BRUSSELS: “Whither NATO?”, the eternal question about the future of the US-led defence alliance, risks turning into “Wither NATO”, a lament for the decline of a once mighty military organization. Since the Bush administration sidelined NATO from its military response to the Sept 11 attacks on the US, the alliance has been in a crisis of self-doubt.

New threats and security challenges lie far beyond NATO’s area. The US, far ahead of Europe in military technology and defence spending, does not want its hands tied by having to share decision-making with allies. Future wars are unlikely to involve the alliance collectively. “Many people in the Pentagon see NATO as a relatively marginal, European organisation,” Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, wrote in the NATO Review magazine.

Because of frustrations at waging war by committee over Kosovo in 1999, “the United States is unlikely to want to use NATO to run another serious shooting war”, Grant argued.

The EU would take on some of the peacekeeping, and NATO as it expands, would become primarily a political, pan-European security organisation, focused on “Europe and its near abroad”, he said. Grant’s vision may delight Russian President Vladimir Putin, keen to see a more political, less military NATO, and France, which has sought a European alternative ever since President Charles de Gaulle quit NATO’s integrated command in 1966.

Many European analysts see a new division of labour emerging in which the US fights wars and leaves Europe to clean up, doing peacekeeping and “nation building”.

But US strategic analyst Ronald Asmus, one of NATO’s most ardent advocates in Washington, who was deputy assistant secretary of state for Europe in 1997-2000, warns that such limited horizons could spell doom for the alliance.

“If NATO is not involved in the central strategic issues facing our countries, it will cease to be central in our policies. A ‘political’ NATO is a halfway house for the alliance’s demise,” Asmus wrote in a rejoinder to Grant.

Republican Senator Richard Lugar made the same point: “If NATO remains focused on Europe, the alliance will be reduced to what might be called the housekeeping function of managing security on an already stable continent, and it will cease to be America’s premier alliance for the simple reason that it will not be addressing the major security issues of our time.” Lugar warned that the debate about “what NATO is for” would sharpen if events in the Middle East or Iraq became a central issue in US-European relations later this year.

Stopping short of advocating a “global NATO”, Asmus argued that the alliance must have the capacity to act in Central Asia, the Middle East and the Gulf. The main problem, he said, was not the Bush administration’s unilateral instincts, but Europe’s repeated failure to invest in defence or to take new threats from terrorism and weapons of mass destruction seriously.—Reuters