long-term, systemic problems” as a “natural consequence of having underinvested in collective defense for over a decade.” He noted that “Just five of 28 allies achieve the defense-spending target of 2 % of GDP.”

Not so fast, Bob. A 2006 Pew survey of Americans found that “by a 45% to 32% margin, more Americans believe that the best way to reduce the threat of terrorist attacks on the U.S. is to decrease, not increase, America's military presence overseas.” A 2006 survey designed by the University of Maryland and conducted by World Public Opinion.org found that, “by a two-to-one margin (63% to 33%), respondents say rising fear [amongst foreign countries] that the United States might use military force [against them] is bad because countries may do things that undermine U.S. security.”

In a speech the next day, Gates admitted that the Pentagon was, in U.S. government terms, an 800-pound gorilla, “sometimes with a very active pituitary gland.” Just quite what that biological analogy meant is not clear, but there is a view around the world and in the United States that the time has come to medicate the over-active gorilla. Gates started that speech with a really good joke, but it was a joke about a “European” foreign minister – not just any foreign minister but a “European” one – who was a notorious drunk. 

We should not be too tough on Gates. He remains one of America’s best ever Cabinet members. This was illustrated in the same speech where he joked about the drunk “European.” He said that the United States should set up an inter-agency process for supporting development of the capacities of the security forces of United States partner states in the developing world. He said he had sent the proposal to Secretary Clinton a year ago. Are we to draw the implication that there has been no response?
The proposal would “involve pooled funds set up for security capacity building, stabilization, and conflict prevention”. This article is too short to replay the detail of the speech at the Nixon Center, but it may emerge as one of the more important speeches ever made by a US Cabinet official on the way ahead for the United States in preventive diplomacy.

Gates made a sideways allusion to the “parochial and self-serving tendencies” of any bureaucracy, so perhaps he still needs to convince the State Department.

What Gates did not say is that the system of pooled inter-departmental funds for preventive diplomacy that he was advocating came from that other place – yes, Europe! In 2001, the United Kingdom set up what it called the “Conflict Prevention Pools” – an interagency mechanism created to achieve exactly the same purposes proposed by Gates. One of the main virtues of the Gates proposal – as for the UK system – is, he said, that it can “incentivize collaboration between different agencies of our government, unlike the existing structure and processes left over from the Cold War, which often conspire to hinder true whole-of-government approaches.” Thus, Gates has a culture war with Europe over its attitudes to war and peace but draws inspiration from Europe for his culture war at home with the State Department and USAID. His plea in the speech on 24 February could not have been stronger: “it is time to move beyond the ideological debates and bureaucratic squabbles”. Gates reminded us that he has “warned against ‘creeping militarization’ of aspects of our foreign policy.” It is encouraging to see that Gates may be closer to what he has described as the European mind set on how to build peace than he likes to admit.