Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s
Globe and Mail is an article – the “lead” for its weekly
Focus section – about NATO at 60:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090327.wfocuscover28/BNStory/International/home
I will quibble with one point Saunders makes when he switches from
fair comment to the
institutionalized anti-Harper bias that is so deeply ingrained in most of the mainstream Canadian media that the majority of
journalists cannot bring themselves to believe that Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada actually won a free and fair election and really, really are the legitimate governing party. Saunders says:
” … the United States, backed aggressively by Stephen Harper's government, was pushing to expand NATO far eastward, by inviting the former Soviet colonies of Georgia and Ukraine to be members — a move that antagonized Russia and deeply divided Europe.” The American led
Drang nach Osten began while George HW Bush and its was supported, with about the same level of “aggression,” by Liberal and Conservative governments alike, led by Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin and Stephen Harper.
The central point, however, that NATO is a worthless hulk, is worth considering.
Caveat lector:
I opposed the expansion of NATO - beginning with the decision to admit the Baltic states and the former Warsaw Pact members. My rationale was that, with the demise of the USSR,
per se, NATO needed to be
contracted rather than expanded and the best role for the former Russian satellites was to serve as a buffer zone between Western Europe and Russia.
NATO is a tightly structured, formal alliance. It was a good, even great idea sixty years ago. Canada played useful, even important roles in its creation and implementation – until 1969 when, 20 years too early, we decided there was no Soviet threat. NATO provided the essential security umbrella beneath which Western Europe sheltered, in relative safety, able to devote its resources to reconstruction rather than defence. NATO, by its very existence, obliged the USSR (Russia in particular) to make difficult and, ultimately, wrong choices. A combination of pride and second rate strategic thinking led the USSR into an arms race a resurgent West. We (the American led West) won - decisively.
Fifteen years ago, in 1994, NATO
did find a useful role – as
Europe’s military agent in the Balkans. But NATO was ill suited for the task because it was, as it still is, an
Atlantic alliance and so Europe
failed because the Balkans was/is a European problem which Europe ought to be able to solve by itself, without American and Canadian help and because it is now perceived, by the world, including Europe, that Europe is unable to clean up messes in its own back yard. Do you think the US will welcome or even allow Spain, a NATO members, to
engage in Mexico? Not bloody likely.
The French were right – even France has to right once a century, or so, and they were desperately wrong, time after time after time, throughout the first 90 years of the 20th century – Europe need its own military alliance,
not NATO, to do Europe’s bidding in Europe and the adjacent regions.
So, in 1994 we made the wrong decision. We preserved and then expanded NATO rather than having a huge victory bash on its 45th anniversary and then folding our tents and disbanding the alliance.
Saunders is right,
I think: Afghanistan will destroy NATO. It has exposed too many deep divisions – cracks that will not be papered over. “Why the hell,” Canadians might ask, “do we need so-called ‘allies’ who are too gutless to send their well equipped soldiers to help us when our men and women are fighting and dying?” (No knock on the individual Germany or Italian soldier, I’m guessing they aren’t “gutless” but Merkel and Berlusconi are certainly not the ‘allies’ we need in a fight, are they?)
But the whole world now knows that the UN cannot run Chapter 7 peacekeeping operations on its own. No one (at least no one who matters) trusts it to do so and
the UN, itself, has admitted that it cannot manage its own operations as well as it must. This, to be the UN’s trusted “hard power” sub-contractor, is the role upon which NATO seized to perpetuate its existence. It’s a valid role – for some body.
I will not go an, yet again, about why we need a loose, informal
alliance coalition of like-minded and militarily interoperable nations that can organize and manage complex, “hard power” operations for the UN – but we do need just that. The problem with NATO is that the members are anything but “like-minded.”
HMCS Winnipeg is off to a NATO mission in the Indian Ocean. That’s commendable – for NATO and Canada, because there’s lots of good naval “work” to be done in Indian Ocean region – but
SNMG1 should have ships from e.g. Australia, China, India, Malaysia, New Zealand and Singapore, too. In other words it should be a
coalition force rather than just a North Atlantic Treaty force operating “out of area.”
It is time to rethink NATO; maybe it’s time to bury it. We would not have to wait long for a replacement to appear. Perhaps it can
morph into a European Security Alliance able to make contributions to “hard power” operations led by a coalition.
