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THE war in Libya may be one of those quietly telling moments in the history of more important nations. For the first time, the United States has taken a secondary role — “leading from behind,” if “leading” is even the right word — in a war prosecuted by the NATO alliance and driven by Britain and France, the two strongest military powers in Europe.
But oh what a war! More than six budget-busting months against one of the weakest militaries in the world, with shortages of planes, weapons and ammunition that were patched over by the pretense that NATO was acting simply to “protect civilians,” when it was clear to everyone that the alliance was intervening on one side of a civil war. All resemblances to the Kosovo war, of course, are a priori inadmissible. That was the war — 78 days of bombing Serbia and thousands dead before Slobodan Milosevic finally capitulated — when NATO said: “Such a success, never again!” Yet here we are — with the “responsibility to protect” the new mantra, replacing Kosovo’s “humanitarian intervention.” Both are debatable, given the failure to intervene in the separatist Russian republic of Chechnya then and Syria, Bahrain or Yemen now.
Libya has been a war in which some of the Atlantic alliance’s mightiest members did not participate, or did not participate with combat aircraft, like Spain, Turkey and Sweden. It has been a war where the Danes and Norwegians did an extraordinary number of the combat sorties, given their size. Their planes and pilots became exhausted, as the French finally pulled back their sole nuclear-powered aircraft carrier for overdue repairs and Italy withdrew its aircraft carrier to save money.
Only eight of the 28 allies engaged in combat, and most ran out of ammunition, having to buy, at cost, ammunition stockpiled by the United States. Germany refused to take part, even in setting up a no-fly zone.
Although Washington took a back seat in the war, which the Obama administration looked at skeptically from the start, the United States still ran the initial stages, in particular the destruction of Libya’s air defenses, making it safe for its NATO colleagues to fly. The United States then provided intelligence, refueling and more precision bombing than Paris or London want to acknowledge. Inevitably, then, NATO air power and technology, combined with British, French and Qatari “trainers” working “secretly” with the rebels on the ground, have defeated the forces, some of them mercenary, of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
The question, however, is whether European members of NATO will ever decide to embark on such an adventure again.
Either Europeans will develop the security and defense identity they have advertised for so long, so Europe can have its own credible voice in a world not only run by soft power, or given the expense and difficulties of defeating even Libya, they will simply stop trying. The jury is out, but the verdict is important.
Some defense experts, like Tomas Valasek of the London-based Center for European Reform, suggest that Washington’s diplomacy worked, in that during the Libyan conflict “the allies established a new division of labor for NATO operations on Europe’s borders, which should be encouraged.”
Possibly. And just possibly, given the cost and strain of the Libyan operation, combined with the vital necessity to cut budget deficits at home to save both the euro zone and themselves, even the eight European nations that fought will decide that a real European security and defense identity is too expensive and that their already shrinking defense budgets will continue to shrink past the point of utility — at least to Washington. After all, the European Union itself played no role at all in the war.
François Heisbourg, a French defense analyst with the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris, said that the decisions made in Washington to “lead from behind” and in Berlin not to participate at all will have “major strategic consequences for both NATO and the European Union.”
