November 19, 2002	Tuesday	Ramazan 13, 1423

LONDON: The Nato summit in Prague this week will determine the security interests of European countries, including Britain, for decades to come. It will determine what strategic direction they should take. It could determine when European countries go to war and when to keep the peace. These decisions will be made not by sovereign nations, but by the United States.

It seems the Blair government has already decided where it stands: Britain’s national interest is identical to America’s. If the Bush administration launches a pre-emptive strike on Iraq, or any other “rogue” state, or suspected terrorists, then Britain has no alternative but to applaud. If Washington wants to use British bases for its “son of star wars” project, then London will, in the end, inevitably concede.

That at least seemed to be the message — one that will determine Britain’s destiny for many years — delivered last week by Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary.

The Prague summit was originally billed as a celebration to welcome seven more countries — from the Baltic to the Black Sea — into the western alliance. That was until questions started to be asked about the post-cold war relevance of an organization increasingly ignored by the US, its dominant member. Nato played no role in the Afghanistan bombing campaign and Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, said it will not be involved in any American-led military attack on Iraq.

Influential hawks circling around President Bush simply do not trust the Europeans in the “war against terror”, politically or morally. And they have little faith in the Europeans’ ability to get their military act together.

As Robert Kagan, the American commentator, put it: “Americans and Europeans no longer share a common ‘strategic culture’.”

Yet Washington has no interest in letting Nato fade away, leaving a strategic vacuum. Better for Bush that new life is breathed into the alliance to give it both a military and a political role — that of promoting American power politics. To this end, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, believes that Nato must set up a rapid response force that would go “any time, anywhere, at very short notice”.

Such a force, Washington hopes, will also snuff out the EU’s embryonic plans for its own rapid reaction force, the first manifestation of plans for a common European security and defence policy. Once enthusiastically endorsed by Tony Blair in a new entente with France, Washington quickly gave it the thumbs down. Thus Hoon insisted: “Nato is and will be the only organization for collective defence in Europe.”

France is deeply uneasy about the US approach, while Germany continues to distance itself from the Bush administration’s “war on terror”. But no matter. To avoid cumbersome (in another word, democratic) procedures in an enlarged Nato, the US is determined to streamline the way Nato makes military and political decisions. Consensus will no longer be necessary.

Washington would like European political cover for military adventures but can do without it. What military support any European nation could give would be marginal. Indeed, the capability gap between Europe and the US because of cost and technology — and America’s reluctance to share it — is already unbridgeable.

Peter van Ham, a Dutch analyst, says in a new pamphlet, What Future for Nato?: “The transatlantic security relationship, based on Nato as we have traditionally known it, is now beyond repair. For non-Americans this is gradually becoming a world where the US acts as legislator, policeman, judge, and executioner.”

Is it in Britain’s national interest to embrace this world, dominated by a single superpower? Earlier this year, the Foreign Office and ministry of defence told MPs that if the government were asked by the US to use British bases for its “son of star wars” project, it would respond “on the basis of our national interest, which of course includes our very strong strategic relationship with our closest ally”.

As for intelligence, the CIA and FBI could learn a lot from Britain’s security and intelligence agencies in the “war on terror”. Is Washington really going to refuse to co-operate against a common enemy by withholding intelligence even if it disagrees on policy? As for missile defence, should Britain and America’s European allies spend billions of dollars on a system that even the CIA questions?

While Bush speaks of an “axis of evil”, and Washington refers to “rogue” states, Whitehall insists that it is in Britain’s national interest to engage with countries such as Iran and Libya that are not only rich in oil and gas but also have no more interest in promoting Al Qaeda than we do.

Britain and Europe cannot hope to catch up with the US as a military power. Britain’s military establishment knows that.

Our “national security” and “national interest” encompass much more than the kind of weapons systems at our disposal.

We don’t have to be suffocated under a Nato umbrella by a US determined to have no competition. There are many in the British establishment who know this but dare not say so. A senior member of it was recently asked what he thought America’s interest was in the EU. “To divide and rule,” he replied.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.