The European Union and the United States are locked in bitter competition over nato’s role in the defense of Europe. Some people dismiss the rivalry, saying the EU will never be independently strong enough to take nato’s place. However, as Europe continues to advance toward creating its own independent military, nato (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) may become a Cold War relic.

In addition to the unmistakable strengthening of Europe’s military power and its growing confidence in handling military missions on its own, faultlines in the Atlantic alliance are showing, with the U.S. and Europe both showing themselves increasingly willing to sidestep the nato bureaucracy in order to pursue their own goals.

The beginning of the end for nato may trace back to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991—the very event that, ironically, demonstrated nato’s effectiveness. The alliance, after all, had been established in 1949 to protect Western Europe from Soviet invasion.

When that threat disappeared in the early 1990s, nato’s existence continued because European allies needed nato to stabilize post-Soviet Central and Eastern Europe; at the same time, the United States, nato’s most powerful member, wasn’t about to lose the primary means by which it could influence Europe.

However, the end of the Soviet threat produced another major consequence that today threatens nato’s existence. It gave nato’s European members, most of which were also members of the EU, the freedom to accelerate the creation of a European superstate.

As part of this process, the EU began creating a security and defense policy of its own. Europe’s desire for an independent military became obvious after nato’s bombing campaign in 1999. The Yugoslavian wars made two facts painfully clear to the EU: that Europe had unacceptably weak military capabilities, and that the United States was the only member of the nato alliance capable of conducting high-intensity military campaigns. Europe’s success in breaking up Yugoslavia was purely the result of U.S. military power.

To prevent having its foreign policy remain at the mercy of U.S. support, the EU beefed up its efforts in constructing its own defense and security identity. The European Council met in Cologne in June 1999 and replaced the defense and security policy of the semi-independent Western European Union with the European Security and Defense Policy (esdp). The esdp’s aim was to give Europe the “capacity for autonomous action, backed up by credible military forces, the means to decide to use them, and a readiness to do so, in order to respond to international crises without prejudice to actions by nato.”

The U.S. voiced concern that the esdp would compete with nato and agreed to its establishment only if EU member states would continue to participate in nato as individual members rather than as a single political bloc, and that the EU would not duplicate military mechanisms, such as a planning staff and headquarters, independent of nato’s Supreme Headquarters. It was as if American officials could see the danger in Europe gaining too much autonomy.

The U.S. also tried to exert some influence over Europe via the Berlin Plus agreement in late 2002 (signed in March 2003). In this agreement, nato agreed to make its planning and common assets available to the EU—a means by which the U.S. hoped to still monitor EU operations while increasing the EU’s capability to mount such operations. However, soon after the agreement was signed, France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg proposed establishing a European military headquarters independent of nato, and the EU participated in a peacekeeping mission in Congo without consulting nato.

On top of that, the EU announced the goal to create “battlegroups” for rapid deployment in crisis areas of the world. These battlegroups, consisting of 1,500 soldiers prepared for rapid deployment, would be Europe-only forces similar to those of the planned nato Response Force (nrf), a force pooled from the European members and trained and equipped up to U.S. standards so it can fight alongside U.S. troops.

Time and again, the U.S., while opposing Europe creating its own military and defense union separate to nato, has still backed Europe increasing its military capabilities. And time and again, the EU has accepted whatever help it can get from the U.S. to beef up its own military so it can one day stand alone.

EU diplomats and military officials have repeatedly made clear the Continent’s intention to someday act independently of the U.S. To take one recent example, last November Kurt Beck, leader of Germany’s largest political party, the Social Democrats, suggested that Europe become “a global peace power” independent of the U.S. military. He proposed the EU force should establish a “partnership based on equality” with the U.S. (Washington Times, Nov. 19, 2006).

The EU can now point to its Congo mission, with its specific mandate successfully completed and easily claimed as a victory, as proof that it can coordinate troops from various member nations and achieve an objective. “Now we really have the beginning of a European Army,” stated Gen. Christian Damay, the French commander in charge of the force.

As Europe strengthens its own military, the faultlines between the EU and nato are widening. February 10, nato Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer came out in Berlin and said, “It is astounding how narrow the bandwidth of cooperation between nato and the [European] Union has remained. There is still a remarkable distance between them.” The statement belied former public claims of harmony and cooperation between the two institutions.

For some time, the U.S. has demonstrated a certain reluctance to act within the confines of the nato alliance. Even when it went into Afghanistan, though nato invoked Article 5 for the first time in its history—the article that states an attack on one member is an attack on all and therefore all members agree to support the nation being attacked—the U.S. did not act through nato. Instead, it gathered a coalition of the willing, enabling it to act with more control and freedom than within the bureaucratized nato structure.

More recently, Poland and the Czech Republic announced in late February they would start talks with the U.S. on installing a missile defense shield outside of nato. The U.S. said it would proceed without nato approval—in effect acknowledging nato’s ineffectiveness. One day later, Germany said the talks should be conducted through the nato framework. The shield, like the Iraq war before it, again opened political faultlines in Europe between pro-U.S. and pro-EU nations.

Though Europe and America profess to act together, they still can’t make the EU and nato work together, even though 80 percent of EU members belong to nato and vice versa. The lack of cooperation will only get worse as the EU continues to push for its own security and defense policy independent of U.S. influence.

Still, with all these advances toward an independent EU military, the reality is that the U.S. is still far ahead of Europe militarily—so much so that Europe still needs nato to guarantee its security. And that is why nato still exists. As long as the EU has to rely on nato for security, and as long as it can use nato’s resources for its own operations, it will do the minimum required to keep nato alive. The U.S. also needs to be able to conduct the operations it deems necessary for the security of the West.

Therefore nato will still exist, but may not be used in any serious way in the future.

Of course, that is what most people do with relics; they hold on to them even when they are no longer used.