Wilton Park, England. 5 October.
In the 1950s the Americans used to have a NATO joke (they have about one
per decade). NATO, they said, was like
the Venus de Milo, all SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe) and no
arms. You are meant to laugh now. The essential point was that NATO was fast
becoming lots of military headquarters with no military forces. At the time it was but a dream but some sixty
years on NATO is indeed lots of military headquarters with few military forces. Whoever said we Europeans no longer take the
long view. I have just written the
report for a big conference on the Alliance entitled “NATO Partnerships in a
Shifting Strategic Landscape” and I could not but recall that joke. In a sense the joke captures NATO’s essential
dilemma – as the world gets bigger NATO seems to be making itself smaller.
It is a contradiction we need to
resolve and fast. Only yesterday a NATO
member Turkey shelled Syria. One of the
many problems is that today’s distinction between NATO members and partners is entirely artificial. Indeed, it is
hard to imagine any sizeable NATO operation ever again taking place without
partners. During Operation Unified
Protector over Libya there were on occasions as many partner states taking part
as members. And yet, in principle at
least, non-participating members had more influence over critical NATO
decisions than fully-participating partners.
That is the strategic equivalent of defying political gravity and if it
continues poses a greater threat to the future credibility and viability of the
Alliance than any perceived failure in Afghanistan.
Quite simply NATO’s place and
utility in a changing world will be defined as much by the strategic
partnerships it forges as any internal strategy, however grand sounding its title. Hitherto, the Alliance’s internal balance has
been guaranteed by the essential equation of NATO strategy – the more grand
sounding a document the less its actual use.
But that was then and this is now.
Within a decade all strategic relationships will have been transformed
by the rise of Asia. Be it NATO membership
and and its now plethora of partnerships they must all be seen in that context,
i.e. part of a world-wide web of security partnerships.
Why? Because NATO’s true utility can only be defined
once its place in American grand strategy has been established and that is
a-changing. Especially so as the more the Europeans
cut defence the more reliant they are on the US. Unfortunately, implicit in the ‘pivot’, the ‘rebalancing’,
the ‘global Yank’ (shiver) or whatever one wants to call Washington’s potential
zweifrontenskreig, a new strategic contract
beckons between NATO and its erstwhile member America. That contract is essentially simple; NATO must
take care of security for both members and partners in and around Europe to ease
pressure on the US elsewhere. If not the American security guarantee will over
time fade. Of course, the Americans will
stay for the big stiff - Iran, but much else will fall to the Europeans.
Given the parlous state of Europe’s
armed forces lessening risk will thus mean shifting the balance from collective
defence and crisis management to co-operative security and that means partners
and partnerships much more tailored to the needs of the individual states
critical to Alliance security. The needs
of Finland and Sweden as partners are a world away from the needs of say Egypt,
Libya or Saudi Arabia.
The trouble is that it is bureaucracy
and resource-constraint that is driving NATO’s partnership policy, not
strategy. Last year to make things simpler
for the NATO-crats a new Partnership Co-operation Menu was offered. The aim was to centralise the various
partnerships into something far more ‘efficient’. In fact, all it did was to
paralyse partnership as certain member-states were given yet another
opportunity to block Alliance development so that they could pursue their own
narrow agendas.
At the military level such
grandstanding is becoming dangerous. NATO could become a military interoperability school, critical to doing military things together
and better and thus supporting the flexible coalitions of both members and
partners that are the future for all Alliance military operations. However, until the essential divide with the
Alliance is resolved between NATO globalists and NATO’s little Europeans it is
difficult to see the Alliance being anything other than a school for defence
scoundrels, who find themselves forever in detention for not having made sufficient effort. Still, enough about my school days.
Of course NATO has no ambition to
be a global Alliance but it still has a critical role to play as a cornerstone
institution in the world-wide security web. For that reason the Alliance must act now to forge the twenty-first century
partnerships central to its future credibility.
If not then NATO will simply become the Venus
de Milo’s fat sister – no shape and no arms.
Julian Lindley-French
