The presumptive Republican Presidential candidate, Senator John McCain, has started telling Europeans that his White House will want effective teamwork with its European allies - a marked change from the way in which the Bush administration often seems to brush them off.

In his concept, the key word of a stronger transatlantic partnership is “together” - with a new emphasis on U.S. readiness to be “willing to be persuaded by” European allies in order to get united action by democracies in Europe and the rest of the world.

A key U.S.-European cleavage - over Iraq - is unlikely to be healed by a McCain presidency. He has consistently supported the war in Iraq and argued for deeper, longer American involvement, not less. Even now in calling for more powerful U.S.-EU cooperation, McCain may dismay some Europeans with his emphasis on hard military power over the soft power options that many allies feel were scandalously neglected by the current Republican incumbent in the White House. (more…)

France has decided more ground troops to Afghanistan for combat missions against Taliban insurgents in the mountainous battle zone close to the border with Pakistan, according to press reports in Paris.

The French commitment, which includes elite special forces, comes at a critical moment for NATO, which it direly needs reinforcements to ratchet up its campaign against guerilla fighters infiltrating eastern Afghanistan from their sanctuaries in the tribal areas of neighboring Pakistan.

By sending in fresh combat units, expected to number up to 500 men, President Nicolas Sarkozy seems to be acting on his pledge that France wants to work more closely with NATO. With the Bush administration asking European nations for more military help in Afghanistan, a Sarkozy adviser was quoted in Le Monde newspaper saying that “France is the only country that can — if it decides to – make the crucial difference.”

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By David Young

At the time of the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999, the premise of Western governments was that confronting ethnic cleansing was more important than respecting the international borders. The message was that would-be tyrants in future needed to know – and be deterred by – the cost that would be imposed on them by the international community if they sought to inflict such atrocities. The U.S. decision to throw its full political-military weight into Kosovo reflected eagerness to make up for perceived moral failures in the 1990s (notably Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia). President Bill Clinton was eager to restore America’s image as the global policeman backing up the recently proclaimed new world order. And he wanted to restore the strategic authority of the United States.

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By Francois Clemenceau

At last there is a book- authoritative but not yet translated into English- that answers the tormenting question of why the two most wanted mass murderers of the Yugoslav civil wars have never been brought to justice a decade after international warrants were issued for them. Despite repeated reports of their imminent arrests, the pair – Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, who headed the Bosnian Serbs’ army – have managed to elude capture and extradition to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.

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Former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Robert E. Hunter examines the current state of the NATO mission in Afghanistan. He focuses on the challenges presented by so-called “caveats”– limitations that individual nations place on their NATO forces– and the difficulties that they are causing for NATO commanders on the ground. Hunter’s article deals not only with the alliance’s immediate prospects in Afghanistan, but also with the long-term repercussions that could result from NATO’s first major military defeat.
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