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CounterPunch
February
18, 2003
The Crisis in NATO
A Geopolitical
Earthquake?
by GABRIEL KOLKO
The next weeks should reveal whether
we are experiencing the equivalent of a geopolitical earthquake.
Washington intended that
NATO, from its very inception, serve as its instrument for maintaining
its political hegemony over Western Europe, forestalling the
emergence of a bloc that could play an independent role in world
affairs. Charles DeGaulle, Winston Churchill, and many influential
politicians envisioned such an alliance less as a means of confronting
the Soviet army than as a way of containing a resurgent Germany
as well as balancing American power.
Publicly, the reason
for creating NATO in 1949 was the alleged Soviet military menace,
but the U.S. always planned to employ strategic nuclear weapons
to defeat the USSR--for which it did not need an alliance. But
no one in Washington believed a war with Russia was imminent
or even likely, a view that prevailed most of the time until
the USSR finally disappeared. There was also the justification
of preventing the Western Europeans from being obsessed with
fear at reconstructing Germany's  economy,
and American military planners were concerned with internal
subversion. But when the Soviet Union capsized over a decade
ago, NATO's nominal rationale for existence died with it.
But the principal reason
for its creation--to forestall European autonomy--remains.
For Washington, the problem
of NATO is linked to the future of Germany, which since 1990
has been undecided about the extent to which it wishes to work
through that organization or, more importantly, to conform to
U.S.' initiatives in East Europe. Germany's unilateral recognition
of Croatia in December 1991 was crucial in triggering the war
in Bosnia and revealed its potentially dangerous and destabilizing
capacity for autonomous action. Its power over the European
Monetary Union and European Union understandably causes other
Europeans to fear the revival of German domination. But for
the U.S., the issue of Germany is also a question of the extent
to which it can constrain America's ability to play the same
decisive role in Europe in the future as it has in the past.
Such grand geopolitical questions have been brewing for over
a decade.
NATO provided a peacekeeping
force in Bosnia to enforce the agreement that ended the internecine
civil war in that part of Yugoslavia, but in 1999 it ceased being
a purely defensive alliance and entered the war against the
Serbs on behalf of the Albanians in Kosovo. The U. S. employed
about half the aircraft it assigns for a full regional war but
found the entire experience very frustrating. Targets had to
be approved by all 19 members, any one of which could veto American
proposals. The Pentagon's after-action report of October 1999
conceded that America needed the cooperation of NATO countries,
but "gaining consensus among 19 democratic nations is not
easy and can only be achieved through discussion and compromise."
But Wesley Clark, the American who was NATO's supreme commander,
regarded the whole experience as a nightmare--both in his relations
with the Pentagon and NATO's members. "[W]orking within
the NATO alliance," American generals complained, "unduly
constrained U.S. military forces from getting the job done quickly
and effectively." A war expected to last a few days instead
took 78-days. The Yugoslav war taught the Americans a grave
lesson.
Long before September
11, 2001, Washington was determined to avoid the serious constraints
that NATO could impose. The only question was of timing and
how the United States would escape NATO's clear obligations while
maintaining its hegemony over its members. It wanted to preserve
NATO for the very reason it had created it: to keep Europe from
developing an independent political as well as military organization.
Coordinating NATO's command structure with that of any all-European
military organization that may be created impinges directly on
America's power over Europe's actions and reflects its deep ambiguity.
Some of its members wanted NATO to reach a partial accord with
Russia, a relationship on which Washington often shifted, but
Moscow remains highly suspicious of its plans to extend its membership
to Russia's very borders. When the new administration came to
power in January 2001, NATO's fundamental role was already being
reconsidered.
President Bush is strongly
unilateralist, and he repudiated the Kyoto Protocol on global
warming, opposes further restrictions on nuclear weapons tests
or land mines, and is against a host of other existing and projected
accords. He also greatly accelerated the development of Anti-Ballistic
Missile system, which will ostensibly give the U.S. a first-strike
capacity and which China and Russia justifiably regard as destabilizing--thereby
threatening to renew the nuclear arms race. Downgrading the
United Nations, needless to say, was axiomatic. The war in Afghanistan
was fought without NATO but on the U.S.' terms by a "floating"
coalition "of the willing," a model for future conflicts
"that will evolve and change over time depending on the
activity and circumstances of the country." It accepted
the small German, French, Italian, and other contingents that
were offered only after it became clear that the war, and especially
its aftermath, would take considerably longer than the Pentagon
expected. But it did not consult them on military matters or
crucial political questions.
Washington has decided
that its allies must now accept its objectives and work solely
on its terms, and it has no intention whatsoever of discussing
the merits of its actions in NATO conferences. This applies,
above all, to the imminent war against Iraq--a war of choice.
This de facto abandonment of NATO as a military organization
was made explicit during 2002 when Washington proposed a simultaneous
enlargement of its membership to include the Baltic states and
to allow Russia to have a voice, but no veto, on important matters.
The nations along Russia's borders regard NATO purely as protection
against Russia, and are therefore eager to please the U.S.--which
wants no constraints on its potential military actions.
The crisis in NATO was
both overdue and inevitable, the result of a decisive American
reorientation, and the time and ostensible reason for it was
far less important than the underlying reason it occurred: the
U.S.' growing realization after the early 1990s that while the
organization was militarily a growing liability it remained a
political asset. That the United Nations and Security Council
are today also being strained in ways too early to estimate is
far less important because the U.S. never assigned the UN the
same crucial role as it did its alliance in Europe.
Today, NATO's original
raison d'être of imposing American hegemony is now the
core of the controversy that is now raging. Washington cannot
sustain this grandiose objective because a reunited Germany is
far too powerful to be treated as it was a half-century ago,
and Germany has its own interests in the Middle East and Asia
to protect. Germany and France's independence is reinforced by
inept American propaganda on the relationship of Iraq to Al-Qaeda
(from which the CIA and British MI6 have openly distanced themselves),
overwhelming antiwar public opinion in many nations, and a great
deal of opposition within the U. S. establishment and many senior
military men to a war with Iraq. The furious American response
to Germany, France, and Belgium's refusal, under article 4 of
the NATO treaty, to protect Turkey from an Iraqi counterattack
because that would prejudge the Security Council's decision on
war and peace is only a contrived reason for confronting fundamental
issues that have simmered for many years. The dispute was far
more about symbolism than substance, and the point has been made:
some NATO members refuse to allow the organization to serve as
a rubber stamp for American policy, whatever it may be.
Turkey's problem is simple:
the U. S. is pressuring it, despite overwhelmingly antiwar Turkish
public and political opinion, to allow American troops to invade
Iraq from Turkey and to enter the war on its side. The U.S. wants
NATO to aid Turkey in order to strengthen the Ankara government's
resolve to ignore overwhelmingly antiwar domestic opinion, for
the arms it is to receive are superfluous. But the Turks are
far more concerned with Kurdish separatism in Iraq rekindling
the civil war that Kurds have fought in Turkey for much of the
past decade, and the conditions they are demanding on these issues
have put Washington in a very difficult position from which--as
of this writing--it has not extricated itself. Turkey's best--and
most obvious--defense is to stay out of the war, which the vast
majority of Turks want. It may end up doing so.
America still desires
to regain the mastery over Europe it had during the peak of
the Cold War but it is also determined not to be bound by European
desires--or indeed by the overwhelming European public opposition
to a war with Iraq. Genuine dialogue or consultation with its
NATO allies is out of the question. The Bush Administration,
even more than its predecessors, simply does not believe in it--nor
will it accept NATO's formal veto structure; NATO's division
on Turkey has nothing to do with it. Washington cannot have
it both ways. Its commitment to aggressive unilateralism is
the antithesis of an alliance system that involves real consultation.
France and Germany are now far too powerful to be treated as
obsequious dependents. They also believe in sovereignty, as
does every nation which is strong enough to exercise it, and
they are now able to insist that the United States both listen
to and take their views seriously. It was precisely this danger
that the U.S. sought to forestall when it created NATO over 50
years ago.
The controversy over
NATO's future has been exacerbated by Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld's attacks on "Old Europe" and the disdain
for Germany and France that he and his adviser, Richard Perle,
have repeated, but these are but a reflection of the underlying
problems that have been smoldering for years. Together, the
nations that oppose a preemptive American war in Iraq and the
Middle East--an open-ended, destabilizing adventure that is likely
to last years--can influence Europe's future development and
role in the world profoundly. If Russia cooperates with them,
even only occasionally, they will be much more powerful, and
President Putin's support for their position on the war makes
that a real possibility.
Eastern European nations
may say what Washington wishes today, but economically they are
far more dependent on Germany and those allied with it. When
the 15 nations in European Union met on February 17 their statement
on Iraq was far closer to the German-French position than the
American, reflecting the antiwar nations' economic clout as well
as the response of some prowar political leaders to the massive
antiwar demonstrations that took place the preceding weekend
in Italy, Spain, Britain and the rest of Europe. There is every
likelihood that the U.S. will emerge from this crisis in NATO
more belligerent, and more isolated and detested, than ever.
NATO will then go the way of SEATO and all of the other defunct
American alliances.
The reality is that the
world is increasingly multipolar, economically and technologically,
and that the U.S.' desire to maintain absolute military superiority
over the world is a chimera. Russia remains a military superpower,
China is becoming one, and the proliferation of destructive weaponry
should have been confronted and stopped 20 years ago. The U.S.
has no alternative but to accept the world as it is, or prepare
for doomsday. The conflict in NATO, essentially, reflects this
diffusion of all forms of power and the diminution of American
hegemony, which remains far more a dream than a reality.
Gabriel Kolko,
research professor emeritus at York University in Toronto, is
author, most recently, of Another
Century of War? (The New Press, 2002). He can be reached
at: kolko@counterpunch.org
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