BRUSSELS, Oct 30: The United States set out an ambitious agenda on Monday for transforming the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) into a global security organisation at a summit next month, but acknowledged that some European allies have misgivings.
Washington’s Nato ambassador Victoria Nuland said the 26-nation alliance had gone beyond debates about whether to act outside its Euro-Atlantic area, deploying forces on four continents in the last 18 months, most importantly in Afghanistan.
Nato is already performing missions in practice for which it has yet to adapt its theory, she said, forecasting tough drafting debates before the Nov. 28-29 summit in Riga, Latvia.
“We want Nato to be able to demonstrate when our heads meet four weeks from now that we have an alliance that is taking on global responsibilities, that it increasingly has the global capabilities to meet those responsibilities, and that it is doing it with global partners,” Ms Nuland said in a speech to the Centre for European Policy Studies think-tank.
The alliance is fighting Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan, supporting African Union peacekeepers in Darfur, patrolling former Yugoslav battlefields in Kosovo and has flown relief supplies to earthquake victims in Pakistan.
“For the next four weeks, allies are going to spend a lot of time arm-wrestling and mud-wrestling about the words that we use in our Nato documents ... to reflect today’s reality.
“It’s going to be a tense conversation as we head towards Riga,” she said without identifying which allies objected to stating such global ambitions in the summit documents.—Reuters
