From Prague to Baghdad: NATO at Risk

Strobe Talbott

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2002

Summary:  In Afghanistan, the Bush administration seemed determined at first to keep NATO on the sidelines. Now, as war with Iraq looms and the alliance ponders its own future, the president needs to reaffirm his commitment to the organization by including NATO in any new operation from the beginning. If not, its future relevance may come into question.

Strobe Talbott is President of the Brookings Institution and former Deputy Secretary of State.

Then Saddam tried his own hand at preemption by announcing -- before the UN could come up with a new, tougher resolution -- that he would agree to inspections. He hoped that this familiar tactic of cheating and retreating would, yet again, divide the Security Council and thwart the United States in its determination to bring him down.

When Bush goes to Prague, he will be tending to an alliance at risk. He will probably make a case similar to the one he made in New York City: the only way to end the menace Saddam poses to world peace is to eliminate Saddam himself. How receptive the allies are to that message will depend on the extent to which the United States is holding its own against those in the UN who believe that Saddam can be deterred, contained, and disarmed without being toppled.

More generally, Bush's audience in Prague will be looking for evidence that he is committed to making full and proper use of the international institutions the United States helped found more than half a century ago. Just as the UN should be the mechanism of choice -- notably, American choice -- for dictating terms to Saddam and authorizing force if he fails to comply, NATO is the best mechanism for applying that force. Most immediately, the allies' and partners' participation is necessary for military reasons: the more of them that are involved, the better the chance of a swift victory, which will be crucial if escalating violence and contagious turmoil in the region are to be avoided.

But there is a larger political stake as well: if there is to be a war against Iraq in the coming months, its justification, conduct, and outcome must vindicate the relevance not just of the UN but also of the U.S.-led alliance that rightly claims to be the most successful in history. Otherwise, NATO may not survive to serve as a general contractor for the pan-Eurasian renovation project symbolized by its plans for a shiny new home in Brussels.

THE SECURITY SOLAR SYSTEM

NATO's military and political functions have always been intertwined. When Harry Truman signed the North Atlantic Treaty in April 1949, he said that the allies were dedicated to achieving "unity on the great principles of human freedom and justice, and at the same time to permit, in other respects, the greatest diversity of which the human mind is capable." In short, even at its inception, NATO was about more than just banding together against a common enemy; it was also about creating, consolidating, and expanding a zone of safety within which common values and cooperative institutions could prosper.

But NATO was never intended to tackle that assignment alone. Its founders envisioned it as part of a network of organizations, each with its own history, makeup, and mission but all serving the cause of democracy and pluralism. The prime example is the symbiosis between NATO and the European Union. For all the controversy and criticism that vex that work in progress, the EU is the most ambitious and promising venture in supranational governance on the face of the earth. Yet it owes its very existence to NATO. The alliance made possible the historic reconciliation between Germany and France, which then made possible the EU. Under NATO's umbrella, democracy took hold in Portugal, Spain, and Greece. By leading the way in enlargement, NATO helped induce the EU to open its own doors to central Europe.

Recent years have seen a burgeoning of organizations that together encompass Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia and that are intended to assist postcommunist states in their transitions -- to help them, quite simply, join the West. The figure facing page 48 illustrates the point. Lurking in the swirls, boxes, and acronyms is an overarching logic and a promising dynamic. Just as the EU came into being thanks to NATO, so have the other 15 organizations depicted on the chart emerged under its aegis. The two that will be spotlighted at the Prague summit -- the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council and the Partnership for Peace -- are offshoots of the alliance. The Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, which continues to regulate the disposition of military equipment, was signed by the member states of NATO and the Warsaw Pact in the closing days of the Cold War. The Council of the Baltic Sea States and the Barents Euro-Arctic Council in the north, and the Southeast European Cooperative Initiative and the Balkan Stability Pact in the south rely heavily on NATO. The alliance encourages the militaries of the participating countries to collaborate on search-and-rescue and other humanitarian tasks and provides them with training and technical backing. More broadly, the sense of security that comes with a connection to NATO makes participating governments feel more confident about permitting the free flow of people, goods, and ideas across what used to be the Iron Curtain.

It is appropriate that the chart resembles a solar system, with NATO and the EU as its twin suns, since those two bodies exert a gravitational pull on Bosnia and Herzegovina at the far right and on Tajikistan at the far left. Tajikistan is the equivalent of Pluto. With much of its population living in poverty and famine, an infant mortality rate higher than that in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a feudalistic society, an authoritarian government, an economy dominated by drug trafficking, and a festering civil war, that country is even further away politically from the capitals of western Europe than it is geographically. Nonetheless, Tajikistan and other struggling nations, such as Macedonia and Georgia, are more likely to close that political distance if they remain part of the system that NATO and the EU are helping to put in place through their eastward extension.

Less than 20 years ago, Russia seemed to be in another galaxy altogether. Now it has been drawn into multiple Western-centered orbits, including the NATO-Russia Council, the Partnership for Peace, and the Council of Europe. Bush, like Bill Clinton before him, has left open Russia's eligibility for NATO membership. Although that day is still a long way off, Russia today is more genuinely a partner of NATO than it was before. President Vladimir Putin's decision to accelerate his country's alignment with the West has profound implications for the future of NATO, including its scope and even its name. "North Atlantic" will seem inadequate as the geographic designation of an experiment in collective security expanding, as Winston Churchill might have put it, from Vilnius on the Baltic to Vladivostok on the Pacific.