by MILAN KRSTIĆ
The changing character of transatlantic relations is an increasingly hot topic in policy and the academic community. Policy divergences between the USA and its European NATO allies when it comes to Iran and the Gulf, Ukraine and Russia, or Israel and the Middle East, followed by Trump’s NATO and EU scepticism and a big crisis in mutual relations on the issue of Greenland, triggered a debate if the transatlantic security community is coming to an end. Using Alexander Wendt’s terminology, the Kantian culture of anarchy seemed to vanish from relations between the USA and its European allies since Trump returned to the White House. Many envisioned that relations between the two sides of the Atlantic would become rivalrous.
This relates to the general trend of envisioning a world order reshaping into a regressive form, and, in Mearsheimer’s words, going “back to the future”. Robert Kagan claims Trump wants to return the world to the 19th-century international order. Stacie Goddard and Abraham Newman claim that the world is transforming from the liberal international order to neo-royalism. Dejan Jović also acknowledges more imperial tendencies and terms the emerging order as limited imperialism within liquid unipolarism. Monica Toft, but also Stefan Mair and many others, claim that the division of the world into spheres of influence is the most important characteristic of the new world order. The focus was on the ‘Trump Factor’ as the cause of radical changes in both transatlantic relations and the world order, with Daniel Drezner recently rephrasing Wendt’s words to claim that “Anarchy is what Donald Trump makes of it”.
However, these tendencies at the level of the world order must not lead to a complete return to rivalry in the transatlantic region. In the article I co-authored with Stevan Nedeljković and Marko Dašić, titled “From Kantian friendship to Benthamite partnership: transatlantic relations under Donald Trump”, recently published in International Politics, we argue that, already during Trump’s first term, the character of transatlantic relations was neither genuinely friendly nor fully rivalrous. To explain the character of transatlantic relations between 2017 and 2021, we expanded Wendt’s theoretical framework. Building on his classification of the three dominant cultures of anarchy, each grounded in a corresponding dominant role (Kantian in friendship, Lockean in rivalry, and Hobbesian in enmity), we introduced a fourth ideal type: a “Benthamite” culture of anarchy, structured around the dominant role of partnership.
Wendt claims that the Kantian culture, with the dominant role of a friend, includes resorting to the use of force in mutual relations between units and the collective defence if attacked by a third party. This was long considered a case in relations among transatlantic allies integrated into NATO. In Lockean culture, on the other hand, typical of pre-WWII relations in Europe, rivals might temporarily form alliances, but they do not give up the use of force or make firm promises of collective defence. We claimed that neither of these idealtypes are explaining the character of the USA relations with its NATO allies during Trump’s first mandate and that there is a need to expand the analytical framework.
Naming the fourth ideal type based on the role of partnership after Jeremy Bentham, due to the logical alignment with his utilitarian political philosophy and based on the role of partnership, we offered a tool for understanding relations between the USA and its European NATO allies in Trump’s era. This type of relation is characterised by a lack of belief in collective defence, yet with a firm rejection of the possibility of direct use of force in mutual relations (while resorting to practices of aggressive political unilateralism). In this sense, this model lies between the existing Kantian and Lockean ideal types, with other important distinctive features that we aim to outline in the article but will not further elaborate on in this blog.
After new shocks to transatlantic relations since the beginning of Trump’s second term, it is important to question whether relations are still falling short of the Benthamite ideal type. Contrary to the predominant discourse of Lockean rivalry, I would once again bet on a Benthamite partnership between the USA and European NATO members. The promise of collective defence is even blurrier than during Trump’s first mandate, but the two sides still jointly materially support Ukraine, which is perceived by many European NATO members as crucial to their own defence. Moreover, although the Greenland issue exposed an unprecedented level of aggressive unilateralism in mutual relations, with potential territorial implications, the dispute still remained below the threshold of force, indicating that the use of force continues to be regarded as an unacceptable feature of transatlantic relations, even under Trump’s administration. I hope to develop this claim further in a future academic article on the subject.
Milan Krstić is an Associate Professor at the University of Belgrade – Faculty of Political Science. Email: milan.krstic@fpn.bg.ac.rs
