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Special Carnegie/CDI Conference: Comments from John Newhouse, CDI Senior Fellow
I'd like to say a few words about the change in NATO, because I think NATO is confronting a process of change. Whether this is going to be abrupt or gradual, we do not yet know. Even before Sept. 11, though, it was clear that NATO was confronting some tough questions. Did it still have a purpose? Was there a role for Russia and, if so, was it a serious role? Now we see Russia and the U.S. as the two countries that can turn to serious advantage what happened on Sept. 11. They have a lot of common ground in the struggle against terrorism, WMD [weapons of mass destruction] and also, arguably, the task of making over the Western security system, which a great many countries have more or less relied on for their security for a half-century or so. Today's threats are clearly not military, and there isn't a lot really that NATO can do in the struggle against terrorism or to deal with WMD.
A few leaders, starting with [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair, have recognized that there is a convergence of Western and Russian strategic interests. The various parties will still argue about Russian treatment of Chechnya and perhaps Georgia, but I think there will be a larger and probably more decisive argument, in that collective security arrangements without serious Russian involvement no longer make any sense.
And, of course, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin was the first to really shuffle the new deck. He was the first to call President Bush after September 11. He decided not to oppose the use of bases in Uzbekistan and elsewhere in Central Asia from which to attack the Taliban. He took himself to Berlin, and then wowed the Germans by making a speech in the Bundestag in fluent German and studded with quotes from Schiller and Goethe and telling his German audience precisely what they wanted to hear. That is to say, Russia today is European in its values. Russia will erect a barrier against drug trafficking, money laundering, and fundamentalism coming across Afghanistan and Central Asia into Europe. And he said that Russian spending priorities have changed. And henceforth - in fact, now - not only are we increasing social spending a great deal, we are, for the first time in Russian history, spending more on education than on defense. This, you might imagine, went down very well, and throughout Western Europe there began to be talk that Russia is now a part of the European scene.
Putin was also taking, even before Sept. 11, a rather more accommodating line on President [George W.] Bush's pet projects; that is to say NMD [National Missile Defense], amending or abrogating the ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile] Treaty, and enlarging NATO. And the enlargement of NATO is something that is very much in the minds of European governments. So are the other two projects, but they feel, I think, perhaps unnecessarily, that there isn't much they can do about those, and so they've stood down. But, they're very much alive to the prospect of further enlargement of NATO. And I think it's fair to say that most of them don't like it.
In London, for example, they say that the test is, "Are they ready, are we ready, is Europe ready?" And the answer throughout Whitehall is a resounding no. They wonder whether this reconfigured assemblage with five new members - that is to say Slovenia, Slovakia, and the three Baltic countries - can continue to be seen as a functioning military alliance, particularly one that operates by consensus and, of course, has the famous Article V lying within. The three Baltic countries, of course, are interested in joining principally to have the benefit of Article V as a hedge against Russia, even though anyone who takes a glance at the map knows that the notion of defending the Baltic against anyone is ludicrous.
And NATO enlargement is a poor idea from the point of view of the French. The Germans are strongly opposed to bringing in the three Baltic countries, and therefore the French are, of course, attracted to the idea of out flanking the Germans by welcoming the Balts. Otherwise, however, the French feel rightly or wrongly that Americans are pushing the idea principally to extend our influence in the region, and they don't want to let that happen without a similar effort by France. But left to themselves, the French do deplore this. The British will deplore anything that appears to loosen the cohesion of NATO. They didn't like the first round of enlargement for that reason.
It's also fair to say the British do not like the prospect of a more serious Russian role in Western security arrangements, despite the fact that Tony Blair feels very differently about it. In fact, the talk is that Blair would have Russia in NATO tomorrow if Whitehall would let him. A curious comment, since Blair seems to be the most imperial prime minister that Britain has had since Churchill during WW II, but anyway that's too complicated, at least for me, to grasp. The Germans would probably be the most acquiescent, and the French strongly opposing because they see a more serious Russian role in NATO as accelerating this movement of political center of gravity eastward that has been underway since German unification.
Another project that may or may not impact on all of this is the European security and defense program, ESDP. From the moment when this project drew the breath of life in a meeting between the French and the British in St. Malo, [NATO Secretary-General] Lord Robertson has been warning his European colleagues not to create yet another EU institution, but to create a military force that would be built on the principles of deployability, sustainability, survivability, etc. But, perhaps predictably, it's going the other way because the Europeans don't have the money to really fulfill the Robertson prescription. They seem to be in the process of creating yet another European institution with very little military base. There will be a military base, but it probably won't be a very advanced or a very deep one, but one that can probably take on modest peacekeeping operations and not much more than that. And the question now arises in this new context: Will these PKOs be carried on principally by Europeans operating within the NATO framework, or will there be something that will be distinctly ESDP? I think I'll stop there.
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