What Is NATO Good For?

It has been the most successful military alliance in the entire course of history, according to its secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Barack Obama reiterated the same sentiment at the summit held in Strasbourg on the 60th anniversary of the Alliance. It is one of the most listened-to mantras of history.

But the brilliance of past successes — as in the case of returns on investments in the financial world — does not guarantee future success. It is even possible to believe the opposite: if past successes seem so incredible, it is because of insecurity about the present and future. The difficulties seen in the snakes’ nest that is Afghanistan are there to remind us: even in the face of so many positive slogans, the depressed believe that the failure in Afghanistan —which the whole world is trying to get out of as soon as possible — will be the end of the Alliance.

We are in the middle of a massive geopolitical convulsion that is [not only] producing power displacements all over the world map, but also rearranging the furniture within countries and institutions such as the EU. Sometimes, even within one organization, such as the EU, we can see how the economic capacity of the government advances, pushed along by the demands of the financial crisis, while at the same time political action remains paralyzed. When comparing the EU and the Alliance, the latter is better situated at the moment, after a few years where the opposite was true. This is due to the fact that there has been peace and security in Western Europe since 1989, the expansion of its membership and its scope of action and the stability of the continent in the two previous decades. But the doubts about the future are shared, because at the end of the day, these doubts are European, like the 21 common members.

In Lisbon, where the NATO summit will take place on Nov. 20 and 21, we will start to find the cure to this palsy. At this summit, the secretary general will present a document entitled the new “Strategic Concept,” the third such document since the Cold War ended, that today the foreign defense ministers will start to discuss in Brussels. The most important issue is that NATO wants to keep being a defensive alliance based on the famous Article 5: An attack on one member is an attack on all. The neocon idea of an alliance incorporating allies of the West from all over the planet and that acts like a global policeman — including in preventive functions — will be excluded. But the difficulties of the moment and of the new wars present many questions. For example: at what point in time is a cyber-attack considered under Article 5? Will Afghanistan serve as a model for future interventions, or will it be the last mission of its kind?

The main course of Lisbon will be the Euro-Atlantic anti-missile shield. NATO wanted to include Russia, something that Moscow observed with suspicion, like everything that comes out of the Alliance. While Obama dropped the missile-defense system that Bush sought to deploy in Poland and the Czech Republic without consulting the allies, the current initiative is raising eyebrows in the Kremlin. It is difficult for them to forget that it was NATO who won the Cold War, who shifted its borders to the East and who until 2008 continued to pressure [Russia] — with the support of Georgia, a candidate for [NATO] membership — in [Georgia’s] war with Moscow. Tying Russia to Europe is a goal cherished by Brussels and Washington: the resetting of relations declared by Hillary Clinton has no other goal.

Moscow’s counteroffer is a mutual defense treaty that includes a common missile-defense system that will encapsulate and dilute NATO. Lisbon will also discuss the dismantling of tactical nuclear weapons deployed in Europe (about 200), which have lost their meaning so many years after the Cold War. The center-right German government will strive for this goal, which one of its peers had in his electoral program.

A good agreement with Russia will facilitate this dismantling, as well as open the way for further steps in nuclear disarmament between Moscow and Washington. According to Javier Solana, Europe’s embracing of Russia would be enough to give NATO a purpose and meaning over the next decade.

Meanwhile, Lisbon is causing the Russians to raise their own questions: “are we a partner or a threat? Why doesn’t NATO want a legally binding treaty, and why is it limited to simple cooperation between Brussels and Moscow? Why are the negotiations to develop the new Strategic Concept being held behind closed doors?”