Volume 10 - Issue 5 - June 2004

By NATO’s own modest goals, its 28–29 June summit was not a failure. But nor did it surge with institutional confidence. NATO leaders may have given up arguing publicly over Iraq, but they hardly furnished the US with the kind of support it once hoped for. Meanwhile, although members reaffirmed their commitment to Afghanistan, pessimism abounds about saving that country from another descent into state failure. It is notable, to be sure, that the whole ‘out of area’ debate of the l990s – that is, whether NATO had a role beyond the physical territory of its member states – has been relegated to historical theology. Still, the abiding question is whether NATO as an institution will be important and effective in the critical strategic theatres of the 21st century.

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Iran would have an intramural interest in influencing Iraqi Shiite politics, even if the US military presence on Iran’s border were not a factor. The clerical regime in Tehran promotes an idiosyncratic religio-political doctrine under which clerics are obligated to rule Muslim society directly, rather than through the intermediary of secular authority. None of the leading Shiite clerics in Iraq accepts the validity of this doctrine. For an increasingly beleaguered Iranian religious leadership, the re-emergence of a hugely prestigious Shiite clerical establishment in Najaf is probably seen as a threatening development, insofar as it is likely to undermine the legitimacy of the Iranian clerics’ claim to power. Another unappealing feature of the new dispensation is the primacy of nationalism in Iraqi Shiism.

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During a visit to Seoul in the first week of June 2004, senior US defence officials notified their South Korean counterparts that the United States had decided to withdraw approximately 12,500 troops from units long stationed on the Korean peninsula by the end of 2005. Though hardly unanticipated, the decision has nevertheless triggered widespread anxiety in South Korea about future US security strategy toward the peninsula. Even assuming that various contentious issues can be resolved, defining a credible basis for alliance planning looms as an unmet challenge.

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Almost as if in defiance of the charges of irrelevance, the UN Security Council has authorised a spate of new peacekeeping operations in Africa.  None of these new missions can be described as ‘traditional‘ peacekeeping operations of the kind deployed in September 2000 to monitor the cessation of hostilities between Eritrea and Ethiopia: they are all ‘complex peacekeeping missions‘, featuring a special emphasis on the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of ex-combatants. But several of the mission are now precariously poised and the recent flare-up of violence in Côte d’Ivoire and the Democratic Republic of Congo is deeply worrying. It is against this backdrop that the need to strengthen the capacity, especially of African nations themselves, to undertake peacekeeping operations is being asserted as an urgent priority, most recently by the G8.

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By creating a new agency to focus on member states’ military capabilities, the European Union has taken a hand in what, for the US, is a most pressing issue: senior American officers and politicians have little confidence in Europe’s will to transform its armed forces and confront the global security threats as perceived by Washington. However, they will inevitably ask whether the new European Defence Agency (EDA), to be formally established in July 2004, will be a genuine instrument for fostering effective capabilities, or just another tentacle of the Brussels bureaucracy. The early signs are that the agency will be able to make a significant difference, albeit from modest beginnings.

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