BRUSSELS: Erected in a hurry over Brussels’ old airport runways at the height of the Cold War, the sprawling, low-rise complex of pre-fabricated buildings that serve as NATO’s headquarters is now on its last legs.
A fitting home, critics say, for an organization in decline.
But the NATO intends to prove at a summit in Prague on November 21 and 22 that, despite the crumbling concrete, it remains the powerhouse of Western security and will renovate to meet new threats and challenges.
“If NATO did not exist, the US would be working around the clock today to build something similar,” says alliance Secretary-General George Robertson.
NATO has faced an identity crisis since being sidelined by Washington from the military response in Afghanistan to the hijacked aircraft attacks of September 11.
The strategic environment has changed faster than NATO: it could still fight land battles in Europe as it was long geared up for to confront the Soviet Union, but would struggle to deploy and sustain strike forces in far-flung hotspots of terrorism or weapons of mass destruction.
NATO’s Europeans are, says Robertson, “military pygmies” compared with the United States, which last year spent 85 per cent more on defence than all its allies combined.
And so Washington, while professing its commitment to the alliance, now sees NATO more as a military toolbox for ad hoc “coalitions of the willing” than a collective fighting force.
NEW MEMBERS: Against this backdrop of uncertainty about its purpose and future, NATO member leaders will invite up to seven Central European states to join the 53-year-old defence alliance.
“Unless the meeting in Prague, originally billed as the ‘enlargement summit’, is truly turned into a ‘transformation summit’, NATO will have outlived its utility and will fade away,” Klaus Naumann, a former chairman of the alliance’s military committee, wrote in the NATO Review.
Critics say NATO’s second enlargement behind the old Iron Curtain could dilute its military capability, undermine its cohesion and turn it into a talking shop for regional security, inhibited by the need to find consensus among 26 nations.
The United States, they argue, has pushed for a “robust” enlargement partly because it will be able to extend its sphere of influence to Europe’s furthest corners.
In a recent factsheet, the US State Department made no pretence of the wider benefits Washington expects: “By helping Europe’s newer democracies as they strengthen good governance, rule of law and human rights, NATO will also facilitate a better long-term environment for American trade and investment.”
The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland became the first ex-Warsaw Pact countries to join NATO in 1999. They are now expected to be followed, probably in 2004, by Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.
Peter Van Ham of the Netherlands Institute of International Relations wrote recently that enlargement will reinforce NATO’s geographical emphasis towards the East.
“Given the key challenges of these regions, NATO’s principal task will be to offer a forum for consultations with ex-foes,” he said. “Will this be sufficient to keep NATO relevant?
IRAQ TEST: Many Europeans are already frustrated by what they see as unilateralism in Washington, and no one expects the United States to call on NATO as a collective fighting force in the event of a strike on Iraq.
Indeed, many believe that military intervention in Iraq would put NATO’s relevance to its most severe test yet.
“The Prague summit will dramatize the specific issue of Iraq as a moment of truth for NATO,” former US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott wrote in the Foreign Affairs journal.
But the United States is not about to give up on NATO, which ensures American control — or at least a veto — over European security at the price of a loose guarantee of help if the Europeans get into trouble.
But he added NATO must transform itself to take on new threats from “unstable failed states and terrorist organizations far from Europe’s borders” and particularly from “the toxic mix of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism”.
It is precisely along this road that the summiteers will set out in Prague, focusing on how to build forces that can be fielded rapidly and sustainably wherever and whenever needed.—Reuters