#6278
[Second Issue of the Day]
#14
The Guardian (UK)
29 May 2002
Editorial
Follies in the forum
Nato and Russia are hollow partners
As host for yesterday's Nato-Russian summit, Silvio Berlusconi's choice of a mock-classical facade of plywood as its architectural theme was fitting. Even in its heyday Nato was as much illusion as substance, but yesterday's event took artificiality to a higher plane.
Nato's original purpose was not only to deter the Soviet Union from thoughts of advancing militarily on the west. It was designed to keep the United States engaged in Europe while "anchoring" Germany. The old enemy needed to be tied down and bound up. In Nato's post-cold war phase the US role has not changed, though the mood is different. The Republican right no longer wants to "withdraw" from Europe. On the contrary, now that Nato is seen as America's European base in a strategy for global intervention, American rightwingers are the most enthusiastic members of the US chorus in support of Nato's continuation.
The big change is the country which now needs "anchoring". Russia has taken on the role. Though nobody dared say it openly in yesterday's phoney piazza of platitudes, this is the main purpose of the new Nato-Russian Council. Western leaders hope they have offered their old enemy enough trappings of partnership to keep it under control.
Not that Russia's president gets nothing of value from the deal. Even more than George Bush, Vladimir Putin is a man whose political destiny is linked to the "war on terrorism". He can even claim to have invented the term, in launching an invasion of Chechnya in 1999 in order to divert Russian voters from the economic fiasco of the Yeltsin years and create a patriotic platform to win the presidency. In developing a similar agenda the US president is truly allied with Putin. No wonder that two men who have very little else to show in their years of power feel comfortable together.
The sad thing is that the rest of Nato should go along with this dangerous nonsense. "There is a common enemy out there," Nato's secretary-general, George Robertson, intoned yesterday, as though relieved the alliance has found a new reason for being. Nato would do better to check if "global terrorism" really exists and whether there are not other more intelligent and effective ways to handle disparate groups of desperate men than modernising an arsenal of hi-tech weaponry left over from a long-gone confrontation on the plains of central Europe.
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