The US was never Europe’s safe harbour

The Europeans were left dumbfounded, if not shell-shocked, by the verbal whiplashing administered to them by US Vice-President James David Vance at the sixty-first iteration of the Munich Security Conference earlier this month. Vance questioned the fundamental commitment of Europeans to democratic values, that, he argued, underpinned the US-European construct. By the end of the speech, there was a lot of European strategic blood spilled on the conference floor of Hotel Bayerischer Hof.

The diatribe led to extended recriminations, with many European leaders pushing back strongly against Vance's caricatured characterisation of the current state of play in Europe.

However, this begs the question as to why Europeans are surprised. For, they have to only look back to the past hundred years or so of US ties with Europe to see that America has always only acted in its own interest — what it has conveniently characterised as American exceptionalism.

The First World War began on July 28, 1914. It was triggered by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, and his wife Sophie, by a Bosnian Serb a month earlier. Though it was a European war, the Triple Entente — Britain, France and Russia — which was fighting the Triple Alliance of Austria-Hungary, Germany and Italy, pleaded with America to weigh in on its side.

The US, led by President Woodrow Wilson, stymied by Senators with Jacksonian impulses, refused to enter what it deemed, and perhaps correctly so, a European imperial joust.

It was only two and a half years later, on April 7, 1917, that the US declared war on Germany. And that was only because the Germans had unleashed extensive submarine warfare in the North Atlantic Ocean, causing a huge loss of American men and material.

An added trigger was a communication by the then German Foreign Minister, Arthur Zimmermann, which later came to be known as the notorious "Zimmermann Telegram". It promised the Mexican government that Germany would help Mexico retrieve the territory it had lost to the US in the wake of the Mexican-American war of 1846-1848. In return for this assistance, Germany asked for Mexico's support in the war.

This was a direct affront to the Monroe doctrine conceptualised by President James Monroe and his Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. Articulated during Monroe's address to the US Congress on December 2, 1823, the Doctrine held that the Western Hemisphere, especially the Americas, was the US' exclusive sphere of influence and the Europeans had no business to interfere in this eminent domain. Thus, only when its own interests were threatened did the US enter the European war.

After the spectacular collapse of the League of Nations — midwifed by President Wilson, vide the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919, with the Japanese walkout in February 1933 and the German withdrawal eight months later — the US once again retreated into splendid isolation even as Adolf Hitler and his Nazis gobbled up territories and countries in Europe, beginning with the Austrian Anschluss in March 1938.

Even when the Great Britain stood alone in its darkest hour — from May to November 1940 — President Roosevelt expressed his inability to help it because of the Neutrality Act of 1939 and the Johnson Act of 1934.

Though certain innovative means were found later, the US only formally entered World War II after the devastating Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

Then also, to begin with, on December 8, 1941, it only declared war on Japan. It was only when Germany and Italy declared war on the US on December 11, 1941, did it reciprocate that announcement. The bottom line is that even as Europe was being subjugated by the hoodlums of the Gestapo and Shcutzstaffel, the US may have continued to remain neutral had it not been for the Japanese attack.

Fast forward to the US withdrawal from Vietnam on April 30, 1975 — after a decade of involvement that effectively led to the extinguishment of South Vietnam, with over 58,000 dead and expenditure of over $1 trillion. This is another example of how the changing domestic environment in the US trumped its international commitments. Many South Vietnamese who had allied with the US in this battle were left to the tender mercies of their North Vietnamese 'comrades'.

Similarly, the US pullout from Iraq on December 18, 2011 after a nine-year-long war was fought on the false premise that there were weapons of mass destruction in that country — which coincided with the rise of the Islamic State or ISIS in Iraq and Syria. The war in Iraq, in which a million Americans served, cost the US exchequer $2.9 trillion and left 4,61,000 people dead. It is still not clear what the casus belli of that intervention was.

Similarly, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, which handed back the country to the very same Taliban it had chased out in 2001 — thereby rolling back two decades of investment in creating a nascent democracy, respect for human rights, women's empowerment and free speech. The Afghan War cost the US $2.313 trillion and left 2,43,000 dead. The conflict in Afghanistan continues.

Why should the Europeans then shake in sanctimonious indignation now that Donald Trump has done a complete volte-face on the Russian aggression of Ukraine? As old imperialists and serial warmongers over centuries, they should understand that you cannot anchor your defence in someone else's port.

The time has come for Europe to design its own security architecture. It should recall the wise caution of Cardinal Richelieu: raison d'état, that each nation acts in its best national interest. So should the doctrine of the balance of power, intellectualised by Hugo Grotius, be recalled.

In the theory and practice of international relations, interests of nation states have always prevailed over alliances. That's because interests are permanent but allies transitory, if not evanescent.