Global Role of NATO

NATO Looks to Expand Mission and Membership
Lionel Beehner
Council on Foreign Relations
July 27, 2006
Members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) remain divided on whether to enlarge the alliance and expand its mission further. NATO officials will meet this November in Riga, Latvia to discuss enlarging the organization to include Ukraine and Georgia in addition to the Balkan states of Croatia, Macedonia, and Albania at some further date. Some U.S.-based experts say NATO must enlarge to meet the changing nature of transnational threats, from terrorism to typhoons to turmoil in the Middle East. Yet others say expanding NATO may put too much strain on the alliance, weaken its collective defense mechanism, and needlessly upset Russia, which still harbor suspicions of the Cold-War-era bloc. Read More

NATO's Growing Role in the Greater Middle East
By Philip H. Gordon, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution
Emirates Lecture Series, Spring 2006
Ten years ago, the idea of writing a substantial paper about NATO's role in the Greater Middle East. would have been implausible. Indeed, at that time NATO was only tentatively involved in southeast Europe . let alone southwest Asia . and the organization's own future remained highly uncertain. In August 1995, after four years of hesitation and debate over the issue of extending the zone of operation of what had once been a strictly defensive alliance, NATO intervened militarily for the first time in Bosnia. However, this only occurred after organizations like the United Nations (UN) and the Western European Union (WEU) were seen to have failed, and the mission was not regarded as a precedent for Alliance action in the Middle East or Asia. At the time, few could have envisaged that a decade later NATO would be deploying over 10,000 troops to Afghanistan, training Iraqi military forces in Baghdad and increasing its political and military cooperation with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). That, however, is precisely the situation today.Read More

The Real Business of NATO
By Risto E.J. Penttila
International Herald Tribune
May 16 2006

(...) NATO has already become a global policeman. The question now is whether it will turn out to be a good cop or a bad cop. If NATO wants to be a good cop, it must work out principles and decision- making procedures for the most likely crises of the future - even if those crises are a far cry from the war games played during the Cold War. If NATO continues to deny that it has become a global policeman, it will act without legitimacy and without a moral compass. In other words, it will be a bad cop. (...) NATO claims to defend freedom, democracy and liberty. Well, freedom, democracy and liberty are at stake when people are being slaughtered in Darfur. The same principles are also at stake when war-torn countries are trying to rebuild themselves. Read More

NATO:Where is it Headed?
Speech by Kurt Volker, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State
March 31, 2006

"We know the value of the world's core democratic community speaking with a united and clear voice. We need to work together with Europe as a single democratic, transatlantic community not just for our combined resources, but for our combined political weight, which embodies a critical mass of moral authority that exceeds what each of us can provide individually. (...) We are reinvesting in NATO, the most successful and most promising Alliance in the history of the world. And this is where I'd like to spend the balance of my time today. (...) I have already noted that we believe that at Riga, NATO should develop its relationship with global security partners, such as Australia or Japan, and set the stage for decisions on enlargement at its next Summit in 2008.
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How to go Global
Economist.com
March 23, 2006
A quiet revolution is occuring in what America expects of its friends. GEORGE BUSH may be consumed at home defending his policies in Iraq against the 60% of Americans who now disagree with his handling of the war. But Europeans hoping that the hard lessons being learned daily in Baghdad and Ramadi would force the administration to adopt a more collegial foreign policy are at last starting to see results. Why, then, are some of them fretting that the transatlantic alliance is about to drift farther apart? Read More

A Transformative NATO
By Jim Hoagland, The Washington Post
Sunday, December 4, 2005; Page B07
The relative political calm that has prevailed across the Atlantic this year will soon be tested by an ambitious U.S. effort to remake NATO into a global security organization able to go anywhere and do much more than fight wars.Light sparring is underway behind closed doors over the sites and the agendas for alliance summits in 2006 and 2008 that could become essential components of President Bush's legacy in foreign affairs. The tactical arguments are precursors of a great strategic debate that lies ahead over the nature of global power in the 21st century. This debate, if handled correctly, could enhance rather than damage allied unity. (...)Outwardly, transatlantic relations have improved substantially. A new German government that does not owe its electoral legitimacy to opposing Bush's policies has taken power in Berlin. France's drive to limit U.S. hegemony abroad has been weakened by internal problems. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has turned U.S. sniping at the European Union's negotiations with Iran over nuclear arms into meaningful support for that effort.(...) Resolving the emerging cleavage between mission affinity and mission capability within the alliance is the key task for the president in his final two outings on the NATO summit stage. (...) There is also concern among European diplomats about an American push to use the 2006 summit as a moment of "transformation" for NATO into a global alliance that can take on large-scale humanitarian, reconstruction and peace-building missions around the world, rather than remaining close to its original purpose of the collective defense of Europe.A glimpse of one possible mission for new NATO came in September when the fledgling Reaction Force ferried symbolic relief (10 tons of cots, tents and other supplies donated by the Czech Republic) to victims of Hurricane Katrina. Then, in October, the force mounted a much larger emergency air bridge to move 2,000 tons of supplies and 300 NATO troops to help earthquake victims in Pakistan and Kashmir.Old Europeans may grumble that NATO should not be turned into the Red Cross -- that the alliance's redefinition should not become endlessly elastic. But Europe must then offer its own concepts for an effective new alliance that contributes to global security, rather than one that stands still and complains about American unilateralism.That in turn should force the Bush administration to treat transatlantic differences not as a simple matter of political will -- of some alliance members having it and others not -- but as a matter of necessity to base a new NATO on a new common program that brings clear benefits to all 26 members. Read More

Global War on Terror and Future of NATO
by Sebestyén L. v. GorkaPosted Jan, 2006
Interview with Gen. Jim Jones, who serves both as the highest ranking military officer at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), NATO’s HQ, and as the commander of the United States European Command (EUCOM).
(...)The process of transformation involves on-going evaluation and there are still problems. NATO’s political appetite to be more global is much greater than its inherent capability to act globally. At Prague, the then NATO 19 committed themselves to spending at least 2% of their GDPs on defence. Today, less than half of the 26 members of the expanded Alliance spend close to that figure. As a result, I am less than optimistic about near-future Alliance capabilities in key short-falls such as strategic lift and CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear) defence. The Prague Capabilities Commitment deals with high-end items that have very long gestation periods before they become true capabilities, and I don’t see them emerging as they should just yet. Maybe the summit in 2006 can reverse this trend. But if you look at the worrying fact that in the aftermath of serious terrorist attacks on the European soil of NATO most of the responses were national and not Alliance responses, then this is a disturbing trend. More could be done if nations really wanted to. The biggest question remains how advisable is it for the Allies to commonly fund a NATO asset? The last century resulted in the acceptance within NATO of the principle of “costs falling where they lie,” a phrase that is not very compelling grammatically but which meant that a nation paid for all the costs of the forces it contributed to a NATO task. This may no longer be the way to manage out-of-area missions and so we are looking at expanding the model of NATO AWACS (Airborne Early Warning and Control System). This Alliance capability, which is funded by 14 NATO nations, has worked tremendously well despite being truly international not only in funding but also in manning structures. It works because it is funded in advance, just as navies budget ‘steaming time’ up front so as to make an allowance for the future costs of their operations. This is a new concept when applied to land forces. Now the question is whether we can broaden the AWACS model so that small nations will be willing to contribute more frequently in terms of capabilities. To be honest, the reality is that most often the issues are not political but financial. (...) In my personal opinion, NATO will most likely expand again. NATO will be more proactive and more involved in multinational joint operations. It will cooperate more with other international institutions, to include the United Nations. It will become involved in supra-interagency cooperation to face the new threats. Operations such as Pakistan have shown that we are not just about classical warfighting. The Alliance will leverage this ability to produce results in the less-than-war spectrum of operations. To be a success NATO will have to be out there earlier, making things happen by shaping the security environment. This will be the next stage of the debate: how we move to being an Alliance of common security from one of common defence. We have to start the intellectual dialogue on this transformation today.
Mr. Gorka is executive director of the Institute for Transitional Democracy and International Security (ITDIS) and adjunct professor for Terrorism Studies at the George C. Marshall Center in Germany. Read More