Renewing the Aged Alliance

Nun macht es! Deliver!

Partnerships are not conceptualized in the way some Americans were proposing as recently as a few months ago—with NATO as the controlling "hub" of global networks,  and perhaps with Australia and Japan as associates, if not full members, of the alliance. Implicitly, the report's treatment of the issue views NATO's power instead as having diminished in the past decade, putting the alliance in need of partners. "[A]s NATO moves toward 2020, it will generally not operate alone," the report declares flatly. In its "comprehensive approach"—the codeword for military-civilian cooperation in such endeavors as bringing good governance to failed and failing states—it will work together with "national governments and nongovernmental entities," as well as the United Nations, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and an array of other organizations.

Above all, in this vision Nato will work with its sister European Union. Notably, there is no whiff in the report of Washington's post-Cold-War suspicion that Europe might challenge the security primacy of NATO with independent operations and strategy that could entangle the U.S. willy-nilly. Instead, the report wholeheartedly welcomes any European defense efforts and buildup of European military forces to reinforce global stability. "The American attitude has changed. Now it's 'Nun macht es! Deliver! Become strong, capable of acting!'" points out Ambassador Hans-Friedrich von Ploetz, the German member of Albright's team.

Specifically, the team’s recommendations call for "more creative and regular use" of the U.S.-European consultations foreseen in Article 4 of the NATO treaty dealing with "the Alliance’s function as a political community," especially in managing fast-moving crises to reduce the risk of violent escalation. Institutionally, the report further "affirm[s] NATO’s desire for a truly comprehensive partnership" with the European Union as "a unique and essential partner to NATO." It would like to see "a plan for regular joint participation in meetings, fuller communications between military staffs, and more extensive coordination with respect to crisis management, threat assessments, and sharing assets."

Back in 2006, when the very new Chancellor Angela Merkel first requested a review of NATO's post-Cold War strategy, this kind of language would have been unthinkable. At mid-point in George W. Bush's second administration, mutual bitterness remained over America's “preventive” war in Iraq. For Washington, the concrete transatlantic issue entailed prodding Europeans to contribute more troops, military trainers, and money to American-commanded anti-terrorist coalitions of the willing. "Out of [NATO's European] area or out of business," was still the U.S. mantra. Conversely, for Berlin and Paris, the issue was how to avoid being sucked into American expeditionary wars of choice.

In practice, such operational transatlantic confrontation is unlikely to be repeated in the 2010s. After seven years of inconclusive war in Afghanistan and Iraq—and soaring debt—a sobered, overstretched Washington is as wary of new adventures as are the Germans and French. And by the time NATO's dozen experts finally began their rethink last fall, a new president—whose middle name, Albright likes to say, is "Partnership"—was in the White House.

In fact, the entrance of pragmatic listener Barack Obama did not resuscitate the transatlantic alliance, since it did nothing to resolve Europe's abrupt perceived global irrelevance. Obama's emergency multitasking of financial reform, Taliban resurgence, Middle East peace talks, polarized domestic politics, healthcare, global warming, and now an environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico have left the president no time for the leisurely E.U. consensus building. He ignored the Europeans and dealt with the Chinese—in what distressed Europeans regard as a "wake-up call"—at the Copenhagen environmental conference last December. He canceled altogether the regular U.S.-E.U. summit talkshop scheduled for May 2010. Transatlantic renewal was left to Madeleine Albright and her Group of Experts.

One area of partnership that may be developing between the United States and the European Union is management—with Russia—of Moscow's adjustment to its 1989-91 loss of empire. "On the list of NATO partners, Russia is in its own category," comments the report laconically in the section it devotes to this issue. It regards the NATO-Russia Council (NRC) that was set up in the 1990s as the proper forum for this partnership (rather than the new OSCE-based arrangement that Russian President Medvedev has been promoting that would presumably give Moscow a veto over NATO operations).

In one of two notices that Russia's military wresting of two provinces from Georgia in 2008 has not been forgotten, the report regrets "that the NRC was not used to prevent the 2008 crisis in Georgia." It further emphasizes that NATO's door is open to both Georgia and Ukraine if they want membership and fulfill the requirements. It assures Russia, however, that NATO does not consider Moscow an enemy. It continues, "The fact that NATO is a defensive Alliance and that Russia’s 2010 military doctrine is characterized by its authors as 'strictly defensive' in nature provides a good starting point for cooperation." And it sees "opportunities for pragmatic collaboration in pursuit of such shared interests as nuclear nonproliferation, arms control, counter-terrorism, missile defense, effective crisis management, peace operations, maritime security, and the fight against trafficking in illegal drugs." This is certainly an agenda that Obama could endorse and is already working on in his own "reset" of bilateral relations through the U.S.-Russian New Start Treaty and the follow-up series of multilateral arms-control conferences this year.

The new strategic concept due to be adopted at the next NATO summit in November will not alone suffice to make Europe once again the indispensable partner to the indispensable America that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright proclaimed in the late 1990s. But, as she puts it today, it might at least begin a transatlantic "renewal of vows."