Global Europe

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO Secretary General, is currently working on a new strategic concept for the alliance, to be issued in September. Recently former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has put the question of the future of NATO in the following way: “How does an alliance that unifies peoples and values under a common defense, created to defend against a threat that no longer exists, find relevance against a whole new set of threats?” Global Europe has put Albright's question to a number of leading European experts on EU foreign and security policy. Here are the responses.

Daniel Korski: Just stay the course

The US and Europe are on the same side of the most fundamental dividing line in today's world: they are both declining powers whose preeminence in world affairs is being eclipsed by other states who reject the liberal system that was created by US and European statesmen to run the post-World War II. It is this insight, not how many troops that European governments have deployed to Kabul, which should shape debates about the transatlantic link -- and discussions about NATO’s future.

For the US to judge allies on whether they are willing to join NATO’s fight against the Taliban is therefore short-sighted. It is the same if the US had in the past chosen its allies on whether they willing and required to fight alongside the 82 Airborne. For that would have meant abandoning an alliance with Britain after Harold Wilson resisted repeated attempts by Lyndon Johnson to secure a British commitment of troops to the Vietnam War.

But US policy-makers did not go down this route. Quite the opposite; they sought to cement an all-purpose alliance, based both on values and interests. They knew the importance of looking beyond today’s war. The wisdom of that decision was proved when the Cold War ended. By rights the alliance should have disappeared, but the Balkans crises of the 1990s, and the post-9/11 security challenges showed that NATO was still needed. In fact, it was the only organization able to take on a range of tasks and bring with two important commodities without which modern warfare is less likely to succeed: a functioning military command structure with proven experience of multinational co-operation; and legitimacy.

The same holds true today. The alternative -- to replace NATO with an ABCD alliance (for America, Britain, Denmark and Canada) may give the US enough firepower for today’s wars, but less of the legitimacy and none of the flexibly for tomorrow’s conflict. It would also include fewer and fewer letters as time passes.

Daniel Korski is Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in London

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Fabrice Pothier: NATO must adapt to new challenges

The predicament NATO faces in the coming decade boils down to one simple truth: it is not enough to share values; you must share the will to fight for and defend those values. Two decades after the end of the Cold War, the moment of truth has finally arrived for NATO: it must demonstrate that it can adapt to the security challenges of the 21st century.

The alliance must begin by identifying these challenges, and defining the role it can play in tackling them. From the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation to terrorism and cyber-warfare, NATO needs to pick its issues. It is only then, when the alliance faces the task of shaping its capabilities according to these threats, that the real work will begin.

NATO members are ill-equipped to deal with the emerging threats of the 21st century. The United States, for example, is wholly unprepared to respond to cyber-threats, while Europe can barely deploy 30 percent of its troops, few of whom are equipped or trained for modern warfare and training missions.

Finally, a 21st century NATO must be prepared to reach out to other regional and multilateral organizations. This would necessarily involve other organizations, such as the United Nations, improving their own effectiveness, but would make interventions in complex theatres like Afghanistan as comprehensive and legitimate as possible. Ultimately, the early 21st century is a time when NATO needs to fight for both effectiveness and relevance.

Fabrice Pothier is the director of Carnegie Europe in Brussels

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Fraser Cameron: We need a new transatlantic partnership

There is no use thrashing around for another new strategic concept for NATO. Let's face face it -- NATO is pretty irrelevant to dealing with today's security threats -- fighting terrrorism, re-building failed states, tackling climate change, etc.

What is needed is a complete re-vamp of the transatlantic partnership so that the twin pillars are the EU and the US. Such a move would force the EU to get its act together -- and quickly. Inevitable cuts in defence expenditure in all member states make sharing the only sensible way forward. It would also result in a more responsible, robust and reliable partner for the US even if there remained inevitable differences of opinion of how to tackle security threats. The article five commitment would remain as well as as much of the integrated command structure that made sense. The US would have to get used to no longer playing divide and rule in NATO -- indeed NATO would disappear as such, having long outlived its original purpose.

Acceptance of such a new structure  would require a mental leap in the minds of the current transatlantic security elite -- but if such a transformation is not made then we are unlikely to be able to convince public opinion to continue to support an outdated alliance.

Fraser Cameron is director of the EU-Russia Centre in Brussels

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Ivan Krastev: America is not a European power anymore

“Europe is too thickly planted with kingdoms to be long at peace,” wrote Thomas Paine some two centuries ago. Since then many things have changed. US Defence Secretary Robert Gates recently expressed the opposite fear. In his view “demilitarization of Europe -- where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks going with it -- has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st”. In short: Europe is planted with too many pacifist democracies to sustain a necessary war.

This is the context in which the US started to re-conceptualize its relations with Europe. The shift of power to Asia, the impact of the global economic crisis -- causing fear of overstretch -- and Washington’s bitterness about Europe’s unwillingness or inability to assist Americans in Afghanistan made many unhappy with NATO’s current performance. American diplomats will never say it, but in reality the US is not a European power any more. It is an illusion to believe that future American involvement in Europe can be similar in scale and content to the role that Washington played in the days of the Cold War, or in the last twenty years. Barack Obama is the most European minded but at the same time the first post-European American president. In the words of one of his closest advisor, he is thinking along the South-North and not along the East-West divide. For sure Europe will preserve its strategic importance for the Americans but it cannot preserve its centrality. American strategic thinking is undergoing profound change. Nothing is unthinkable, nothing is impossible.

The present US-centered security arrangement contributes to the existing mistrust between old Europe and new Europe and makes it difficult for the EU to realize its potential as a security actor. Washington should scrap its ambitions for Global NATO and instead push the EU to play a more central role in the defense of European continent.

Ivan Krastev is Chair of Board of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia

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Jolyon Howorth: Times may change, but NATO will persist

NATO is not about to throw in the towel. It is a community of values. The United States and Europe share with one another more normative ideals than either does with any other major actor.

However, since 1989, interests have diverged. Europeans still value the Alliance essentially for its collective security guarantees. Yet Europe ceased long ago to figure on the US radar screen. Since the Prague summit in 2002, an Alliance initially devised to deliver an American security guarantee to Europe has morphed into a body geared to mustering European support for US global strategy.  Europeans are uncomfortable with that reality. Americans would be uncomfortable with any “Alliance” that failed to rise to global challenges.

Hence the confusion over the new strategic concept. While the EU, through ESDP, is progressively fine-tuning the civilian and military instruments of crisis management, NATO is left wondering what it is about. Like Baudelaire’s albatross, having soared magnificently over the oceans of deterrence and containment, once down on the ground in real engagement situations, “its giant wings prevent it from walking”.

NATO will find plenty to do in coming decades. But, as Paul Valéry remarked, “the future is not what it used to be”.

Jolyon Howorth is Professor of European Politics at Bath and Visiting Professor at Yale

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Paweł Świeboda: What NATO needs is political backing

NATO’s challenge is entirely political. It is not the question of its ability to identify and address new threats. Technically NATO is uniquely capable of rising to the task. It needs to improve its arsenal of means for fighting cyberterrorism or dealing with proliferation problems but it will manage well, if given the mandate. The question, however, is not of technical but of political nature.

 NATO has to fight its wars inside the political sphere of its member states. It needs to face off populism and become part of the political process. This is the lesson of the recent collapse of the Dutch government over its Afghanistan policy. NATO needs to bring its arguments to the parliamentary chambers, cabinet offices and front pages of newspapers.

Part of the task is to demonstrate that the founding objective of common defence is not irrelevant in the post-Cold war world. This requires a serious debate about the new threats which may originate in regions such as the Middle East or which might result from instabilities spilling over from outside of the borders of the Alliance. Another issue is to win the case for engagement in stabilising key strategic regions, the need for which will only increase in the future. This will not happen by itself. NATO urgently needs to be politicised if it is to remain relevant in the years to come.

Paweł Świeboda is President of demosEUROPA, Centre for European Strategy, in Warsaw

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Nick Witney: It's the alliance that matters

NATO has a crisis of identity. Like all big organisations in crisis, it should do two things: get back to core business; and cut costs.

Afghanistan, it turns out, was the organisation’s strategic mistake. After 9/11, and in the spirit of the new millennium, it was natural enough. Liberal interventionism was much in vogue; hubristically, the Western allies claimed both the right and the duty the pre-empt ‘evil’ around the globe.

A decade on, not much is left of that millenarian optimism. But alternative rationales based on different ‘threats’ do not fly, either: Russia is a difficult neighbour, but its military is prostrate; ‘energy security’ has no real military dimension.

Never mind. It is the alliance that matters, not the organisation. The mutual defence commitment does not need to invent new threats. But it does need the disparate allies’ armed forces to be able to work and fight together effectively. NATO’s key job -- boring, and therefore neglected -- is to ensure this ‘interoperability’.

The permanent command structure is part of this core business. But it has become hugely bloated. Resources should be refocused on providing effective military capability, not sinecures for the staff. 


Nick Witney is Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council for Foreign Relations in Paris and former Chief Executive of the European Defence Agency in Brussels

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Anand Menon: Stick to the fundamentals

For an Alliance to be relevant, it must be effective. Equally, to be effective, it must serve purposes its members all believe in. What the conflict in Afghanistan illustrates is that, for organisations like NATO to work effectively, they must carry their members with them. It is all too easy to manufacture consensus when it comes to deciding to intervene. The real challenge is to ensure that member states are committed enough to deploy in sufficient numbers.

The secret, then, is not a quest to expand NATO’s task to make it appear more relevant to the world of today. It is to ensure that it remains capable of carrying out those functions, notably the preservation of Euro-Atlantic security, to which all member states are committed. It is crucial that NATO maintain this core capability, not least as there is little prospect of the EU taking it over. A multi-faceted NATO with a global role to which member states have signed up only reluctantly will be an ineffective and ultimately redundant one.

What Anders Fogh Rasmussen must do, therefore, is stick to the fundamentals. NATO is not a tool of America’s global role. It is a European security institution, and only by focussing on this can it maintain its credibility.

Anand Menon is Director of the European Research Institute at the University of Birmingham