#13
The Russia Journal
March 29-April 4, 2002
Whittling down the new Russia-NATO set-up
By IRA STRAUS

A NATO-Russia Council of 20 members – the idea that was proposed last fall as a breakthrough in mutual relations – has been persistently delayed and whittled down. It is now going through a further round of whittling-down. Russia is publicly upset, warning last week that the new Council was being reduced, in the words of Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, to a "purely cosmetic" renaming of the NATO-Russia Joint Council that already exists.

The reason is simple. NATO never tried to figure out a workable way to include Russia in its core processes. If it can’t figure it out for the core processes, it won’t be able to figure it out for the peripheral processes either.

As long as NATO does not think about how to do it right with Russia, it will be left only with plans for doing it wrong. It will become afraid of these plans. It will want to whittle them down to a bare minimum, which would limits the damage but still leave the net balance negative. And that fails to offer prospects for major gains.

That is what is going on now.

The crux of the matter is that NATO has never tried to figure it out. This would not be so hard to do, but it would require some creativity about reforming the decision processes. It would mean giving up the traditional NATO rhetoric that portrays the existing processes as the best of all possible worlds, a near-miraculous achievement in consensus – a process that no one has been able to explain without mystification, that was better fitted to the Cold War than to the fast-changing world of today and that no one thinks Russia could fit into. There would have to be some open discussion about the existing mix of decision processes in NATO, their aspects of flexibility and rigidity, and how to develop supplementary procedures for getting past the rigidities – procedures for evaluating new situations without dogma or gang spirit, making decisions quickly enough, presenting them publicly without fearing if a few members mildly dissent, implementing them under the joint aegis yet through flexible coalitions and changing them expeditiously as the external world changes and as the initial joint measures bring some unanticipated consequences.

In the absence of ideas on how to do this, it is not surprising that NATO is running into all kinds of self-contradictions when it comes to its plans for including Russia in decision-making on some new anti-terrorism issues. With every issue, no matter whether old or new, the same need arises for a more flexible system. No matter which issues are coming up for decision, the same inadequacies in existing NATO mechanisms come into play. If NATO cannot solve them for the old core issues, it cannot solve them for any other ones, either.

While the existing decision processes have some flaws, they are nowhere near as bad as the public rhetoric about them. People are led to believe that there is a right of veto for NATO members. This is repeatedly uncritically in the mass media, day in and day out. It has gained the status of an accepted myth, a basis for making all kinds of false deductions.

In reality, the North Atlantic Treaty creates no right of veto and leaves it to the NATO Council to set its own procedures. The main U.S. author of the Treaty, Ambassador Theodore Achilles, told me a few years before his death that this was deliberate: They did not want NATO to be hamstrung by a veto. The myth of a right of veto nevertheless has served some PR purposes, particularly during the Cold War, when it was important to present a front of unanimity against the enemy.

The overall NATO veto-right myth is what gives rise to the sub-myth that Russia was offered a veto last fall. As long as the NATO decision-making system is described as if it were one in which every country had a legal right of veto, people will wonder whether Russia is also getting this right. And as long as the actual NATO decision-making system is only somewhat flexible, operating by a mix of normal mutual political pressures and abnormal privileges that diplomats of member states sometimes extend to one another for dragging out the discussion in the name of consensus, no one will be able to understand how to extend that system to include Russia without at least some damage to the ability to reach meaningful results.

A former U.S. Ambassador to NATO told me that the fears of a "Russian veto" had all arisen by a kind of accident. "Lord Robertson was tricked by the press. They asked him if Russia was being offered a veto over NATO decisions, and he was unusually flat-footed in his response. Then the press spread the story all around that Russia was being given a veto, and we’ve had to keep explaining ever since that it isn’t so."

That was an accurate recounting of how the flap over a "Russian veto" began last fall, but it didn’t explain why it began. Why did the press ask trick questions? Why did it seize upon an ambiguous response to spread a myth? Why was it so easy to create a panic? Why was there a similar panic about a "Russian veto" five years ago, when the NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council was being created? Why is everyone afraid of this "veto", when no one has been able to define it or explain where or when it could ever come into play? Why are the official denials about the "Russian veto" so unconvincing, despite being absolutely true?

The explanation lies in the rigidities in the existing procedures of NATO and the even more rigid language used for describing them. If every member of NATO is said to have a "veto," Russia naturally wants one, too – otherwise it cannot expect to get any respect for its views. If Russia talks of wanting a "veto," everyone gets scared. And so NATO and Russia run around the circle again and again.

We’ve been through all this before. In 1997, when the Permanent Joint Council was created, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger raised up a veritable hysteria about it. Discussion with Russia was equated with a Russian veto and the destruction of NATO – unless NATO reached a joint position first and simply presented it to the Russians, take it or leave it. The Republicans in Congress and the mass media joined in the hysteria; no one refuted it effectively, probably because the language game of NATO served to delete all the space for refuting it. The Clinton Administration caved in and imposed restrictions on the Joint Council: It could not talk with Russia until the Alliance had already made up its mind. Advertised as a breakthrough in relations, the Council was reduced to near-insignificance.

Are we running around the same circle all over again?

Again, Kissinger is whipping up hysteria about a "Russian veto." This time he is joined in it by Zbigniew Brzezinski and by the three new Central European members of NATO. The last time, the Central Europeans had been cautious: They were on their best behavior, and they knew an agreement on a Russia-NATO Joint Council might be a condition for their joining NATO. Today, however, they are securely entrenched in NATO, and are available for the mobilization of hysteria about Russia. The situation will get worse if more states with anti-Russian feelings are admitted in November.

The crux of the problem, regarding any new NATO-Russia council and NATO’s handling of new members in its old North Atlantic Council, remains NATO decision-making. David Abshire, one of the most respected of the former U.S. ambassadors to NATO, wrote in 1992 of a need to consider procedures such as "consensus-minus-one" or "weighted voting" so that former enemies could not "prevent the Alliance’s traditional members from acting." Ten years have been lost since then, but last month Lord Robertson, in a speech at Chatham House, said it is time to get on with the "modernisation of NATO’s decision-making machinery" so that it will continue to be able to make decisions expeditiously "after NATO’s enlargement in November."

Carried out seriously, such a "modernisation" would make a tremendous difference, not only in NATO’s internal effectiveness, but also in its capacity to adapt to the new challenges. Whether it will be carried out seriously enough and soon enough for NATO to build a working alliance with Russia is the question on which the future of the relationship rides.