Nothing remains to be said about the American abandonment of Syrian Kurdistan. But what about Europe?
Is not Europe also responsible for the fate of our most dependable allies in the war against Islamic State? Is it not at least as affected by the strategic and moral disaster of leaving the field open for Turkey, Iran, Russia and the thousands of jihadists the Kurds had been holding, who are now in the hands of Bashar Assad and Recep Tayyip Erdogan ?
And does Europe not possess the means, with its 500 million inhabitants and 28 national armies, to take up the gauntlet, to step in for the 2,000 Special Forces troops the U.S. is withdrawing, and, for the first time, to begin to assure a share of its own defense while standing up for its values?
That is the proposal I made in January after President Trump’s first withdrawal announcement. At the time, I floated the idea of a European military unit made up of as many of the 28 European Union members as were willing to recognize the geopolitical significance of the event unfolding on the Turkey-Syria border. With France already having some 200 Special Forces soldiers on the ground, it wouldn’t be hard, given the political will, to arrive at 2,000 with troops from elsewhere in Europe.
A precedent exists—one I witnessed up close.
It is June 1995. The war against Bosnian civilians has been raging for three years. The international community is doing nothing. The United Nations Protection Force is on the ground, but Unprofor is a prisoner of its own mandate, which leaves it a spectator as the Serbs shell Sarajevo and commit acts of genocide in Srebrenica. The U.S. under Bill Clinton, like Mr. Trump today in Syria, deems the Balkans a faraway quagmire that is to be avoided at all costs.
Such is the situation when newly elected French President Jacques Chirac arrives on the scene. With consternation, he sees the French members of Unprofor chained to the Vrbanja bridge and humiliated. He observes that when two blue helmets fall in the center of Sarajevo, struck dead by Serbian rockets fired from the surrounding hills, Unprofor is unable to respond.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization convenes in Paris to discuss once more the possibility of responding to what are euphemistically termed Belgrade’s provocations. When the meeting concludes with another resounding decision to do nothing, Chirac cannot help but notice. He presents the idea of forming—outside the NATO framework and free of the paralyzing procedures of the EU—a force composed of those of France’s partners who share his sense of urgency.
The French, the British, a small Dutch contingent and troop transports furnished by Germany are forged into a Rapid Reaction Force with flexible rules of engagement. It breaks free from the rut of cruelty and cowardice that Bosnia has been for the past three years.
The Rapid Reaction Force remains, in principle, under the command of U.N. Gens. Rupert Smith and Bernard Janvier. Its sole mission, in principle, is to protect a U.N. force that has become a hostage to itself and its absurd mandate.
But the soldiers who make it up are not wearing blue helmets. Their Warrior armored vehicles, Lynx antitank helicopters and AMX-10 tanks are not covered with the white paint that has become a synonym for impotence, dishonor and surrender. Instead, each wears the uniform of his own nation’s military—a detail that makes all the difference.
Soon they are protecting the rutted road through Mount Igman that is the sole remaining supply route for besieged and famished Sarajevo. With 120mm mortars, they pound the artillery position that launched the rockets that killed the two U.N. peacekeepers. One day, an arms depot is destroyed; the next, a Mirage 2000 drops laser-guided missiles on the Serbian snipers’ command center in Pale. So begins the virtuous cycle that will end with Operation Deliberate Force in August 1995, the routing of Serb forces whose strength was based on the West’s weakness, and, finally, the Dayton peace accords.
Syria in 2019 isn’t Bosnia in 1995. But couldn’t the same solid core of European countries that succeeded in deploying 4,500 troops in an entirely hostile theater of operations deploy 2,000 on the border of a nation that still pretends to be our NATO ally? Can’t the modicum of political will needed to lend aid to the brutalized Muslims of Bosnia now be summoned in defense of another group of beleaguered Muslims, the Kurds, who, moreover, fought for us and protected us from Islamic State?
Why wouldn’t France, Britain and other willing countries of Europe jump at the chance to provide not an armada, not a regiment, but a few hundred elite troops to replace those who, until recently, had been enough to keep northern Syria a sanctuary?
French President Emmanuel Macron, in a splendid interview in the Economist, pronounced NATO “brain dead.” He seems to know better than anyone that a page of Western history is turning and that Europe will have to reinvent its own security. He also knows that the germ of the collective European defense that he has pursued with such energy since his election may lie between Erbil and Raqqa.
Mr. Macron’s hour has arrived. That is the message addressed to him by the many Americans of goodwill—Republican, Democrat and independent—I have had the good fortune to meet during a weekslong tour of America I made to support the Kurds in cooperation with the New York–based nonprofit Justice For Kurds.
May Mr. Macron act—not against but alongside the best of the United States.
Mr. Lévy is author of “The Empire and the Five Kings: America’s Abdication and the Fate of the World” ( Henry Holt, 2019). This article was translated from French by Steven B. Kennedy.
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