Features » April 19, 2008 » Web Only

Letter From Bucharest

The NATO Summit was a gigantic flop.

By Paul Hockenos

Nato Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer gestures as he talks during a joint press conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai on the second day of the NATO summit in Bucharest on April 3, 2008.

For better or for worse, Romania’s authorities were the only ones who appeared to know what they were doing at the NATO summit here last week. The daily Adevarul noted the occasion was the first time in the post-revolution years that the streets had been cleaned of garbage, Bucharest’s odious traffic stemmed, and the street corners cleared of pimps, drug dealers, and Mafioso types (as well as beggars and homeless). Yet it took every police officer in the greater Bucharest region and several thousand reinforcements from across the country to do so, effectively shutting down the city and making everyday life immensely frustrating for ordinary Romanians.

In contrast, almost nothing went right for NATO’s big wheels in the cavernous rooms of the gargantuan palace built by Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, the largest building (and eye-sore) in all of Europe. Usually harmonious, well-orchestrated events with pre-packaged successes—as were Ceausescu’s marathon congresses—this NATO summit was a spectacular flop that revealed a fragile alliance in acute crisis, uncertain of its post-Cold War incarnation and divided within its own ranks. While the Bush administration has warmed up to the necessity of transatlantic alliances in some form, the issues that distance Washington from the Europeans are considerable—and they won’t disappear under a Democratic administration.

Most urgently, Afghanistan was on the table, NATO’s first “out-of-area” mission beyond Europe since it defined its post-Cold War role as a global intervention force. As much as NATO’s General Secretary Jaap de Hoop Scheffer tried to present the current situation in terms of a glass half full, there was no disguising that Afghanistan’s stabilization has proved elusive and that NATO’s closest allies are still very much divided over how best to go about righting it. There is no consensus on strategy. The American, Canadian, British, German and Dutch forces in Afghanistan pursue different courses in the field in dealing with the Taliban, eradicating poppy plantations, building police forces, and cooperating with local authorities.

Indeed, NATO’s own generals contradicted de Hoop Scheffer’s optimistic gloss on Afghanistan. The Afghanistan Study Group, which included Marine Corps General James L. Jones (ret.), the former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, concluded the security situation in the country had worsened dramatically and that a stable, self-sustainable country was not yet in sight. The answer for now: more troops. Although France will deploy an additional 700 troops (to non-combat regions) and the United States agreed to send another 3,200 soldiers, this was certainly less than Canada wanted, which had recently threatened to withdraw its forces should U.S. reinforcements not be forthcoming.

As much discord as there is over Afghanistan, there is broad agreement that the mission is do-or-die for the alliance. If NATO fails at its very first effort at global enforcer, the strains within the alliance could cause it to buckle altogether, rendering it useless even as a deterrent force in Europe, its original raison d’etre. This is NATO’s dilemma: In reinventing itself without a clear idea of what it wants to be, it risks becoming an unwieldy conglomerate that can do no one thing properly. The more members it has (Croatia and Albania joined in Bucharest, making it 28, with Macedonia to follow once the ridiculous dispute over its name is cleared up with Greece) and the more functions it claims to fill, the more it becomes a de facto coalition of the willing under American leadership, one that can circumvent the United Nations and even major allies in NATO for undertakings that the United States alone chooses. This has already been the case in the Balkans (neither the 1999 air campaign against Yugoslavia or Kosovo’s independence had UN Security Council approval) and in Afghanistan. In today’s NATO, “strategic solidarity”—the defining principle of the old NATO—is virtually meaningless.

Afghanistan was just about the only issue discussed in Bucharest that didn’t involve Russia, NATO’s chief concern during the Cold War in the form of the Soviet Union and at the top of the agenda again today. The crux of the Western alliance’s problem (and one shared by the European Union) is how to respond to the authoritarian and confrontational Russia that has emerged under the leadership of Vladimir Putin.

Putin’s clampdown on the democratic opposition, silencing of independent media, and the bullying its former Soviet-bloc charges is deeply disturbing to all NATO members and also destabilizing, for example, in the Balkans and the Caucasus. But options are limited. There are those, foremost the Germans and the French, who want to reach out to engage Russia in a process of dialogue and Europeanization. Others, led by the United States, opt to confront the New Russia more directly, for example, with the extension of the Atlantic Alliance to Russia’s border and the deployment of new weapons systems, like the anti-missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. Though unspoken at summits like this one, the United States and Russia are competing for influence in the geopolitically critical Black Sea region—an energy-rich, strategically crucial area connecting the Balkans with the Caucasus and East Central Europe with Turkey—which goes some way to explain the choice of Black Sea country Romania for the summit venue and the vehemence of the tangle over Georgia’s eventual membership in the alliance.

Not for the first time, Washington found ideological allies in the East and Central Europeans who—out of legitimate historical experience—have no grain of sympathy for Russia and understandably desire the protection of a collective defense pact. Why, ask aspirants like Ukraine and Georgia, should they be excluded from the only security alliance in the region, stranded as non-aligned states between East and West? Russia has already hiked natural gas prices to bully Ukraine and waged cyberwar against Estonia. Giving in to Russian pressure, they argue, would only strengthen Putin’s hand and that of his soon-to-be successor, Dmitri Medvedev. By crowning Putin’s anti-Western, neo-imperialist stances with success, it would entrench them in policy for years to come. These arguments should be taken seriously.

Tellingly, countries like Ukraine and Georgia admit that security is only one, and probably not even the most important reason they favor NATO. Off the record, their representatives acknowledge there is no certainty that the alliance would come running to their aid—and possibly provoke a war with nuclear-power Russia—should there be a border incursion or some other kind of aggression, such as a terrorist strike or a cyber attack, like the one on Estonia in May 2007, purportedly by Russia. (Estonia—and only Estonia—deemed the episode an Article 5 case, namely an attack by a foreign power that committed all NATO allies to come to its defense. But in fact, there is no agreement on exactly what constitutes the kind of attack that triggers an Article 5 response—or what that response should be.)

Moreover, since Ukraine’s membership course would certainly antagonize Russia, it could well become the brunt of even rougher Russian treatment, maybe even of economic sanctions. NATO membership could also aggravate tensions in the country itself between the pro-European western and pro-Russia eastern populations. In the event of sanctions or civil conflict, NATO has nothing to offer Ukraine.

But in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, NATO membership is seen as a step toward the West, a sign that—in lieu of EU membership—Europe and the greater Atlantic community accept them as one of their own. Indeed, it would strengthen the hand of democratic, pro-Western forces in these countries, like the embattled Orange revolutionaries in Ukraine and Macedonia’s struggling multiethnic leadership. Although not nearly as important or lucrative as EU membership, NATO membership provides token recognition that their hard work in pushing through reform—against the likes of hardline nationalists and other undemocratic elements—is being rewarded by those they aspire to emulate.

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