"Nato is dead"?

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Interestingly the International Herald Tribune pulled this surtitle off the
article by William Pfaff, its most Europhile correspondent, in the internet
edition of the paper. But it was there in the edition available in London.

It articulates the bitterest anti-US European sentiments, which of course
have an economic basis.

The two day conference in Iceland, just starting, about the relationship
with Russia, has been heralded as presaging a fundamental strategic review
of the role NATO. This is how contradictions are papered over under finance
capital. But the underlying material interests are signalled in the article
below.

Chris Burford



>>>

 Sat May 11

Allies look to the EU for future security By William Pfaff (International
Herald Tribune)


PARIS: American policy spokesmen - such as Under Secretary of State Marc
Grossman, speaking at The Hague in April - insist that NATO is "the key to
the security policy of the United States" and must be expanded, "open to
all of the democracies from the Baltic to the Black Sea."

At the same time, the Bush administration displays indifference to the
trans-Atlantic alliance and hostility toward the European allies, whom it
sees as reluctant combatants in "the war on terrorism."

NATO and Russia are reportedly on the verge of an agreement, to be signed
at the end of this month, that would give Moscow a substantial voice in
alliance policy, as well as what the Russians see as reestablished
influence in global affairs.

Former Warsaw Pact members who are candidates for NATO membership fear this
will limit who else will get into the alliance and weaken the security they
have expected from NATO membership. Some are now asking if the European
Union might offer a better security guarantee than NATO, since Washington
and Moscow have become allies in the war on terrorism.

The trans-Atlantic relationship is on the brink of a big change. Today the
most powerful policymakers in the White House and the Pentagon have lost
interest in NATO. NATO is history - subject only to artificial respiration
should an Article 5 vote be needed.

NATO's utility to Washington ended in the difficulties the allies made
during the Kosovo bombing campaign - chiefly, but not only, the French. An
obituary for the alliance has not been published because some things don't
have to be published. West Europeans have spent more than 50 years as
contented followers of the United States. That now is ending. The Bush
administration, without intending it, is forcing Europe to consider its
alternatives.

Recent initiatives to give the European Union the means for independent
security and foreign policies have until now been treated without urgency,
and without serious funding. As a Belgian diplomat recently remarked,
Europe's internal discussions of a potential role as a serious world power
have "been meant to keep the French quiet, while never, for one instant,
seriously examining the question."

Now the Bush administration is forcing the Europeans to be serious. The
Americans, whose practical interest is to keep the West Europeans as docile
allies, content with a Europe that remains an economic giant and political
dwarf, are angering, and even frightening, the Europeans.

Philippe Grasset, a French analyst and longtime critic of the United
States, argues that a dozen or more allied European countries have for 54
years been content with a de facto abandonment of national sovereignty in
security matters. These countries had a notion of a post-Cold War European
future as eventually something like a big Switzerland, cooperating with the
United States in the United Nations and other multilateral international
institutions, building a new world order of international law and cooperation.

The people now in power in the Bush administration have forced them to see
that this is not likely to be what Europe's future is going to be about.
Characterized, Grasset says, "by irresponsibility and arrogance, ready to
sacrifice everything to a vanity which amounts to an astonishing political
phenomenon," these Bush administration leaders have succeeded in
undermining America's best friends in Europe.

By repudiating treaties, by its conduct in the Middle East, by resuming the
nuclear first-use option - the list of unilateralist policy choices is
familiar by now - Washington has brutally recalled to Europeans that the
world is run by force and intimidation, and that those who want to survive
had better have political and military power equivalent to Europe's
economic weight.

It is a paradox that this administration would so casually undermine the
advantages and influence in trans-Atlantic relations the Cold War has given
the United States. Instead, it is radicalizing Europe.

It is alienating those who have been America's closest friends, making them
once again think about the world responsibilities Europe's economic power
imposes upon European society. It is not a welcome meditation; but Grasset
says, it is "a duty to history."