Is Nato past its sell-by date?
ft......21 april 99.
It was useful as a weapon of deterrence.
But it is ill-suited to the war in Kosovo writes Quentin Peel
Let us pause for a moment, as the great and good gather in Washington to mark the 50th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, with Kosovo top of their agenda. Let us look back to the world as it was when Nato was born.
It was a moment of extraordinary tension in Europe. In February 1948, Jan Masaryk, the Czech foreign minister, was assassinated in Prague, as part of a communist coup. It was a brutal demonstration of Stalin's determination to impose communist rule throughout the area of Soviet occupation.
There were real fears that both France and Italy might fall to communist rule as well - and Washington was actively planning for military intervention if they did so. In June that year, the Soviet blockade of Berlin began, and the allied airlift was launched to keep the western part of that city alive.
In April, 1949, Nato was founded. And in September, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic device.
It was, in short, the start of the cold war for real, and a very explosive start, too.
How the world has changed. Today, the Russian threat is of collapse, rather than aggression. The country is bankrupt. And Moscow's miserable failure to suppress the revolt of Chechnya in its own backyard suggests that it could scarcely mount a serious conventional onslaught on anyone else if it wanted to.
Of course, Russia still has a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons and that threat is unpredictable: no one knows if the weapons remain under adequate control or even if they remain operable.
Democracy in western Europe is thoroughly established. The communists have reinvented themselves as good social democrats, not just in the west but in central Europe.
The Czech Republic has joined Nato, along with Poland and Hungary. Their negotiations to join the European Union are well under way. All the former Soviet satellites are eager to join the western club.
And a thoroughly democratic, unified, federal Germany - with all the confusion and indecision that implies - has just celebrated the return of its parliament to Berlin.
With the one glaring exception of former Yugoslavia, it is a fairly reassuring scenario. But the Nato leaders will undoubtedly be obsessed with the exception. Thanks to their ill-considered intervention in Kosovo, and the bombing campaign they have launched, they will be urgently attempting to close ranks and find a way of bringing that undeclared war to a rapid conclusion.
What they will not be thinking about is the question that is going begging: Is Nato itself past its sell-by date?
It is no doubt a disloyal question to ask at this moment. Perhaps it is too late. It was asked back in 1991, when the Warsaw Pact was wound up, and the Soviet Union imploded. But it was rapidly dismissed as an irrelevance. After all, most of the old enemies wanted to join. And if it wasn't broke, why fix it?
The trouble is that the conflict in Kosovo, and the terrible human tragedy that has been unleashed there, does not just raise questions about Nato's tactics. It revives questions about the very structure and purpose of the organisation.
Every important success achieved by the alliance in its 50 years was won without a shot being fired in anger. But now the first shots have been fired, and the cracks are starting to emerge.
Nato's success was precisely as a weapon of deterrence, as one side of a military standoff that actually guaranteed the peace. The combination of strategic and conventional capacity ensured that neither side dared disturb the peace in Europe.
Today the alliance boasts massive military capacity without any countervailing balance. It is a mighty weapon, without an obvious role. The temptation is to use it, even if it is inappropriate.
In Kosovo, that has happened. Awesome technological equipment, represented by US-led air power, has been used as a hammer to crack the nut of a horrible, localised, medieval war. It not only appears to be failing but actually seems to have made matters worse.
In an articulate and persuasive new study of the transatlantic relationship*, Elizabeth Pond, former Christian Science Monitor correspondent in Moscow and Bonn, says Nato emerged from the cold war "with glory and perplexity". Its victory should have put it out of business. In the event, it was the Europeans, from both east and west, who decided (back in 1991) that Nato was "the only possible instrument" to keep the US engaged in Europe.
One reason, she argues, was the danger of "imperial recidivism" in Russia. Another was the "conspicuous preference. . . for American security leadership over the alternatives of German leadership, or no leadership". The third was the belief, because of the atrocities in former Yugoslavia, in the need for "credible force - which only the Americans could provide - to constrain local bullies on the peripheries of Europe".
All those reasons for preserving Nato can be queried today. As far as Russia is concerned, the threat of an unpredictable response, such as some crazed nationalist threatening to use its nuclear weapons, is more likely because of the alienation caused by Nato's continued existence and enlargement. The alliance may be seen as a benevolent force among its member states. But many outsiders suspect its motives, and not just in Russia.
As for maintaining a credible force to deal with the likes of Slobodan Milosevic, it is questionable whether the sort of force the US brings to Nato is relevant. It is becoming increasingly clear that his vicious militia can only be stopped on the ground. But that is precisely the sort of war Bill Clinton wants to avoid at all costs.
But what about the desire to preserve American security leadership in Europe? There lies the nub. Perhaps the time has finally come for the Europeans to resume security leadership on their own continent.
The US did not want to be involved in Kosovo. It is, thank goodness, a reluctant sheriff on the world stage. If Nato had not existed, and had not offered the option of a massive US-led bombing campaign, the Europeans would have been forced to tackle Mr Milosevic with more modest, and possibly more effective, means.
As for the Europeans, they continue to hide behind US security skirts. They did not even attempt to solve Kosovo alone, because they have ceded "security leadership" to Washington. The brave words of Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac at St Malo, promoting a new effort at building a European defence identity, are likely to remain so much hot air as long as they rely on US leadership in Nato.
The alliance should be replaced by a genuinely European defence initiative, which would finally allow the US troops on the European continent to go home.
It is ridiculous to suggest that the US will remain bound to Europe only if it has soldiers on the spot. The two-way economic ties of investment and trade are now so great - in spite of silly squabbles over bananas and the like - that the two sides of the Atlantic are condemned to ever closer co-operation.
If both sides can eventually realise that, it may be the one positive lesson to emerge from the present sorry story in Kosovo.
* The Rebirth of Europe, by Elizabeth Pond, Brookings Institution Press, price $26.95. |
