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THE EUROPEAN Union's search to reduce its reliance on America and endow itself with a strong defence capacity must not be allowed to weaken the unity of Nato, a US official said.
Insisting on the "complementarity" of the alliance and the EU, Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state, said the last thing Washington wanted to see was a European defence identity "which begins within Nato but grows out of Nato and then away from Nato". The risk, he told a seminar at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, is of an EU defence structure that "first duplicates the alliance and then competes with the alliance".
Though he acknowledged the debate was for the time being more about nuances than absolutes, Mr Talbott's words are a sign of the anxiety in the Clinton administration that if Europe goes too far and too fast, it could add to existing isolationist pressure on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. They also touch America's basic ambivalence about greater European unity: that it is fine so long as it does not threaten US global pre-eminence.
They carry extra weight coming as they do from one of the most instinctively Atlanticist members of Mr Clinton's team and just as Javier Solana, the former Nato secretary general, takes up the new post of EU representative for foreign and security policy.
In the wake of the Kosovo crisis a mood of "never again" was already strong, Mr Talbott said. Many policy-makers in the US felt it had been forced to contribute too much to the war in Kosovo and believed that in a future European crisis a similar US role "would not be sustainable, given our other global commitments".
Two events have especially made Washington uneasy, as Europe - stung by its almost humiliating reliance on American military muscle - tries to beef up its own capacity. One, Mr Talbott said, was the Anglo-French defence initiative that emerged from the St Malo summit in December, raising fears among Nato members that were not in the EU, Turkey in particular, that they would be shut out of the decision-making.
Six months later came the EU Cologne summit, which vowed that it must have "the capacity for autonomous action". This language, Mr Talbott said, "could be read to imply that, all other things being equal, Europe would tend to act outside the Nato alliance". First, however, Europe would have to give itself the means to project military power. Its shortcomings lay above all in transport and logistics, and though several allies were restructuring their forces, "there was still a long way to go".
Mindful of the political problem of devoting extra spending when all government expenditure was under pressure, Mr Talbott said the challenge was "not to spend more but to spend more efficiently".