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.

In the last eight years, NATO has begun to establish connections with six Arab countries through the Mediterranean Dialogue. The modest purpose of this effort is to support scientific cooperation, education, training on crisis management and defense planning, and the sharing of information on terrorism. The Mediterranean Dialogue is a tentative first step by NATO toward doing in the Arab world what it is has been doing for the past dozen years in the post-Soviet region: foster modern concepts of domestic governance and cooperative patterns of international behavior.

In the term coined by political scientist Joseph Nye, these endeavors represent the projection of "soft power," the use of suasion along with cultural, political, and economic influence to co-opt rather than coerce. However, that amalgam is less potent in the Middle East than in central Europe, since the central Europeans have, for the most part, decided they want to be part of the West, whereas the Arabs, to put it mildly, have not. The Mediterranean Dialogue is further hobbled, at least under current circumstances, by its Arab members' disinclination to cooperate with Israel, which is also a member. The only other grouping of any significance in the region is the Arab League, which includes 22 members ranging from Morocco to Yemen -- and Iraq. Fortunately, the Arab League is quite ineffectual both politically and militarily. If it were otherwise, the Arab League would greatly increase the threat to Israel and further complicate the challenge of dealing with Saddam Hussein.

Although soft power is a necessary component of what it takes to keep the peace, it is insufficient; the hard stuff is required as well. For NATO to succeed as a master builder of structures such as those now taking shape across Eurasia, its members must occasionally be ready to pick up the tools of war and undertake a demolition job against regimes that threaten the values and interests that the alliance champions.

Every day from its founding in 1949 until the collapse of the Soviet bloc 40 years later, NATO was ready to unleash its destructive might in response to aggression by the Warsaw Pact. In the waning days of the Cold War, the successful prosecution of Desert Storm depended on the coordinated participation of allied and associated forces and the use of NATO bases in Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey. British armored units, along with French legionnaires, joined the U.S. Army for the charge into Iraq. British and American special forces worked behind enemy lines to seek out and destroy Iraqi missile launchers. Meanwhile, warships from as far away as Australia, Norway, and Japan provided transport, force protection, mine clearing, and at-sea refueling in the Persian Gulf. The orchestration of a broad-based and highly effective coalition that drew much of its strength from allies was a lasting credit to George H.W. Bush and an important legacy to his successors.

Not until the Cold War was over did NATO itself go into combat on the basis of a formal "Action Order" from the North Atlantic Council, the alliance's governing body in Brussels. Moreover, it did so "out of area" -- that is, beyond the borders of its member states -- and in partnership with former adversaries. First in Bosnia, then in Kosovo, the alliance provided the muscle so that more than a dozen other international bodies could help rebuild the economy, establish the institutions of self-government and civil society, and supervise elections. As a result of NATO's projection of hard power against Belgrade, Slobodan Milosevic is in the dock in The Hague today, and what might be called Milosevicism is discredited in the Balkans. As a symbol of its return to the fold, Serbia may be invited to send an observer delegation to the meeting of the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council during the Prague summit.

Although NATO rose to the first major challenge of the post-Cold War era, its role after September 11 was more ambiguous. For the first time in its history, NATO invoked Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty, which declares an attack against one of its signatories an attack on the alliance as a whole. Even so, the United States flew 90 percent of the sorties and delivered 99 percent of the precision-guided bombs against targets in Afghanistan. By that index, Operation Enduring Freedom was nearly an all-American display of power.

However, after having been largely excluded at the beginning, NATO allies and others were drawn in as the campaign gathered momentum. British, Canadian, and German units have been on the ground, undertaking risky sweeps through the caves where al Qaeda was hiding; the United Kingdom and France have provided significant help from the air, conducting reconnaissance missions, refueling American strike aircraft, and launching attacks of their own. In support of the action in Afghanistan, the British have deployed their largest naval task force since the Falklands war. French and Italian vessels are helping patrol the Indian Ocean. The Europeans and the Canadians have increased their presence in the Balkans so that the United States could shift units from there to Afghanistan. Turkey leads the peacekeeping force deployed in Afghanistan today. At the same time, NATO partners have provided bases, overflight rights, troops, and equipment. Russian forces, whose Soviet predecessors were driven out of Afghanistan by a U.S.-supported jihad 13 years ago, have returned to Kabul on American coattails. Five AWACS early-warning and command-and-control planes with allied crews patrolled the skies over the continental United States for more than six months starting shortly after September 11.

For no good reason, the Bush administration tended to disparage these substantial contributions by allies and partners, feeding the impression on both sides of the Atlantic that NATO was a wasting asset. Playing up rather than playing down the allies' and partners' participation would have entailed no cost and brought sizable benefit, not least because it would have helped establish the military operation in Afghanistan as a model for the one that may be required to end the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

THE RIGHT CHOICE

Americans are justified in expecting the principal military alliance in which they have invested so much over the past half-century to prove itself up to the tasks of the years and decades ahead, many of which loom in the Middle East. At the same time, America's allies are justified in expecting the United States to assemble a genuine coalition of the willing, not just a coalition of the obedient. To meet that standard, the Bush administration must make effective, enforceable, un-authorized inspections the centerpiece of America's Iraq strategy rather than a pretext for what much of the world would see -- and oppose -- as unilateral action of dubious legitimacy.