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http://www.economist.com/world/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1109654 The future of NATO A moment of truth May 2nd 2002 | WASHINGTON, DC >From The Economist print edition The NATO alliance has until its November summit in Prague to decide what it is for NOBODY damns NATO with faint praise. Both boosters and detractors call it the most successful military alliance in history. But does it have a future? It is hard for Americans and Europeans to imagine the past 50 years without the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation there to defend them. Yet it is harder than it used to be to imagine NATO, as it is, advancing far into the 21st century. Before September 11th, the question dangling over the transatlantic alliance was what it was for. The cold war, after all, had been over for ten years. Since the attacks on the United States, and with Europe, too, more worried than it used to be about unfettered terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction, the value of "collective defence" is no longer in so much doubt. But does America, with its unrivalled military power, need NATO any more? And, assuming someone wants and needs it, how can the alliance be adapted to defend its members against the very different threats they now face? If good answers are not found before the NATO summit in Prague in November, the future of NATO looks bleak indeed. By an irony, NATO has never been busier. But much of its recent activity has been in fuzzier collective security-organising peacekeeping missions, holding the hands of Europe's weaker new democracies-rather than the harder-edged collective defence for which it was created. You might call it, as some do, babysitting the end of the cold war. Not everyone is unhappy at this change. Peacekeeping in the Balkans and elsewhere, as those who do it sharply point out, is not for wimps. Others, on both sides of the Atlantic, argue that ensuring peace and stability in Europe, given the trouble its past wars have caused, is anyway plenty for NATO to be getting on with. But those who want NATO to be doing more than babysitting are in deeply gloomy mood. NATO troops still turn out together for peacekeeping duty in the Balkans, though in smaller numbers now. But what the war for Kosovo revealed, and the American-led campaign in Afghanistan hammered home, is how far the European members of NATO lag behind America, both in high-tech weapons and in their ability to get useable troops speedily to where they are needed. The extra $48 billion that President George Bush now proposes to add to America's $331 billion defence budget is more than Britain or France spends on defence in a year. As Europeans struggle to equip the 60,000-strong EU-led rapid-reaction force they promised for next year, such a gap may well drive them to despair. Even success can be a problem. Former cold-war adversaries from Central and Eastern Europe are either in NATO already (Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic) or else queuing to join, with Russia's president keen to get alongside. Last June, in Warsaw, Mr Bush called on NATO to be ready at Prague to issue as many new invitations as possible. The alliance should "not calculate how little we can get away with, but how much we can do to advance the cause of freedom." Yet some of those who most value NATO's military effectiveness-the British and German governments, some members of the United States Senate-have doubts about going much beyond the current 19 members. They worry that Mr Bush's open-door enthusiasm really reflects his dwindling interest in NATO as a military tool. Critics feel that to extend new invitations to Slovenia, Slovakia, perhaps the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and possibly even Bulgaria and Romania, would inevitably dilute the alliance, turning it into more of a security talking-shop. That might make a bigger NATO more acceptable to Russia, but would reduce it to little more than an armed version of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which is open to all Europeans and spends its time on good works such as election-monitoring. Such worries have been compounded by America's swift, crushing and mostly unilateral military response to the September 11th attacks. Although the alliance, for the first time in its history, formally invoked Article 5 of its treaty and thereby declared the attacks on America to be an attack on all, European governments fret that America's military chiefs-compelled by the need for speed, but also with the frustrations of warfare-by-coalition in Kosovo in mind-preferred to fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan largely on their own. Where European officials tend to be gloomy, however, senior officials in the Bush administration see mostly NATO's opportunities. One recalls that, as he sat in the White House in the wake of the September attacks, NATO's swift invocation of Article 5 came as "an expression of European solidarity none of us will forget." Another admits that September 11th was a "wake-up call" for the alliance, but in its aftermath, he argues, "NATO's stock has never been higher." The challenge now is to make the alliance more effective against the new threats. Thinking positive It is true that the eventual fighting in Afghanistan was not a formal NATO operation. But at both the Pentagon and the State Department this matters much less than the fact that every NATO member (and would-be member) is somehow involved. All but a couple have soldiers doing dangerous jobs on the ground, whether helping to flush al-Qaeda members from their caves or manning the international security force that is currently stationed in and around Kabul. Nor is the war in Afghanistan necessarily a good case-study for the future. The adversary in this instance was poorly armed, only a few specialised ground troops were needed early on, and there were local groups to work with. America may not be the next target of attack, officials point out. And future military operations may need to be conducted differently. America's changed thinking about NATO after September 11th is already reflected in its new priorities for the November summit. First, say Mr Bush's officials, will come discussion of new capabilities against the new threats. Only then will come discussion of new members, and after that new relationships. This last means chiefly the effort being launched this month to include Russia as a partner with NATO's 19 members in deliberations on common problems (which would then be held "at 20"), but also includes relations with Ukraine, Central Asia and others. Since threats to NATO members can come unexpectedly, from anywhere, NATO needs to be ready for anything. Weapons of mass destruction in the hands of bad guys, insist American officials, present as much of an "existential" threat (that is, a threat to everyone's existence) as the Warsaw Pact divisions once poised to pour through the Fulda Gap. Britain's Tony Blair publicly endorses that view. So, by their quieter actions, do many other European governments, from Norway to Spain. "Long-range ballistic missiles pay no heed to national borders," argued Germany's defence minister, Rudolf Scharping, recently at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. NATO must be ready to act where its vital security interests are at stake, whether in Europe "or some other corner of the world". That is the challenge, and it has implications for all aspects of the Prague summit agenda. Can NATO meet it? With allies like these... Long before the events of September 11th, NATO's secretary-general, Lord Robertson, was telling everyone who would listen that the alliance's future depended on "capabilities, capabilities, capabilities." Yet not only NATO, through its defence-capabilities initiative launched in 1999, but also the EU, with the goal it has set for its rapid-reaction force, have promised more than European governments have delivered. Sharp declines in defence spending have levelled off, and 11 of the EU's 15 members are now planning small increases. Yet this is not enough to fulfil Mr Blair's hopes, as he launched the EU's defence effort along with France, that Europeans would do more under an EU label for the ultimate benefit of NATO. These meagre efforts are recognised in defence ministries across NATO as the greatest threat to the ability of Americans and Europeans to sustain NATO as a military alliance. It is not that the Europeans do nothing: between them they provide more than 65% of Balkan peacekeepers and do a lot of other handy things. But the few useable forces they can muster from the more than 2m men and women they have under arms are already overstretched. Part of the answer to Europe's capability shortage, suggest American officials, is to refocus NATO's 58 capability goals on the things that are most needed in the post-September 11th world: compatible and secure communications, air- and sea-lift, special-operations forces, precision-guided munitions and the ability to fight together under threat of the use of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. Ships and aircraft are expensive; the right radios and gas-masks are not. Nor need everyone gear up to do everything. Small countries can provide useful niche capabilities, such as the Czechs' much-praised biological and chemical response unit. In the future NATO, as American defence officials envisage it, a British plane, say, using information supplied by an American satellite, might back up Norwegian troops on the ground. Can those same officials imagine NATO itself running another military operation, as it did in Kosovo? "I wouldn't rule it out," is the diplomatic reply. In other cases it might just do the force planning, as it may have to when Turkey assumes command of the security force in Afghanistan from Britain; in still others America might take over the leadership and planning, as it did in the Gulf war and in Afghanistan. The point to remember, say Pentagon officials, is that NATO's years of working together are the reason why America can call on pretty well all its various allies today for help in Afghanistan. Preserving the ability to operate together is in everyone's interests. But that is something only NATO can do, using its own mechanisms and standards to preserve an "escalation continuum", as Julian Lindley-French argues in a forthcoming report for the EU's Institute for Security Studies. Doing that would require at least the bigger Europeans, the British, the French and the Germans, to share more of the risks by maintaining the ability to operate alongside the Americans in many different circumstances, even if the rest provide only specialist help or foot-soldiers. NATO's command structure and planning mechanisms would also need reform. America will be pressing at the Prague summit for more high-readiness commands and mobile joint headquarters. One idea being floated inside and outside the administration is for the immediate establishment of a special-forces command to bring together the military skills America, Britain and others deployed in Afghanistan. Some Europeans remain sceptical of this more militarised future. They argue, rightly, that the world needs "smart" development aid, not just smart bombs. But an alliance limited merely to that sort of burden-sharing, based on America's hard power and Europe's soft power, would give Europeans little real say over the strategic agenda. As Mr Lindley-French puts it, they would just be America's "garbage collectors". To avoid that fate, the European members of NATO will have to contribute more and better military capabilities too. America's patience, meanwhile, is wearing thin. Marc Grossman, the under-secretary of state for political affairs, recently told the Senate Armed Services Committee that, in the end, it comes down to cash and hard choices for Europe. Pleading poverty, or pointing to the money Europeans are spending on reconstruction in the Balkans or elsewhere, only exasperates America's NATO-backers. "If they won't spend the money [on defence], it's not our fault," shoots back one frustrated senior official. After all, points out another, the EU has dollops of money to spend when it wants to: witness its recent decision to invest some euro3.3 billion ($3 billion) in Galileo, a satellite system that deliberately and needlessly duplicates America's Global Positioning System. American reaction to the European defence project is the same: it will be welcome if it comes off and can contribute to the common effort, but the Europeans must come up with the goods. Into the unknown If new capabilities are the test of Europe's commitment to NATO, the handling of enlargement will be a test of America's. The administration refuses to name names, insisting that any decision on new members will not be taken until nearer the summit. Meanwhile Richard Lugar, in the past one of the Senate's strongest supporters of a bigger NATO, now argues that, in the wake of September 11th, enlargement should be pursued only in a way that "strengthens not weakens" the alliance in its new military mission, and that new members must meet new NATO requirements. Squaring the need for military efficiency with the president's wish for inclusiveness weighs most heavily at the Pentagon. All the would-be new members have drawbacks. The three Baltic states have tiny armies, but have been working hard together to develop useful niche capabilities. One official compares them to Norway, which has few forces but sent most of them to Afghanistan. Although the alliance should not take in basket cases, he argues, membership can help pull countries in the right direction. Bulgaria and Romania are keen and well-placed strategically, yet their military reforms still have a long way to go, with Romania looking less stable than it did before the last round in 1997 and Bulgaria described by one NATO official as "bottom of the heap". Elsewhere in the administration, the political advantages of enlargement seem to outweigh the operational disadvantages. "NATO decides to act at 19, but 19 don't have to act," argues one senior State Department official. Yet when it comes to intelligence-sharing, crucial to the fight against terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, NATO is already a two-tier, if not a three-tier, alliance. Does it make sense to dilute things further? Knowing how much might hang on it, since September 11th all aspirants have been careful to act as if they were already NATO allies. That has been noticed. "I can handle an ally that says 'This is our fight'," notes a senior White House official approvingly. The alliance could anyway use new blood, he argues, "especially countries who take security seriously because they had to do without it" in the past. NATO did not start with the 16 members it had at the end of the cold war, and it would be wrong to pull up the ladder now, says the Bush team. But does it make sense, asks one former insider, to bring into NATO so many of Europe's weaker democracies? If the Democrats had tried it, the Republicans would have loudly complained. Officials in charge of the American end of enlargement discussions insist they will be "unsentimental" in assessing progress. Slovakia is on notice that if its election in September returns the distrusted Vladimir Meciar to power, no invitation will be forthcoming. Yet neither Bulgaria nor Romania looks any more stable. And what of Russia? Vladimir Putin says he wants his country to play a more constructive role in Europe, politically, economically and in security too. Since September 11th he has aligned Russia more closely with America in the war on terrorism. The British proposal for NATO and Russia to meet "at 20" to discuss such issues at first caused apoplexy at the Pentagon, which was opposed to giving Russia even a hint of a veto over aspects of NATO policy. Some smaller members, and newer ones for which NATO membership was a means to escape Russia's shadow, were also hostile. The proposals for a new NATO-Russia Council, soon to be put to NATO's foreign ministers and then aired at a NATO-Russia summit, fall far short of giving Russia that veto. If agreement eludes them, everyone retains the right to go his own way. But the idea is to work together at problems of common concern, such as terrorism, weapons proliferation, regional peacekeeping, missile defences, search and rescue and airspace management, reaching joint decisions where possible. No one knows how this will work. Russia has to decide whether it will send a proper working delegation to NATO headquarters, like any other co-operating non-member. As trust builds, say NATO officials, the agenda can expand. Russian officials say they are ready to go as far as NATO is. But Mr Putin's wish to co-operate may not be fully shared by the foreign and defence officials he will have to rely on to make the whole thing work. So what sort of NATO will emerge after Prague? A somewhat bigger, more political NATO, inevitably. A more militarily capable one, too? That depends on the resources everyone, especially the Europeans, puts into it. Whatever future awaits NATO, the past will be no guide. --------------------------- ANTI-NATO INFORMATION LIST ==^================================================================ This email was sent to: archive@jab.org EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9617B Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
