Al-Sijill
2009-04-09 19:27:19In spring 1999, during the war in Kosovo, I was dispatched to Brussels to cover the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's bombing of Serbian targets. For several weeks, I button-holed diplomats and military attaches in the corridors of NATO headquarters to learn about the latest twists and turns in the campaign. Would the sustained offensive force Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic to end his attacks on Albanian separatists? If not, would NATO intervene with ground forces?
I attended the daily briefings by then-NATO spokesman Jamie Shea and spent a day interviewing military officials at Mons, the Allied operations command center. It was a glamorous assignment. How often does one mix with charming internationalists in the heart of Europe? But looking back, what I remember most clearly was the sense of urgency about the place. Yes, there was the crisis in the Balkans to reckon with. But there was also the clear need among NATO officials to show they were somehow necessary eight years after the Cold War ended.
Not only had NATO preserved itself intact following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it actually expanded. By combining alarmist cant - a unified Germany, we were told, might emerge as a "Fourth Reich" if not for a robust coalition to manage it - with the political muscle of US defense contractors, NATO fast-tracked the inclusion of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary into its fold. American hegemony was extended to a then-prostrate Russia's very front door. Opposition to such an advance - a few Sovietologists and foreign policy "realists" warned it might one day needlessly provoke Moscow - was ignored.
Still, the Kosovo War had revealed fault lines in NATO's ranks. The Americans were complaining that the Europeans had failed to invest adequately in their military capability, leaving it to the US to bear the brunt of the bombing. Diplomats told me, sotto voce, that the Kosovo campaign would be a wake-up call for the alliance. NATO, they told me, was on the brink of failing its first real test since the collapse of the Soviet Union. If this did not concentrate minds in the capitals of Europe, surely NATO would not survive.
I dutifully took notes. It all sounded so dire.
That was a decade ago. Last week, on the occasion of NATO's sixtieth anniversary, US president Barack Obama visited Strasbourg, France, to celebrate the staying power of a Cold War anachronism. A defense treaty ordained as a counterweight against a long-dead adversary has, thanks to the September 11 terrorist attacks and the war in Afghanistan, found new life. Empires rise and fall. Entire species come and go. Intrepid political-military types, it seems, are forever.
NATO is now consumed by a different war, but the intramural tensions remain. In 1999, US officials were griping that the Europeans were backsliding under Washington's security umbrella to back-slide. They wanted the allies to invest in next-generation technology, including surveillance and cargo aircraft and command and control systems, which they wanted them to buy from US arms manufactures rather than develop them domestically. This was important, said the Americans, to ensure alliance "inter-operability." Needless to say, American defense contractors emphatically concurred.
Nothing has changed. The new entrants into the alliance defied Washington by purchasing billions of dollars worth of non-US fighter jets. ("We're not just a market for US defense firms," the ambassador to Hungary's liaison office to NATO told me during the Kosovo campaign. "When NATO is disappointed, I care. I don't care if Lockheed Martin is disappointed.") In Afghanistan, units that make up the coalition's expeditionary force are effectively segregated from each other because their weaponry, from communications equipment to ordnance, operates on different standards and frequencies.
President Obama's eloquent appeals notwithstanding, many European NATO members are losing interest in the Afghan war. The Strasbourg summit yielded little in the way of new transatlantic commitments to the eight-year-old conflict, to which Mr. Obama has pledged 21,000 US troops this year. The war in Afghanistan is becoming as Americanized as many experts say it is unwinnable. Afghanistan may not necessarily be the place empires go to die (the Mongols had a pretty good run there, from the 13th to the 15th centuries), but it may be enough to bury the Obama presidency.
In retrospect, it is clear that the war on Milosevic was more about protecting NATO's rice bowl than it was about the strategic interests of its members. Perversely identifying the use of armed might as an end in itself, US Senator John McCain said at the time that any vital stake the US may have had in the Balkans was less important than a show of raw American might the moment Washington threatened to unleash it. "Credibility is a strategic asset of the highest order," said Mr. McCain, "and well worth fighting to maintain."
Incredibly, despite the looming quagmire in Afghanistan, the disaster of Iraq, and Russia's short but brutish war with Georgia last year, Cold War fetishizers like Mr. McCain are still aching to pick a fight with Moscow by extending NATO membership to both Georgia and Ukraine. One hopes Mr. Obama's fulsome rhetoric about NATO's precious credibility belies a realist's cold, clear instincts. Rather than expand NATO, the US should slowly disengage from it. Washington should end plans to build its missile-defense system, which is hideously expensive, unproven, and needlessly provocative of Russia. Despite the likelihood of minor cuts in the Pentagon budget, the US still accounts for half the world's defense outlays. That fact, together with America's bankrupt economy, should compel the White House to redefine as a rational foreign policy one that balances commitments with resources.