Due to a shortfall in contributions from NATO allies, the Pentagon is considering sending as many as 7,000 more US troops to Afghanistan, write Steven Lee Myers and Thom Shanker in the New York Times:

[Senior Bush administration officials] said the step would push the number of American forces there to roughly 40,000, the highest level since the war began more than six years ago, and would require at least a modest reduction in troops from Iraq.

The planning began in recent weeks, reflecting a growing resignation to the fact that NATO is unable or unwilling to contribute more troops despite public pledges of an intensified effort in Afghanistan from the presidents and prime ministers who attended an alliance summit meeting in Bucharest, Romania, last month.

Related posts on Atlantic Review:

•  Bumper Stickers Slogans: What is the Purpose of NATO?

•  Afghanistan: Merkel Has "No Time" for Burden Sharing Proposals

•  Rupert Murdoch: Alliance Based on Shared Values, not Geography

NYT Columnist Roger Cohen wrote Europe Votes Democrat, but Asia Tends Republican and Michael J. Green, who served on the National Security Council staff from 2001 to 2005, claims that the Iraq war has been good for US interests in South East Asia. He writes in The Washington Quarterly:

If anything, most major powers in Asia have used the war on terrorism and the conflict in Iraq to align more closely with the United States in order to balance rivals within the region or to advance their global standing.

Greg Sheridan agrees with this analysis and adds in The Australian (HT: Joe Noory):

Australian commentators almost universally mimic the European critique or more often the liberal American critique of the Bush administration and all its works. What is clear is that they have almost no sense of the Asian context at all.

Other conservatives, however, worry about the US standing in in East Asia: Michael Austin from the American Enterprise Institute opines that appeasement politics weaken US credibility in Asia: "Some of America's most important bilateral alliances are at risk of coming unmoored."

In just three years, the Brussels Forum has established itself as an elite annual conference for the key players in transatlantic relations. The Brussels Forum is what Davos is for the business elite and the Munich Security Conference for the defense politicians.

Steve Clemons was impressed by this year's Brussels Forum from March 14-16. Dan Drezner has posted some good gossip and written something more serious for Newsweek.

Constanze Stelzenmüller of the German Marshall Fund, the main organizer of the Brussels Forum, presented an interesting sounding paper: "America and Europe, seven years after 9/11: Hard power humbled, soft power exposed, and a looser, more pragmatic relationship," available for download as a PDF.

Helga Haftendorn, professor emeritus at the Free University of Berlin and one of the leading experts on transatlantic relations, argues that "a common transatlantic strategy for global challenges is nowhere in sight -- even in the event of a Democratic US administration come 2009."

Europe and America embrace different concepts of world order that are based on diverging values, belief systems, and experiences-and thus they employ different strategies and instruments to shape international affairs.

Yet, Haftendorn argues that "differences in the power relations between Europe and America are more relevant than diverging concepts of world order." This leads her to conclude: "Given the structural asymmetries between Europe and America, it is unlikely they will unite to cope together with new challenges." The flexible structures of a "multilateralism à la carte" are thus the future.

I agree with this analysis. Such a realistic assessment of the future of European-American cooperation is better for transatlantic relations than those typical essays and speeches full of wishful thinking.

The German Council on Foreign Relations presents her article in IP Global Edition. It is just five pages long, which is unfortunately a bit too short for her analysis of the five basic European-American interaction patterns. A longer version "How well can Europe and the United States Cooperate on Non-European Issues?" is to be published later this year by Geir Lundestad and the Norwegian Nobel Institute.

The Boston Globe

World War I veterans still have no national memorial. There has been no Hollywood blockbuster in recent years to bring their story to life. But they still have Frank Buckles. More than 90 years after he fudged his age to join the Army, Corporal Frank Woodruff Buckles, the last surviving American veteran of World War I, came to the Pentagon yesterday to represent the more than two million "doughboys" who braved the trench warfare and gas attacks of the "The Great War." (...)
Now, Buckles is the last flesh-and-blood reminder of the 116,000 Americans who gave their lives to save Europe at the start of the 20th century.

Wikipedia tries to document the surviving veterans from all World War I combatant nations.

The surviving veterans remind us that the era of wars between the world's major powers is not ancient history. I wonder what these veterans think when they hear how today's politicians talk about the risks of terrorism. Do they think that this is just scare-mongering to win votes and that we shall consider ourselves to be lucky to live in such peaceful times? That Al Qaeda is just a nuissance compared to the Wehrmacht or the Red Army?

The human and financial costs of WWI were huge. America's current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are also expensive: $3.5 billion per week, according to William Hartung. German Joys quotes some comparisons from his article: The "whole international community spends less than $400 million per year on the International Atomic Energy Agency, the primary institution for monitoring and preventing the spread of nuclear weapons; that's less than one day's worth of war costs." And the US government's yearly budget for combating global warming is as big as two weeks of expenses in Iraq and Afghanistan.

More efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation and combating global warming are at least as important as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Julianne Smith and Alexander Lennon of the Center for Strategic and International Studies contend that climate change will further disrupt the stability of already volatile regions, which has the potential of producing multitudes of discontented individuals prone to radicalization...

While many Americans criticize Germany and other European countries for not spending enough on defense, there seem to be more and more Americans, who criticize the huge US defense budget, which is not only much much bigger than the combined budgets of half a dozen US enemies and allies, but also huge compared to other foreign policy instruments.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates for instance calls for more money and effort to "soft power" tools, including communications, because the military alone cannot defend America's interests around the world. (See Atlantic Review post "Al Qaeda is better at communicating its message on the Internet than America").

Today, James Carroll refers to Gates speech and writes in The Boston Globe (HT: David): "For US foreign policy, it's all power, no influence":

A MAN bit a dog last week. Not just any man, and not just any dog. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates decried the vast disproportion between America's annual investment in the Pentagon - something like $700 billion - and what is spent on the State Department - about $35 billion. That's less, Gates said in a speech in Kansas, than the Defense Department spends on healthcare. The total number of foreign service officers is about 6,600 - which is less, Gates said, than the number of military personnel serving on one aircraft carrier strike group.

And a for me even more shocking comparison was quoted in FP Passport: "There are substantially more people employed as musicians in Defense bands than in the entire foreign service," says David J. Kilcullen, a senior advisor to Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq.

I know, why Germany spends comparatively little on defense: a) A long history of starting the wrong wars, b) domestic priorities (unemployment, ageing society etc), c) less fear of terrorism than in the US, and d) belief in soft power, especially in the stabilization effects of an ever expanding EU.

But why is the US spending comparatively little on regular foreign policy, including public diplomacy? Why is the Pentagon budget and staff sooo much bigger than the State Department budget and staff? Why is hard power considered soo important?

Which country's policy is more short-sighted and could prove to be more of a problem in the coming years? Germany's or America's?

Mark Helprin, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, is concerned about Germany's security. He describes Germany as the "soft underbelly of Europe," which presents a tempting target for Russia and the Jihadists.

Having been deeply humiliated in recent years, Russia is now "like Germany between the wars." Moscow is encouraged by European pacifisim and US failure in Iraq and views Germany as "the strategic gate to Western Europe," says Helprin.

And the Jihadists are interested in Germany, because it is according to Helprin the "richest target least defended," because Germany does not spend much on defense and lacks an independent expeditionary capability and nuclear weapons. Helprin assumes that nukes would deterr Jihadists... He also opines that NATO would not retaliate with nuclear weapons, if a member country was attacked by a nuclear weapon.

Germany, says Helprin, "sleeps and dreams unaware" of all theses threats. And the The US just views Germany as a "giant aircraft carrier with sausages." His entire post is available in the Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal (HT: ROA and GM Roper). I find Helprin's comments on Russia more convincing than those on the "Jihadists."

Fareed Zakaria and Norman Podhoretz debate on PBS whether Iran would be a rational nuclear power and what US policy should be: Deterrence or pre-emption? Zakaria is concerned about yet another US invasion of Muslim country, and made this interesting quote on deterrence:

It used to be that one had to explain deterrence to the Left; it has now become something the Right does not understand.

The transcript is available at The Australian and a video is posted below and available at Youtube. HT: Jeb Koogler, who also writes in Foreign Policy Watch that deterrence is not enough.