[A-List] The role of Nato?

[Sabri Oncu <soncu@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nato strategy fails to silence sceptics
By Gerard Baker in Rome
Published: May 27 2002 22:36 | Last Updated: May 27 2002 22:36
Financial Times


In Rome on Tuesday, leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organisation countries will formally launch a new, though as yet
largely undefined, partnership between them and the country their
military alliance spent 40 years preparing to fight - Russia.

The event - mainly ceremonial but with some specific proposals on
Nato-Russia defence co-operation - is designed above all to
demonstrate the new friendship between the old cold war enemies.

But it is also intended to emphasise the continuing commitment of
the Nato governments to a military alliance whose purpose and
even whose continued existence critics on both sides of the
Atlantic have questioned in recent months.

The cold war is over, the dark threat the alliance faced gone.
Meanwhile a massive and widening disparity in military capability
between the US on the one hand, and the other 15 members on the
other, has cast doubt on its cohesion. In the US, conservatives,
with some influential supporters in the Pentagon and elsewhere in
the Bush administration, have wondered aloud about the viability
of the alliance.

The US military superiority is so large, they say, that far from
being a useful coalition to meet the new challenges of the 21st
century, Nato is just a nuisance - another multilateral
entanglement in which US attempts to promote its own national
interest risk being blocked by carping and querulous Europeans.

But on his trip to Europe in the last week, President George W.
Bush has seemed eager to distance himself from such
Nato-scepticism.

In his speech at a US military cemetery in Normandy on Monday, Mr
Bush recalled the heroism of American, British, Canadian and
French servicemen almost 60 years ago and paid tribute to men and
women from Nato countries in action in Afghanistan.

"Our security is still bound up together in a transatlantic
alliance, with soldiers in many uniforms defending the world from
terrorists at this very hour."

This gentle elision from world war to cold war to war on
terrorism was intentional. It echoed what Mr Bush said in his
speech last week to the Bundestag in Berlin: "As it faces new
threats, Nato needs a new strategy and new capabilities."

US officials travelling with Mr Bush insisted that, far from
sidelining Nato, September 11 pointed the way ahead for the
alliance.

"This is the classic Nato mission," the official said. The
president was sending "a positive signal" that the alliance had a
clear role to play.

Yet it is not clear that the debate within the Bush
administration on this subject is over. There is enough doubt in
the US both about the political cohesion of the alliance and its
military effectiveness to keep the issue simmering.

On the military side, senior policymakers, in the Pentagon
especially, with the memory of what happened in the Kosovo
conflict fresh in their minds, had no intention of turning the
war in Afghanistan into a Nato-led exercise. They recall with
horror how the US had to get approval, target by target, for its
aerial bombing campaign in Serbia, from all 15 other Nato allies.

A story, possibly apocryphal but revealing nonetheless,
circulates among conservatives in Washington about how one
European government offering help after September 11 enquired
about transporting troops to Afghanistan by train.

Mr Bush's advisers acknowledged in Europe this week that military
compatibility was a critical challenge but said the US and its
allies were willing and eager to remedy it.

"A lot of countries came to us and said: 'We want to be in the
fight. We want the action'," a senior administration official
said. "But it's also true that Nato was not organised to respond.
. . We recognise that Nato's willing to play [a role] and we
recognise that Nato itself is getting ready to deal with these
new challenges."

But that still leaves a significant doubt over the political
viability of Nato as the agent for fighting the war on terrorism.

The US has identified Iraq as the next target in that war. It has
also singled out Iran and North Korea as threats. But Europeans
are at best divided over action against Iraq and deeply critical
of the "axis of evil" rhetoric. Is it plausible that Nato can
have, as its principal role, the global fight against terrorism
if it exempts itself from the first three battles the US wants to
fight?

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