The Greater the Danger, the Happier We Are: NATO Discovers Mission Creep

NATO will announce its new strategic concept at the November summit meeting in Lisbon. By then, all differences of opinion between member states will have to be bridged. That will also be the task of the foreign and defense minister’s meeting this Thursday in Brussels.

Two opposing concepts will compete for the future direction the alliance will take. One faction wants NATO to go back to its roots as a regional alliance with the mission of protecting member states from external threat. The other wants NATO to be forward-looking as a global policeman. Neither concept is very convincing.

European Revisionists

The previous concept of April 1999 was approved in the midst of the war in Kosovo and created the unwieldy concept of “responses to crises not covered by Article 5.” What was meant were military operations outside the classic defense agreements and those beyond the borders of member states. Therein lay NATO’s future direction. Measures to be undertaken against the invasion of member states were put on the back burner because the danger of that had all but disappeared.

Middle Eastern and South European regions want to reverse this ranking again. They demand visible preparations for armed conflict to include demonstrative crisis planning, i.e., the pre-stationing of alliance forces, plus joint maneuvers.

If this demand were met, the West would probably have to abandon its intention to normalize relations with Russia. The revisionist motive dominates here all too clearly. Eastern borders that exist now only as legally and politically drawn would again become militarily fortified front lines. Western and Russian troops would again be facing one another across those borders.

The war in the Caucasus two years ago can serve as a warning. A local secessionist conflict instantly became a major international crisis. NATO delegates in Brussels discussed the possibility of sending in NATO response forces at the time. How close the West came to a military conflict with Russia back then can only be guessed at today.

Are crisis reaction deployments, which should more properly be called armed interventions, preferable? We’ve had a few experiences with them recently and they were mainly bad. The length of involvement in the targeted countries speaks for itself. Allied forces have been in Afghanistan for nine years now. In Kosovo, it has been twelve years and in Bosnia fifteen.

All hope of a military victory in the Hindu Kush has been abandoned. In the Balkans, little more than violence prevention has been achieved. Bosnia and Kosovo may be sovereign nations on paper, but in reality they’re little more than quasi-protectorates. If crisis management as a long-term goal is measured by self-sustaining peace, the military weapon has proven to be a dull sword.

860 American Military Installations around the Globe

If one wants to know in which direction NATO will move, one needs to first note which direction the leadership is taking. The hallmark of U.S. involvement is increasingly becoming the covert operation, where it has access to a worldwide network of military bases.

Remarkably, the United States maintains 860 bases in more than 90 different countries; half of them came into existence during the George W. Bush administration. Special Forces operate from them in 75 different countries, generally without the knowledge of the affected governments. Besides Iraq and Afghanistan, these include countries like Somalia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The New York Times reports the responsible headquarters based in Florida says the mission is “to undermine, disrupt, oppose or destroy militant organizations.” Arming and supporting an infrastructure for these unconventional counter-terrorist warriors has meanwhile become the main factor in the growth of the U.S. defense budget.

NATO Attacks a Nuclear Power

This paradigm shift has led to a growing risk of losing sight of the risks involved. There is a decreasing ability to differentiate between which situations need military response and which do not. CIA unmanned drone attacks close to the Pakistani border have become routine exactly as if there had been no leadership change in the White House. It is also becoming increasingly evident that other member nations are involved in them as well. In plain English, NATO is currently attacking a nuclear power.

With a similar bent, NATO now constantly seeks to usurp new areas of responsibility — first energy security, now cyber security. Will someone please tell us what that’s supposed to mean? Is NATO supposed to scramble the fighters if oil flow through the pipelines is once again reduced? Launch unmanned drones if a pesky hacker needs to be neutralized? And what will be first — maybe someone will decide their currency needs to be “defended” in case commercial competitors subsidize their exports by lowering exchange rates?

Meanwhile, NATO has turned 61 years of age. Those responsible need to compare the North Atlantic Treaty with both the United Nations Charter and their own charter of common values. They would certainly notice something surprising about the latter two: Both are cut from the same cloth and speak the same language. Both put priority on the civil resolution of conflicts rather than military solutions and violence that crosses the threshold of strict limits.

In times of global terror threat — whether from suicide bombers or “rogue states,” an obsolete notion — critics take the stage. They need to take a look at the conflicts in today’s real world and ask themselves whether or not the policy of shoot first and ask questions later actually defeats malicious new forms of violence. Or is it perhaps more likely to stir them up?