BRIEFING NOTE What role for NATO? by Charles Grant
NATO adapted well after the end of the Cold War. An organisation which had been focused on collective defence against the Soviet threat found new things to do: spreading security and stability through NATO enlargement to new members and partners in Central Europe, and applying force to impose – and then police – peace agreements in Bosnia and Kosovo. Since September 11th, however, NATO has faced something of an existential crisis. The US chose to fight the Afghan war largely on its own, rather than through NATO, or alongside European allies. Some officials in the Bush administration have done little to hide their disdain for the alliance. The imminent enlargement of NATO, to be confirmed at the November summit in Prague, with seven Central European states will reduce its military cohesion. And the recent deal to establish a NATO-Russia council has reinforced the perception that the alliance is becoming a largely political body, rather than a serious military organisation. Secretary-general George Robertson has called for NATO to develop a new role in fighting terrorism. But that struggle requires intelligence sharing among a minimum number of parties, great secrecy and the ability to move speedily. It is hard to think of a body less well-suited than NATO – for all its merits, a large, sometimes leaky, multinational bureaucracy – to lead the war against terrorism. So why do we need NATO? The alliance is worth preserving, and reforming, for three reasons. The first is that NATO has a political role to play, in providing a forum for North Americans, Europeans and Russians to talk about common security concerns, such as proliferation, missile defence and the Balkans. NATO helps to keep the US directly involved in European affairs. Indeed, it remains the only important multilateral organisation which ties North Americans to Europeans. Furthermore, no other organisation is so well suited to engage Russia’s security establishment. Russia’s armed forces are in bad need of reform: successive governments since the end of the Cold War have tried to modernise Russia’s under-equipped, ill-disciplined and ineffective forces, without any success. The NATO-Russia council could provide the channels through which NATO members can help to modernise the Russian defence establishment. In the long run, if President Putin succeeds in making Russia a more Western country, and if the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy becomes more solid, NATO’s political role could be the linking up of three pillars: the US, the EU and Russia. NATO’s second role should be to promote a single market in armaments and defence technology. On both sides of the Atlantic, the leading defence companies understand that the long-term trend is for transatlantic alliances in the defence industry. Europe’s markets are simply too small to sustain world-class ‘prime contractors’ in the defence business. Similarly, US companies will not be able to win many contracts in Europe unless they team up with European firms. The best way to preserve some competition in the defence industry is for rival transatlantic alliances to compete against each other.