#6570 #6571
#9 - JRL 6569
Commentary: Mending NATO's Mess
By Ira Straus
WASHINGTON, Nov. 24 (UPI) -- The expansion of NATO at this month's Prague Summit gives pressing urgency to the need to streamline and carefully reexamine the Alliance's top-level decision-making procedures.
Until recently, the debate on NATO had a surrealistic quality. No one was asking what strategic benefits or forces the new Eastern European members could bring to the alliance; instead it was simply asked whether their minuscule militaries could fit into NATO technical standards.
No one was asking how to secure the good behavior of new members after they joined, only how to tighten up the standards to be met prior to accession. No one was worried that the new members might try to obstruct strategic cooperation with Russia; only after the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington of Sept. 11, 2001 did it really start to dawn on U.S. and Atlantic Alliance policymakers that Russia's strategic help was really needed.
Previously, terrorism and nuclear proliferation were treated as hypothetical dangers. And no one was then paying attention to the damage the increase in membership might do to NATO's capabilities for making decisions that are timely, relevant, and robust. NATO simply "ruled" that its 1999 expansion had not done any harm to decision-making, and so ruled out any serious discussion.
Sept. 11, 2001 changed all that. NATO's Secretary-General, Lord George Robertson of Britain, faced with a terrorism crisis, came into his own as a world leader. He shifted emphasis from expanding the membership to transforming the structure of the Alliance, building more flexible capabilities, and building cooperation with Russia, the only ex-communist country that could help in the new war.
Robertson called for developing greater flexibility in the political and military structures of NATO, so that NATO would be able to focus on the tasks of the new era and adapt to the fast-changing challenges of a fast-moving enemy. He called for "modernizing" the decision-making processes of NATO, so they would be flexible enough that NATO could go on making decisions expeditiously no matter how many new members it might take. He changed the watchword of the Prague summit from the Enlargement Summit to the Transformation Summit.
The Pentagon chipped in with the idea of a NATO rapid reaction force. NATO adopted the plan in Prague.
Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, Ranking Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, raised the question of expulsion of members who behave badly. The behavior of the three new Eastern European members was in some respects opposite to what it was supposed to have been. Yet NATO membership was a one-way street with no way back.
Levin was not impressed by warnings that Russia might get a power of de facto veto if the West talked more with it: all that was at issue was taking Russia's views "into consideration", and this was not, he said, "tantamount to giving Russia a veto." However, Levin asked whether it was safe for NATO's own members to have a right of veto. If a new member went bad and became a dictatorship, he warned, it could veto everything NATO does.
There is a confusion behind the talk of a veto in NATO. It is usually said by NATO that all decisions are made by consensus, implying that each member has a right of veto. In reality there is no legal requirement of consensus, nor right of veto. Nevertheless the official view is partially true: the common NATO practice does try to reach a consensus at least for public consumption and so gives each member a de facto veto. The use of the veto is strongly discouraged, but it does retain a phantom existence as long as NATO retains the rhetoric of pure consensus. The ambiguous status of the veto makes the prospect of too many countries around the table a very real danger, but also a danger that can be overcome fairly quickly since no new treaty would be needed.
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has pointedly brought up the danger of too many members for the present forms of decision-making. She has called on NATO to reconsider its reliance on consensus, warning that it would water itself down to a debating club if it too many new members into an unreformed Council structure.
During the 1997 first round of NATO expansion, when Albright had been in office, she had supported expansion without linking it to reform, thus handing a de facto veto power to three Eastern European countries. They have proceeded since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to use their role in NATO to obstruct the Alliance from its strategic goal of building close cooperation with Russia. Today Albright proposes doing without consensus.
A working group sponsored by the Stanley Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson International Center has also recommended moving beyond consensus. Weighted voting, once treated as belonging to a different world, is now entertained as a preferable method. This accords with the suggestions made some time ago by David Abshire, former US ambassador to NATO.
In NATO as in the 15-nation European Union, widening requires deepening. NATO is a dozen years behind the EU in facing this problem, but it has one advantage: it can change its procedures without having to make treaty amendments. The NATO Council controls its own procedures. Ambassador Theodore Achilles, the main U.S. author of the NATO Treaty, used to explain that Article 9 of the Treaty, which sets up the Council without specifying its procedures, was no oversight: it was a deliberate step to make sure that NATO would not be hamstrung, like most international organizations, with a right of veto.
There are a number of options for decision methods beyond consensus. The first of them is simply a more flexible interpretation of consensus itself, by taking the onus off NATO to wait for a consensus, and putting the onus instead on individual countries to compromise and fall in quickly with the main tendency of discussion. This has already been partly implemented. However, it can succeed in the long run only if NATO has an option of moving on to other methods in the event that a country persists in obstructing consensus.
Such other methods include: consensus minus one or two; voting by country; and weighted voting, in which every country is given a weight based on its population. This last method, if held in reserve for use only when consensus proves unworkable, would be the most realistic. It would mimic the power weight that every country de facto already has in NATO; it would simply make the weights explicit, and would not allow a small minority weight to obstruct the workings of a large majority.
There is still time for NATO to adopt such procedures, or to write them into the protocols of accession of the new members. The discussion has begun late, but it remains to be seen whether it is too late. The question is whether the necessary corrections will be made in the coming months, before the protocols are sealed and the new members take their seat at the table. On this question hinges the future of the Alliance.
(Ira Straus is U.S. coordinator of the Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO)
Back to the Top Next Article
Nov. 25, 2002:
#6569 #6570 #6571
- Back to the Top -