NATO Won’t Bring Peace

Uli Cremer, Green Party Peace Activist, doubts that NATO can be reformed. On the contrary, he feels its new strategy will just make aggressive war increasingly easy. Ulrike Winkelmann interviewed him for die Tageszeitung:

Die Tageszeitung (TAZ): Herr Cremer, what changes will the NATO summit in Strasbourg and Baden-Baden bring about?

Uli Cremer (UC): There won’t be any changes for the better. First of all, France will return to NATO, thus the rivalry between the European Union and NATO will come to an end because it was mainly Paris that aimed to build the EU into NATO’s military competitor. Now the EU will become the European pillar within NATO and areas of influence will be assigned to it.

Secondly, NATO wants to intensify the war in Afghanistan. NATO is in a military mess there at present. At the same time, the U.S. president has publicly declared that the war there is not winnable. The so-called “strategy change” consists of the perennial solution of ramping up hostilities. That will mean more battles and more deaths.

By summer, more than 100,000 Western soldiers and mercenaries will be stationed in the Hindu Kush. That’s as many troops as Russia had committed in the 1980s. As everyone knows, they lost the war anyway and withdrew after ten years in the country.

Third, NATO is launching a new strategic concept. The planning papers presently available give reason to fear that George W. Bush’s “preventive war” strategy will be adopted by NATO to include the right of first use of nuclear weapons.

Besides that, they’re tinkering with a joint task force to be made up of troops from member nations in order to make NATO deployments simpler. Last but not least, NATO wants to take over more responsibility for the protection of gas and oil supplies.

TAZ: In the new strategy, however, civilian construction and disarmament are supposed to play a role. NATO is to be forced to work cooperatively with civilian organizations like the U.N. and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). Isn’t this a chance to pacify NATO?

UC: I doubt that after 60 years of military history, NATO is capable of being reformed. The major question would be whether it would be willing to actually disarm or would it retain its capacity for intervention. Naturally, the latter would be the case.

Disarmament would only occur regarding old and obsolete weapons. New weapons would mean greater combat efficiency and that wouldn’t create peace.

TAZ: You would prefer an inefficient NATO with obsolete weapons?

UC: The military alternative to the NATO we know would not have an offensive capability; it would be a purely defensive alliance. In order to convert the German army accordingly, the 105,000 offensive troops, along with their weapons, would have to be dismantled. The 145,000 remaining troops, i.e., those with no offensive mission, would be retained.

TAZ: If a less efficient NATO were the goal, then expanding it to include Croatia and Albania as members 27 and 28 would seem to be a way to accomplish that. Even NATO supporters say that with every expansion the probability of gaining a consensus for launching a given campaign is lessened.

UC: Which is why abolishing the consensus requirement will be a very important part of updating the strategy concept. Besides, that’s exactly why up to now only small eastern European countries have been integrated into NATO, nations that don’t present a serious threat of dissent. In order for any change to be taken seriously, NATO would have to offer membership to an opponent. NATO will become a collective security system only when and if it offers membership to Iran.

TAZ: Iran? Regardless of the hundreds of foreign policy reasons that militate against that, the limits of realism were already reached with the suggestion that Russia be offered membership.

UC: Just because Joschka Fischer suggests it doesn’t mean the limits have been reached, even though I’m always happy when my opinions agree with his. An invitation to Russia isn’t necessarily progress. NATO’s and Russia’s military potential would only result in a northern pact against the south because Russia isn’t a real opponent: it has actually been cooperating with NATO for some time – Russia actually supports NATO in the Afghanistan war.

TAZ: Another idea to possibly transform NATO into a peacemaker: Ralf Fücks, board member with the Heinrich-Böll Foundation, suggested bringing Israel into NATO. He feels this would assure Israel’s security, thus making the two-state solution acceptable to them. (Trans. Note: Wikipedia describes the Foundation’s purpose as follows: “The Foundation’s primary objective is to support political education both within Germany and abroad, promoting socio-political activism, democratic involvement, and cross-cultural understanding.”)

UC: If NATO takes one side in any conflict, that’s not conducive to peace. The suggestion might be really interesting if NATO also took a newly created Palestine into the alliance as well. If that would help bring about peace in the Near East, why not? But that’s a bit unrealistic because NATO requires members to contribute to exporting security, for which reads as participation in military intervention in other lands. Expansion in the Near East might obligate NATO forces there, making them unavailable for other missions.

TAZ: Many NATO critics are of the opinion that the alliance is more an obsolete bureaucratic mess than a military factor to be taken seriously. The United States itself, after the Kosovo war in 1999, went its own way rather than deal with convoluted European debates on everything. Is Europe perhaps the only power supporting U.S. interests within NATO?

UC: I don’t subscribe to the idea of NATO as a peacekeeping force, even if others involved in peace research do. The West is losing world significance in general compared to China and India, so it stands to reason that the U.S. and Europe will pull together out of fear of being marginalized rather than argue about the course of military action. The only reason the European Union has remained relatively peaceful to date is the fact that it hasn’t yet built up its own military capacity sufficiently. It especially lacks air transport capability now that the Airbus A400-M project has run into delays.

TAZ: Doesn’t Afghanistan show that European support for involvement has rapidly dried up, that the member nations are increasingly hesitant and willing to take risks?

UC: No. The Afghanistan example shows precisely that the members can carry on with war for many years without having to drum up public support for it. Even in Germany, with its parliamentary government, there are majorities in favor of involvement despite the fact that a large portion of the public opposes involvement in Afghanistan.

TAZ: But support seems to be lessening here according to the latest election results.

UC: Still, we’re a long way from the government withdrawing support for the war altogether. And a troop surge, as the United States and NATO will continue to support, will be approved in parliament by wide margins.