.The hollow shell that is NATO
On Thursday, I watched as the American general David Petraeus passed through this cluster of one-storey buildings and barbed-wire fences on the outskirts of Brussels, where, on his way to Kabul to take command of the almost 120,000 troops fighting in Afghanistan, he briefly paid homage to NATO.
He said a few words about his years commanding Cold War troops on Europe’s borders, and then the world’s attention followed him out the door, leaving this lumbering organization and its 13,000 employees in near-solitude to oversee its collapse into complete irrelevance and disarray.
While we were busy watching the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 28-member nations dump $800-million into the only war they have ever fought under the mutual-defence rules of their founding charter, the organization itself has seen a changing world suck out all its internal logic and leave it a huge, hollow shell of self-abnegating bureaucracy.
Its efforts to repair itself – including a study released four weeks ago by former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright and a huge summit in Lisbon in November, during which it will try to give itself a new “strategic concept” – only draw attention to the impossibility of maintaining NATO as a significant organization beyond the end of the Afghan war.
If you talk in public to senior NATO officials, they will speak boldly about sweeping away the 61-year-old alliance’s old Cold War structures and eastward-pointed defences, and giving it a new purpose: Perhaps a “comprehensive approach,” in which it takes on peacekeeping, cyber-defence and all manner of other roles; or perhaps a rapid-reaction force, designed to respond in hours to sudden terrorist threats.
Privately, the organization’s top policy minds throw up their hands and tell you a darker truth: The Afghan war didn’t just disguise a disabling paradox within NATO; it turned that paradox into an impossibility.
First, there is the money: So far this year, 19 of NATO’s 28 member states have cut their defence budgets sharply. Some very sharply: by 30 to 40 per cent in the Baltics, and the worst of the cuts, in Germany and Britain and France, are yet to come.
So NATO, like most of us, is operating in the red, its $2.6-billion budget facing a $670-million deficit. As it stands, of the 28 members only five – Albania, Britain, France, Greece and the United States – spend the required 2 per cent of their national budgets on defence, and that number is sure to drop.
In other words, any “strategic concept” will have to be known as “less.”
But there is a deeper problem, one that quietly emerged during Afghanistan. In order to get more soldiers involved, and to make NATO reflect the new Europe, it added 12 new countries, all of them former Communist states, between 1999 and 2009.
It no longer makes sense, all of NATO’s founding members agree, to have a huge and vastly expensive military organization devoted to defending Europe against an attack from Moscow. In fact, almost everyone in NATO headquarters, and most Russian military figures I’ve interviewed, say it is only logical that Russia become a member of NATO.
If it is to become an organization devoted to defending the developed world against modern-day threats in a way that justifies the expense, and if it is to convince its funding governments that it is not just a Cold War anachronism, then its membership needs to include Russia, which has a strong interest in modernizing its forces and having a common international defence that extends to its eastern flank. To qualify, Russia would need to become a functioning democracy, which it really is not at the moment, but the carrot of NATO could become an enticement to change.
But suddenly, such an expansion has become an impossible fantasy. As of 2009, half of NATO’s members are, in effect, former colonies of Moscow, and their leaders almost unanimously believe that the organization should devote itself solely to defending Europe from an attack on its eastern flank, however implausible that is. They want missiles positioned along the Polish, Romanian and Baltic borders.
Those Eastern European countries want a NATO built around Article V of its charter, which requires all members to come unanimously to the defence of any other. This Cold War clause has been invoked exactly once, 12 years after the Cold War ended, on Sept. 11, 2001, to legally justify the conflict in Afghanistan. The founding members want to rid themselves of this burdensome obligation, but their new cousins see it as the only thing of value.
They will come out, in November, with a mish-mash that will disguise the fact that Afghanistan is the last, tragic time this giant alliance will play a major military role in the world.
“We’re trying to co-operate against a backdrop of continuing distrust,” says a top NATO official involved in coming up with a new purpose for the organization. “It’s like a marriage where we have all the certificates and the marriage licence, but there’s no love between us.” There will be no formal divorce, but the action, after the general comes home, will surely take place somewhere else.
The Globe and Mail
He said a few words about his years commanding Cold War troops on Europe’s borders, and then the world’s attention followed him out the door, leaving this lumbering organization and its 13,000 employees in near-solitude to oversee its collapse into complete irrelevance and disarray.
While we were busy watching the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 28-member nations dump $800-million into the only war they have ever fought under the mutual-defence rules of their founding charter, the organization itself has seen a changing world suck out all its internal logic and leave it a huge, hollow shell of self-abnegating bureaucracy.
Its efforts to repair itself – including a study released four weeks ago by former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright and a huge summit in Lisbon in November, during which it will try to give itself a new “strategic concept” – only draw attention to the impossibility of maintaining NATO as a significant organization beyond the end of the Afghan war.
If you talk in public to senior NATO officials, they will speak boldly about sweeping away the 61-year-old alliance’s old Cold War structures and eastward-pointed defences, and giving it a new purpose: Perhaps a “comprehensive approach,” in which it takes on peacekeeping, cyber-defence and all manner of other roles; or perhaps a rapid-reaction force, designed to respond in hours to sudden terrorist threats.
Privately, the organization’s top policy minds throw up their hands and tell you a darker truth: The Afghan war didn’t just disguise a disabling paradox within NATO; it turned that paradox into an impossibility.
First, there is the money: So far this year, 19 of NATO’s 28 member states have cut their defence budgets sharply. Some very sharply: by 30 to 40 per cent in the Baltics, and the worst of the cuts, in Germany and Britain and France, are yet to come.
So NATO, like most of us, is operating in the red, its $2.6-billion budget facing a $670-million deficit. As it stands, of the 28 members only five – Albania, Britain, France, Greece and the United States – spend the required 2 per cent of their national budgets on defence, and that number is sure to drop.
In other words, any “strategic concept” will have to be known as “less.”
But there is a deeper problem, one that quietly emerged during Afghanistan. In order to get more soldiers involved, and to make NATO reflect the new Europe, it added 12 new countries, all of them former Communist states, between 1999 and 2009.
It no longer makes sense, all of NATO’s founding members agree, to have a huge and vastly expensive military organization devoted to defending Europe against an attack from Moscow. In fact, almost everyone in NATO headquarters, and most Russian military figures I’ve interviewed, say it is only logical that Russia become a member of NATO.
If it is to become an organization devoted to defending the developed world against modern-day threats in a way that justifies the expense, and if it is to convince its funding governments that it is not just a Cold War anachronism, then its membership needs to include Russia, which has a strong interest in modernizing its forces and having a common international defence that extends to its eastern flank. To qualify, Russia would need to become a functioning democracy, which it really is not at the moment, but the carrot of NATO could become an enticement to change.
But suddenly, such an expansion has become an impossible fantasy. As of 2009, half of NATO’s members are, in effect, former colonies of Moscow, and their leaders almost unanimously believe that the organization should devote itself solely to defending Europe from an attack on its eastern flank, however implausible that is. They want missiles positioned along the Polish, Romanian and Baltic borders.
Those Eastern European countries want a NATO built around Article V of its charter, which requires all members to come unanimously to the defence of any other. This Cold War clause has been invoked exactly once, 12 years after the Cold War ended, on Sept. 11, 2001, to legally justify the conflict in Afghanistan. The founding members want to rid themselves of this burdensome obligation, but their new cousins see it as the only thing of value.
They will come out, in November, with a mish-mash that will disguise the fact that Afghanistan is the last, tragic time this giant alliance will play a major military role in the world.
“We’re trying to co-operate against a backdrop of continuing distrust,” says a top NATO official involved in coming up with a new purpose for the organization. “It’s like a marriage where we have all the certificates and the marriage licence, but there’s no love between us.” There will be no formal divorce, but the action, after the general comes home, will surely take place somewhere else.
The Globe and Mail
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