Transatlantic Relations in a Post-American World : The Case of the Libyan War

The current geopolitical transition in global interstate relations from a unipolar power structure, in which American primacy was largely uncontested and generally acknowledged, to a multipolar international system characterized by the relative decline of the United States and what Zakaria [2011, 2008] has referred to as ‘the rise of the rest’, brings with it significant challenges for several collective-defense and collective-security organizations throughout the world. This Paper analyzes one subset of this transformative reshaping of the international-security environment by focusing on transatlantic relations. More specifically, it sets out the various ways by which State actors in the Euro-Atlantic zone are contending with a rapidly evolving process that is sweeping before it established patterns of diplomatic interaction and military cooperation between NATO-Europe countries and the United States, and by the same token driving a fundamental rethinking of the relative power relations among the allied States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The case study selected to illustrate the contours of the paradigm shift now underway in conceptualizations of such core NATO issues as threat assessment, command authority, risk-sharing, operational objectives, burden-sharing, and alliance cohesion is an instructive one: the Alliance’s contribution to the implementation of UNSC Resolution 1973 [S/RES/1973 (2011)] authorizing under Chapter VII of the UN Charter ‘all necessary measures’, short of ‘a foreign occupation force’, to safeguard threatened civilians in Libya