[A-List] The end of NATO?

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

After NATO's Year of Identity Crisis, a Defining Meeting
By STEVEN ERLANGER
New York Times, November 4 2002

BRUSSELS, Nov. 1 - Stung by charges of irrelevance after the Sept. 11
attacks, NATO is making a serious effort at transformation to match the
needs of a new age and an aggressive United States. It is undertaking a
historic enlargement, to 26 members, and making plans to create a strike
force able to wage offensive operations alongside the Americans anywhere in
the world.

But if the alliance fails at this task, senior American and British
officials warn, NATO will be increasingly sidelined as a political talking
shop, useful in bringing along the nations of the former Soviet Union but no
one's first resort in time of crisis.

Now the prospect of a new war in Iraq looms over NATO's summit meeting,
three weeks from now in Prague, with Washington undecided how hard to press
its allies for a joint statement supporting the need for Iraq to comply with
United Nations resolutions or face the consequences.

Washington is insisting that the Prague meeting produce a unified statement
on Iraq, but with significant opposition to a war from Germany and other
NATO allies, the statement, not yet drafted, may have to be limited to a
general endorsement of Iraq's obligation to comply with the resolutions and
to rid itself of weapons of mass destruction.

"In Prague, we need to declare unity, or NATO implodes," a senior alliance
official said.

Prague will also be the first opportunity for President Bush to meet with
Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, since Mr. Schröder's harsh
criticism of the Bush administration's campaign against Iraq. American
officials say they doubt that Mr. Bush, who is still angry, will grant him a
one-on-one dialogue.

But also looming over Prague is a potential competition with the ambitions
of the European Union. Not only is the union enlarging, it is also trying to
construct a collective defense identity that could one day rival NATO
itself.

Many NATO officials believe that France in particular sees the American call
for a NATO rapid reaction force to be a prototype for a future European
army. While a senior French official here said he regarded such a
supposition as "paranoid," he argued that history - and perceived American
unilateralism - are leading eventually toward a Europe that could go its own
way and support its policies with credible force.

The French official said NATO must transform or sink into irrelevance. "The
problem is that NATO wants to show that it's not a creaky old lady, but a
fresh young maiden, and that requires a lot of plastic surgery, with all the
risks and pain," the official said. "But there is no longer a monopoly in
the security field. There will be NATO and the European Union."

As NATO tries to redesign itself, the French official said, there is a
serious question: "Is there Europe in the future of NATO? For me, that's the
issue."

This will be NATO's first summit meeting since April 1999, when the alliance
was torn over the prosecution of its first war, against Serbia over Kosovo.

That war overshadowed NATO's first post-Soviet enlargement, inviting in
Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, in a dramatic change for an alliance
that was founded as a collective defense against Soviet expansionism.

This time, NATO will invite seven more nations, including the Baltic states
of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - which were annexed by the Soviet Union
after World War II - as well as Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and even
Romania. The size and variety of this enlargement is breathtaking, but it is
also a reflection of a much calmer post-Soviet world, with a weak Russia
eager to enhance its growing ties to NATO. But the alliance also is
reorganizing under pressure from a new set of threats stemming less from
nation-states than from globalized terrorist groups like Al Qaeda.

"We want the Prague summit to launch a whole-scale transformation of the
NATO alliance for the 21st century," said Nicholas Burns, the American
ambassador to the alliance, in a speech this week. "Threats to peace come
not from strong states within Europe, but from unstable failed states and
terrorist organizations far from Europe's borders." The most dangerous of
those threats, he asserted, is "the toxic mix of weapons of mass destruction
and terrorism, aimed not just at our militaries but at our civilian
populations as well."

Prague is about "deconstructing the old rigid NATO and building a new one,
able to fight the wars of the future," said an American official. "If NATO
can do it, it has a whole new history before it. And if it can't, NATO
simply won't be as useful or important. Members have to implement these
changes and come up with the money. A year from now, we'll know."

Kosovo and Afghanistan have shown that NATO, devised as a static defense
against Soviet invasion, is incapable as of yet of quickly moving combat
troops anywhere. Its other members lack the sophisticated encrypted
communications, precision-guided weapons and all-weather capacity of
American troops and have difficulty fighting efficiently alongside the
Americans.

With Afghanistan in mind, the Bush administration has challenged the allies
to come up with a NATO rapid reaction force of 5,000 to 20,000 people that
would be able to get to a battle anywhere within 7 to 30 days, sustain
itself in the field for a month, and cooperate effectively with American
troops. Such a force would require NATO to buy or lease heavy-lift transport
planes and to improve its abilities on the American model.

While the allies are expected to agree to the idea in principle in Prague,
the details - and the necessary commitment to greater defense spending -
will be fought over later.

The NATO secretary general, Lord Robertson, has been touring member states
to get specific commitments on higher defense spending to enhance NATO
capabilities. He is asking the Spaniards to lead a coalition to secure
tankers to improve in-flight refueling; the Dutch to head up securing more
smart weapons; the Germans, who had wanted to get troops to Afghanistan by
train, to lead a group to lease existing heavy transport planes; the
Norwegians to do more with special operations forces; the Czechs to improve
defenses against nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

"We're committed to revamping NATO to make it more flexible, adaptable and
mobile," Lord Robertson said in an interview. "If the Europeans want
influence over what the U.S. is doing or planning or thinking, then they've
got to be able to be there with them when the time is right."

Lord Robertson has been quietly criticized as carrying too much American
water. But part of the problem, senior NATO officials say, is widespread
doubt that Washington is truly committed to using a new NATO, as an
alliance, to combat modern threats. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's
philosophy that the "mission defines the coalition" and not the other way
around has shaken NATO and strengthened support for the French view that
Europe must become a counterbalance to American power.

Mr. Rumsfeld, for that reason, is waiting to see what the European allies
offer for the new rapid reaction force before making an American
contribution. "He wants to be sure that this is not a new way for the U.S.
to carry Europe," one official said.

There is another criticism of the force, which is that it does not answer
the question of what NATO is really for. "The response force is a technical
military answer, a kind of tool in the toolbox, to what NATO should become,"
said Ronald D. Asmus, a former State Department official and the author of
the new book "Opening NATO's Door," on its 1999 enlargement. "But it's a
tool without a context or a vision, and they need to lay out that vision."

Jeffrey Gedmin, a conservative who runs Aspen Institute Berlin, likes the
idea of a transformed and flexible NATO, but he has doubts it will happen.
"More likely, NATO will become ever more political as it becomes bigger, and
there's nothing wrong with that. It may not be the first military instrument
of choice for the United States, but that may not matter."

NATO remains, one alliance official said, "the only place where Washington
must talk to its allies about security issues regardless of whether Cheney
or Rumsfeld deign to take their calls."