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“You’re thinking of Europe as Germany and France,” Rumsfeld responded, gesturing to the two states at the vanguard of the European project, which also happened to be among the more staunch skeptics of Bush’s plans. “I don’t. I think that’s ‘old Europe.’ If you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the center of gravity is shifting to the East. And there are a lot of new members.”
Rumsfeld’s formula wasn’t the tidiest — governments in putative “old” Europe, like Britain, Spain and Italy, were at the time relatively supportive of the United States’ position on Saddam. And a number of governments in Eastern and Central Europe said they would back a U.S. operation, but with the condition that it receive a mandate from the Security Council. That did not come to pass, and the United States and its cobbled-together “coalition of the willing” soon plunged into what would become seen by many as an illegal war that destabilized the Middle East for years thereafter.
The war in Iraq triggered a series of conflicts that left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead and is now, in some tellings, synonymous with a legacy of American hubris, imperial overreach and political deceit. The late Rumsfeld, for his part, is more remembered for the ontological maze of “known knowns,” “known unknowns,” and “unknown unknowns” that he conjured in 2002 when pointing to the possibility of Saddam supplying extremist al-Qaeda with weapons. (It’s now safe to say that the falsehood of that claim is more or less a “known known.”)
But Rumsfeld’s rubric of an “old Europe” juxtaposed against a more vibrant — and, from Washington’s perspective, amenable — “new” Europe endures, 20 years later. It has been revived by the explosion of open war on Europe’s eastern borders, which has animated a host of countries formerly in the Kremlin’s orbit. Leaders of governments in Poland and the Baltic states have been the most unflinching in their support of Kyiv and suspicious of any diplomatic overtures made to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
On a visit to Washington last week, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki summoned the dichotomy, tapping into months of friction with French President Emmanuel Macron, who has been the target of much Western consternation both for his failed attempts at outreach with Putin before last year’s Russian invasion of Ukraine and his more recent foray to China in the company of dozens of French business leaders.
“Old Europe believed in an agreement with Russia, and old Europe failed,” Morawiecki said in a joint news conference with Vice President Harris. “But there is a new Europe — Europe that remembers what Russian communism was. And Poland is the leader of this new Europe.”
This apparent phenomenon has been observed and discussed for a while. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, speaking in the Czech capital in August, said “the center of Europe is moving eastward.” The war in Ukraine had been a jolt to an arguably complacent continent, a shock to the system, and it seemed the countries in Russia’s periphery were more primed to react to what that shock represented.
“Scholz is right,” said Timothy Garton Ash, a European historian at Oxford University, to Steven Erlanger of the New York Times earlier this year. “The voices of Central and Eastern Europeans are being listened to more and taken more seriously in the councils of Europe, and there is a big eastern enlargement agenda on the table.”
What this supposed divide actually represents in the day-to-day workings of European geopolitics is a bit murkier. According to the Polish prime minister, Central and Eastern Europe “can be a driving force in global competition and in defending our freedom,” bolstering European defense with increased military spending while abandoning dependence on Russian energy imports.
Speaking at an event hosted by the Atlantic Council, Morawiecki said “the collective West [wants] Ukraine to win, but not necessarily to the same extent” and went on to bemoan how Western European nations focused too much on their economic interests, enabling China and Russia to amass considerable leverage over a continent hungry for Chinese goods (and later access to its market) and Russian energy.
Other analysts describe what’s at play more flatly: “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has revealed Europeans’ profound dependence on the US for their security, despite E.U. efforts at achieving ‘strategic autonomy,’” wrote Jeremy Shapiro and Jana Puglierin of the European Council on Foreign Relations, referring to the policy goal espoused in particular by Macron.
In a jab at Macron, Morawiecki linked the war in Ukraine to the potential of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The French president courted controversy earlier this month after he told reporters that it wasn’t in Europe’s interest to get sucked into a conflict over the island democracy that was driven by “American rhythm and a Chinese overreaction.”
“You need to support Ukraine if you want Taiwan to stay as it is … if Ukraine gets conquered, the next day, China can attack Taiwan,” Morawiecki declared.
But prominent European officials from that “old” part of the continent have made similar noises. On a visit this past week to Beijing, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said a military escalation over Taiwan would be a “horror scenario” that would have “inevitable repercussions” for Europe. She also told reporters that as her nation learned the tough lesson of what happens when you make yourself overly reliant on Russian energy, it wouldn’t fall into the same trap with China’s booming industries and market.
“We just paid a high price for our energy dependency on Russia, and it is well-known that one should not make the same mistake twice,” Baerbock said.
Josep Borrell, the E.U.’s top diplomat, said that it was incumbent on China to use its particular clout to compel Russia to abandon its revanchist war in Ukraine. “It will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the European Union to maintain a relationship of trust with China, which I would like to see, if China does not contribute to the search for a political solution based on Russia’s withdrawal from the Ukrainian territory,” Borrell said in a statement Friday.
Yet, Borrell and the bulk of his European counterparts would probably share Macron’s unwillingness to wholly yoke European foreign policy to that of the United States. “Vassalization is not a smart policy for the coming era of intense geopolitical competition — either for the U.S. or for Europe,” wrote Shapiro and Puglierin, in language that would be familiar to Macron. “The alliance with the U.S. remains crucial for European security, but relying fully on a distracted and inward-looking America for the most essential element of sovereignty will condemn the nations of Europe to become, at best, geopolitically irrelevant and, at worst, a plaything of superpowers.”
French officials have lamented the overreaction to Macron’s comments, which no matter the optics, never implied that France and Europe as a whole was somehow a neutral arbiter between the United States and China. Macron and other politicians from countries far afield from Europe are all simply wary of succumbing to the temptations of a new Cold War.
“Macron’s recent comments are evidence that even card-carrying members of ‘the West’ are uncomfortable with a vision of international order that divides the world into blocs,” wrote Peter Harris, a nonresident fellow of Defense Priorities, a Washington-based think tank. “On this question, Macron might actually be much closer to the median world leader than his critics would like to believe.”
Twenty years ago, one of the scorned denizens of “old Europe” offered a gentle riposte to the chest-thumping ideologues in Washington and their allies. “An ‘old’ continent — a continent somewhat ancient in its historical, cultural, political, economic traditions — can sometimes be infused with a certain wisdom, and wisdom can sometimes make for good advice.” Jean-Francois Cope, a French government spokesman, said at the time.