From 'Plenty of Nothing' to Plenty of Everything

1 Apr 2009

While NATO proved it could survive a 'midlife crisis' following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the alliance continues to wrestle with its postmodern identity. As NATO enters its 60th year, the alliance must clearly redefine its purpose and refocus its strategic vision.

When the foreign ministers of Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy, Portugal, Denmark, Iceland and Norway and the secretaries of state of the United States and Canada signed the Washington Treaty on a pleasant spring day in the US capital 60 years ago, the band of the US Marines played two selections of Porgy and Bess: “I got plenty of nothing” and “It ain’t necessarily so.”

Barely a month later Stalin lifted the Soviet blockade over Berlin, but the choice of Gershwin’s music nevertheless seemed a bad one to reassure the Europeans of both the seriousness and the strength of the American security commitment. After all, the economic and psychological recovery of Europe heavily depended on the foundation of security – a security only the Truman administration could provide.

Based on its political, economic and military preponderance of power and welcomed by its West European allies, the United States – partly pushed by others and partly driven by its own ambition – established its “external pageempire by invitation.” Throughout the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty remained a cornerstone of both transatlantic security and European stability, irrespective of significant internal struggles about matters of strategy and tactics. For more than 40 years, the threat posed by the Soviet Union constituted the ‘ties that bind’ and led allies to constructively manage and ultimately settle their disputes.

‘Whither NATO?’ after the Cold War

But it was not long after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact that eminent voices both in politics and academia predicted the demise of the Atlantic alliance: Alliances, so the saying went, could not outlive the threats they were created to address, and allies would soon lose their raison d’être for cooperating.

They did not. Indeed, NATO’s midlife crisis was short-lived. With its new strategic concept of 1991 and redefinition of objectives and tasks at its 50th anniversary summit in Washington amidst the Kosovo war in 1999, NATO proved that alliances are not just aggregations of national power, but can, as security institutions, cope with a variety of security problems.

And yet, while the focus remained, though under fundamentally different circumstances, on the alliance’s traditional role, that is, to provide stability on the European continent, harbingers of intra-alliance conflict were clearly visible. First, like their seven successors in 2004 and like Croatia and Albania in 2009, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland primarily applied for NATO membership to benefit from the promise of collective defense. What they got instead was a baptism of fire – in the form of a peace enforcement mission to be followed by a prolonged peacebuilding effort, for the time being limited to the European periphery.

Secondly, prior to the Washington summit of 1999 and at the time the EU decided to give itself a proper role in security and defense, US proponents and Europeans bitterly argued as to whether NATO, in view of the new security environment, should extend its reach beyond the Euro-Atlantic shores. The ‘Global NATO’ debate has gained even more currency since the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, irrespective of its near-death experience over the war in Iraq. Some would argue that NATO’s ISAF mission in Afghanistan resolved this conflict. However, no matter how important - even existential - NATO’s war-fighting and stabilization mission in Afghanistan might be, the debate about its roles, tasks and geographic range is far from over, as the challenges facing the allies at their 60th anniversary summit demonstrate.

The challenges ahead

The timing of the summit, jointly hosted by Germany and France in the border area of Kehl and Strasbourg, could not come at a better - or worse - time. While it provides the new US president with the opportunity to meet many of his counterparts for the first time and to endorse his administration’s intention to launch “A New Era of Cooperation,” as stated by US Vice-President Joseph Biden at the Munich Security Conference in February, the heads of state and government have little to offer in terms of substance. This follows the precedent set by previous summits in Riga and Bucharest.

The new US administration had little time to prepare for the anniversary summit, and the time it had it spent on a thorough overhaul of its own strategy in Afghanistan, resulting in a commitment to substantially increase the number of combat troops deployed there. In addition, during a three-summit week – it follows the G20 London summit on stability, growth and jobs and will be followed by the EU-US summit in Prague – the focus will clearly be on tackling the international financial and economic crisis and restoring worldwide financial stability.

True, NATO will welcome France’s reintegration into the alliance’s military structure 43 years after General de Gaulle’s walkout. It will adopt two new members, Croatia and Albania, and reconfirm its open-door-policy without being able to hide the fact that further enlargement is clearly on the back burner. The outgoing secretary-general will present a declaration on alliance security; and NATO leaders will commission a new strategic concept to replace the one of April 1999. And last, but by no means least, for the third consecutive summit, Afghanistan will take center stage. After all, it is the ISAF mission which has long been transformed from a stabilization mission to a war-fighting and stabilization operation upon which the alliance’s future increasingly hinges.

Afghanistan’s importance for the alliance, however, reaches way beyond the operational level. “I hope that Afghanistan will not be Obama’s war, because it should be owned by all of us,” said NATO’s secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, barely a week before the anniversary summit. While NATO’s helmsman might have had short-term success in mind, the true meaning of his statement lies in the widening gap in strategic thought amongst NATO member states. There might be agreement on the necessity to replace the strategic concept of 1999. But there is certainly no agreement amongst the Anglo-Saxons who favor a global role for NATO, those led by the Franco-German couple who at best support the status quo, and the newcomers whose focus is on NATO’s collective defense tasks. How to square the circle and to commonly define the alliance’s self-perception and strategy remains – to resort to a Churchillian phrase – “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”

If Gershwin’s “plenty of nothing” worried the Europeans 60 years ago, observers might be equally concerned about a policy that can best be described as plenty of everything. For in the long run, the tendency of the past few years to make the alliance a dumping-ground for nearly all conceivable security challenges, irrespective of the evident limits of its capabilities, will not only fail to hide its lack of cohesion, coherence and common purpose but will ultimately result in the triumph of Gershwin’s second popular melody, “it ain’t necessarily so.” This dumping-ground approach would lead to the decline of a once veritable alliance – not by design but out of neglect. Less, not more, stability would result.

It is therefore time for the heads of state of NATO member states to refocus and redefine a common sense of purpose. Repeating the same old platitudes and simply shying away from both strategic choices and the mounting tasks ahead make NATO summits short-sighted exercises in crisis management on the lowest operational level. Such superficial summitry will no longer suffice.

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