NATO’s Riga summit

NATO’s Riga summit

The decision to admit Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia to the Partnership for Peace (PFP) program was long overdue. There is no better way to guarantee that the military forces of these countries begin to interact with their counterparts in the region and to develop democratic procedures than to be active participants in PFP. For more than four years, the United States and a few other member-countries prevented this step because they unwisely conditioned membership on the apprehension of Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić.

That was simply “shooting ourselves in the foot,” to use an American expression, because it was in NATO’s own interest that all the countries in this region be exposed to the benefits of PFP. To provide an exit from this conditionality, the decision included language that specified that NATO will “notably expect Serbia and Bosnia to cooperate fully with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. We will closely monitor their respective efforts in this regard.” One of the central arguments used to pass this decision was to lessen the impact of the coming loss of Kosovo, by demonstrating that Serbia is not being excluded from Europe and that positive steps are occurring.

It is unfortunate that the absorption fatigue shown by many members of the EU has migrated to NATO as well, as under normal circumstances, Croatia should have been invited at this Summit to join as a full NATO member. It is head and shoulders above the other two candidates (Albania and Macedonia) in military preparedness and in its transition process. On factual grounds it is fully ready for admittance. It was always a miscalculation to group the three countries together and hopefully Croatia’s admittance in 2008 does not depend on the progress that the other two countries make on their own democratic transition and military reorganization.

Croatia should have fought long and hard against being grouped with these other two countries, regardless of the pressure (principally from the United States) to do so. In any case, the formal groundwork has now been set in place for a positive decision in two years time. The question which Croatians must now ask themselves, as the NATO Summit Declaration subtlety points out, is whether they in fact want to be full NATO members.

The most important aspect of the Summit, however, was that in the various steps that it took, it re-affirmed NATO’s relevance in the post-Cold War era. Given that its sole initial mission was to provide an effective defense against the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies, NATO’s future was not certain once the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact became distant memories in the trash bin of history. It had to re-define itself. Several European countries, including France, have labored long and hard to develop a separate wholly European alternative to NATO.  There is in fact an EU force now that has even taken on responsibility for peacekeeping in Bosnia. All of the European efforts, however, have always had to confront the reality that for decades, Europe as a whole and individually has spent only half as much on defense as the United States. Moreover, the bulk has gone to salaries and redundant national projects. This means that the United States remains critical for strategic power projection, including long-range airlift capability, and also that it remains in a class of its own when it comes to overall military capability. That provides an indispensable edge for NATO in any serious conflict.

The critical steps in the transformation of NATO were the creation of Partnership for Peace, the extension of NATO eastward to include former members of the Warsaw Pact, and then the beginning of the sensitive step of “out of area” operations. These have included peacekeeping in Bosnia, the Kosovo bombing campaign and later peacekeeping operations there, training of Iraqis, logistical support to African peacekeepers in Darfur, and in the biggest step of all, ground combat operations in Afghanistan.

Twenty years ago, it would have been inconceivable for NATO to be active outside the boundaries of Europe and its member countries. But the reality is that the challenges to member countries now are more complex than simply defending its borders from Soviet invasion. The threats are further afield, and include terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, dealing with failed or failing states, regional conflicts and the disruption of the flow of critical resources such as oil and gas.

NATO has the years of experience, planning capability, interoperability, and established mechanisms to carry out military operations on a large scale anywhere on the globe. The only conceivable alternatives are the UN (which has repeatedly been incapable of acting on almost every conceivable issue due to the presence of Russia and China on the Security Council) and “coalitions of the willing.” Some of the weaknesses of that latter approach are clearly on display in Iraq today.

The current NATO Summit moved further towards a global role by bringing to full operational capability a 20,000 member NATO Response Force (NRF) with land, sea and air components ready to be deployed within five days; by reiterating that it is open to new members; by adopting a Comprehensive Planning Document providing a roadmap for the future; and by highlighting the need to broaden cooperation with different security organizations and several like-minded countries such as Australia, Japan, and South Korea. It is hard to say how this process will play out, but there are already serious calls for NATO to expand to include such countries. While the current NATO Treaty does not foresee it and there is internal European opposition at this point, it is impossible to rule it out in the not too distant future. Global challenges call for global partners.

Afghanistan, however, remains the make-or-break issue for the NATO Alliance. Unlike Iraq, the UN has fully blessed the mission in Afghanistan and the goal of eliminating the Taliban and the terrorist threat they represent is almost universally accepted. However, the initial ease of the operation and the reluctance of individual member countries to take casualties have given the Taliban a chance to regroup. Using sanctuaries in Pakistan, recruits from Al-Qaeda, and operational experience learned in Iraq, it has grown in strength and capability. A successful operation in Afghanistan will provide significant momentum for a continuation of a global approach for NATO.  On the other hand, if member countries do not contribute the needed manpower and resources and Afghanistan begins to turn into a long Iraq-like struggle, it will have the opposite effect. The stakes are high, as a return to power by the Taliban will provide an enormous victory for radical Muslim fundamentalists and a secure launching pad for future terrorist acts. Under a worst case scenario, a failure by NATO in Afghanistan could help to unravel the alliance. While the Riga Summit definitely helped to solidify the NATO effort, questions –and challenges—still remain.

Finally, all of the above took place with the active support and participation of the United States on a multi-lateral, cooperative basis. This is a welcome change in approach from the Bush Administration and is perhaps, the best news of all. While it does not guarantee success, it is an absolute prerequisite for any chance of achieving it.