Alphen,
Netherlands. 14 September. You know, I
suppose I should be writing today about European Commission President
Jean-Claude Juncker’s State of the Onion 2017 address, which he made yesterday
to the European Parliament. So here goes: more EU; more power for the Commission
President; more EU defence (the Juncker Bunker?); much more EU foreign policy; an EU finance ministry
to control Europe’s money; everyone to join the Euro like it or not; less
member-state (except Germany); damn Brexit and sod the Brits (or is that the
other way around?)! Clear? Right then,
that sorted. Won’t happen.
Back to the real
world. NATO is nervous this morning, not to mention my friends in Riga, Tallinn,
Vilnius and Warsaw. You will recall that last month I wrote about Zapad (West) 2017. As I write this massive
Russian nuclear-tipped, 100,000 strong military exercise is getting underway. Zapad 2017 ‘sandwiches’ the
Polish-Lithuanian border between Belarus and the Russian enclave of
Kaliningrad. If Moscow so chose it could
very quickly roll this exercise forward into an invasion of the Baltic States. The invasions of Georgia and Ukraine followed
similar such Russian exercises.
In fact, my
focus this morning is rather on the efforts of NATO allies in the Caribbean to
help the poor people therein recover from the mega-hurricane Irma. Now, I am loathe to load more work
onto NATO’s Allied Command Operations and it senior strategic headquarters, the
Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe or SHAPE. They will have their
collective eyes and ears focused firmly on NATO’s Eastern Flank this morning. But,
hear me out.
On Tuesday I
had a great chat with General Philip Breedlove, until May 2016 NATO’s Supreme
Allied Commander, Europe (SACEUR). Phil and I are working closely on a new
paper entitled Future War NATO that
will be published shortly as part of Harmel
2.0, the GLOBSEC NATO Adaptation Initiative, and for which I am the lead
writer. We discussed the crisis in the Caribbean and the efforts of Britain,
France, the Netherlands, and the UK to support the peoples in the region, some
of whom live in former colonies, actual ‘dependent territories, and in the case
of the French and Dutch islands that are technically part of both countries.
There has
been much criticism of the aid efforts of all the countries involved. In fact, not only was there significant
levels of resource and force already pre-positioned, the sheer scale of the
devastation wreaked by Irma swamped
the efforts of the countries involved. They have spent the last week
reinforcing that effort, as evinced by the Dutch decision yesterday to send the
impressive amphibious assault ship the HNLMS
Karel Doorman. And, to be fair to President Juncker it was good to see him
yesterday offer EU support.
However, much
of the problem has been a lack of co-ordination of the efforts of the four NATO
members engaged therein. SHAPE would be ideally placed to lead such operations.
Indeed, it even has the Comprehensive Crisis and Operations and Management
Centre (CCOMC) embedded at its core which is designed to co-ordinate both military
and civilian efforts.
Phil
Breedlove also made an important political point to me that he has granted permission
for me to share with you. Such a NATO
effort now would also send a strong message of solidarity to those in the Western
Hemisphere bit of NATO’s Euro-Atlantic Area. There is every reason to believe that
Washington and others would be appreciative of such an effort. Make no mistake,
the need for the European bit of the Alliance to send such messages to the
North American bit is, and will become, ever more important. The days of
one-way NATO are over.
SHAPE? Right
now it is busy, but the clue is in its role; it is a strategic
headquarters. Recently, I have been doing a lot of scenario-building and
table-top war-gaming. Every future crisis I create involves NATO facing
multiple, diverse and widely-separated simultaneous crises. In other words,
NATO and SHAPE had better prepare to engage at one and the same time a future,
and quite possibly, even bigger Super-Zapad
and an Irma. It is simply the way of
NATO’s twenty-first century world.
Zapad 2017?
In fact, I don’t think Russia will invade anywhere today. Rather, Moscow is
sending me and you a message. Don’t worry Moscow, I hear you. Message received
and understood: “We need a strong NATO!”Clear?
Julian Lindley-French
