Maintaining NATO.

Kaiser, Karl

NATO was fortunate to have two particularly gifted Secretaries General at moments of historic change for the international community. At the end of the Cold War the German Manfred Woerner creatively succeeded in adapting the Alliance to the disappearance of the East-West conflict that had previously dominated international geopolitics. After September 11, 2001, with the Iraq War to follow, Lord George Robertson from Great Britain skillfully held the Alliance together despite the divisions created by the administration of US President George W. Bush and the disagreements on the Iraq War. Lord Roberton also assisted NATO in adapting to new goals and policies.

Lord Robertson's analysis ("The Future of NATO," Fall 2004) correctly delineates the future tasks of NATO in a fundamentally unstable world, ranging from political convulsions in the adjacent world regions to jihad-terrorism, failed states, and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. As he points out, NATO has succeeded in fulfilling completely new tasks: ending ethnic cleansing with military force in Kosovo, keeping the peace by maintaining a military presence in the Balkans, supporting stability in Afghanistan through various mechanisms, and helping Poland's military involvement in the Iraq War by providing command infrastructure support which the country itself was unable to provide.

But Lord Robertson remains diplomatically silent on NATO's most important structural problem that it has faced in the recent past and will likely continue to confront: the tendency of the Bush Administration to bypass the Alliance or to treat it as a handy "tool box" from which to select "coalitions of the willing" to support Washington. Despite many of NATO's accomplishments, the organization has often been relegated to the sidelines by the Bush Administration's statements and actions.

When, as Lord Robertson put it, NATO "spectacularly proved its enduring relevance on September 12, 2001, when Article 5, the collective defense clause ... was invoked," the absence of a proper US response immediately demonstrated what has basically remained an ongoing problem. Not only did the Bush Administration make no effort whatsoever to involve the Alliance, but, even more importantly, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld transformed the concept of "coalition of the willing" from what was previously a pragmatic approach into a doctrine.

This new approach adopted by the Bush Administration treated the "old Europe" that dared to disagree with Washington's policy with disdain. Perhaps even more disturbing, the policy seemed to play the European partners against each other.

Though efforts were made to overcome old divisions by creating NATO's Rapid Reaction Force or the Provincial Reconstruction Teams for Afghanistan--all of them with Lord Robertson's help--NATO will only survive as the indispensable alliance of democracies if a proper compromise can be found between the necessity to conduct operations with those who are capable and ready and the need for joint decision-making, preparation, as well as shared command and infrastructure. The relegation of NATO to Washington's "tool box" would result in its eventual demise.

Lord Robertson rightly points out that Europe has to enhance and modernize its military capabilities. Indeed, if the members of the European Union would only abandon their obsolete and internal multiplication of military structures and weapons systems, Europe could do much better with the same budget. But one problem remains: as Europe (hopefully) grows stronger, Washington will have to abandon its continued skepticism vis-a-vis a united Europe in the field of security and return to its former policy that considered a strong and united Europe as an asset and valuable partner for cooperating on shared strategic goals.

A concerted effort to resolve these issues within the Alliance is imperative now that the US Presidential elections have passed.

Karl Kaiser is the former Director of the German Council on Foreign Relations and is now a Scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs of Harvard University.