Features » April 19, 2008 » Web Only

Letter From Bucharest (cont’d)

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.

This is a moving case, but it begs the question why these countries are so desperate for symbolic Western recognition in the first place. Clearly, the West is not doing enough to support their transitions by other means, in particular by stepping up integration into the European Union. Moreover, if NATO is not first and foremost a European security alliance but rather a global coalition of democracies (an option under discussion that could include Australia, Israel, New Zealand, Brazil, and northern Africa states, among others), then it is no longer NATO but some kind of revamped Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) under U.S. leadership. In any case, the task of democracy promotion would be better undertaken by civil organizations trained to do so and not a military pact. The OSCE had once been the organization envisioned to fill this role—and perhaps that of pan-European security too. But unfortunately neglect has rendered it ineffective, today nothing more than an election-monitoring agency. And, furthermore, any democracy promotion agency would have to clarify its requirements: Georgia’s western-backed leadership has dealt heavy-handedly with its domestic opposition, using excessive force against a largely peaceful political demonstration in the capital Tbilisi last November. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, only a third of the population supports NATO membership.

The impassioned pleas of the Eastern Europeans tug at the heart-strings of the Western Europeans. But the West’s opposition to a full-speed ahead eastward expansion (the bids of Ukraine and Georgia for pre-membership talks were put on hold) underscores a basic difference among the Atlantic allies—including within Europe—over the source of Russia’s authoritarian development and self-assertive foreign policy—and how to respond to it.

In contrast to those who imply that Putin has simply used NATO expansion and other alleged affronts as a pretext for cracking down at home and flexing muscle abroad, Berlin and Paris believe that there is something about the West’s post-Cold War policies that have legitimately angered and humiliated Russia. They see Putin’s course, at least in part, as a response to NATO, the missile defense project, and being snubbed on Kosovo, among other issues. In the long term, Merkel and Sarkozy believe that some kind of accommodation has to be found with Russia, one that encourages its constructive participation in Europe. They don’t want Russia backed into a corner with the feeling that a western-only club is forming against it, one that will dictate the nature of collective security on the continent. This is Russia’s fear, which indeed Putin exploits for all its worth.

NATO’s continued existence in some form is ultimately much more important to the United States than to the Europeans. One day, the European Union’s security and defense structures will be able to provide credible security on the continent. But for the United States, NATO is indispensable: a loose club of democracies that it picks from on a mission to mission basis, according to American interests and behind the fig leaf of multilateralism. No wonder the United States is pushing the hardest for expansion, admitting Japan, Israel, Morocco, and Georgia. The bigger the better.

Everyone at the Bucharest summit was aware that NATO eventually has to formulate a new security concept to guide it. Is NATO a traditional military alliance, a global policeman, a peacekeeping force, a counterterrorism agency, or all of the above? Does it do energy security, cyber defense, counterterrorism, post-conflict reconstruction, crisis management, and WMD non-proliferation? Are the resources there for even a fraction of these mandates?

This rethinking is all the more difficult because Europeans and Americans disagree fundamentally about the nature of the security threats that face them—obviously an enormous obstacle for a collective security organization. The danger of sitting down and conducting a strategic review is that it would bring these differences starkly to the fore, perhaps causing NATO’s 28 members to realize just how little they have in common.

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