11 February 2009: Security Times - Supplement of the German times for the 45th Munich Security Conference
As the Munich Security Conference convenes, global security problems are more diverse than at any time in the conference’s history while the traditional instruments for dealing with them are in special need of rejuvenation. To meet these multiple challenges, North America and Europe must both cooperate more effectively and think more strategically.
The recent threats from international terrorism networks and nuclear proliferation risks persist, but they do so in an environment plagued by poor relations between the Western powers and Russia, diminishing willpower and capacity among European states for sustained projection of combat military power, and growing instability in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. The global economic crisis means additionally that financial resources for conflict prevention and reconstruction will not be abundant. This means that creative diplomacy must be an ever-greater component of good strategy.
In the wake of President Obama’s inauguration, the NATO powers must find a way to develop a relationship with Russia informed by true strategic interests and a relationship that permits cooperation on wider security issues that affect the stability of the Eurasian geopolitical theater. In the last few years, the West has approached Russia with perhaps careless indifference to the impact of its policies on Russian perceived interests. Asking Russia sequentially to accept Western policies on NATO enlargement, Kosovo recognition, prospective ballistic missile deployment, Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty interpretations and on numerous other subjects, while perhaps individually justifiable in their own right, has cumulatively amounted to a process that encouraged resentment in Russia. As a result, while certain Western policies were advanced, some larger strategic interests were sometimes sacrificed.
It is true that dealing with Russia in current circumstances is extremely difficult. Recently Moscow has sought to assert its interests widely and with greater force. It appears sometimes to take decisions based more on pique and anger than on strategic calculus and self-interest. The Kremlin has made bad temper almost an instrument of foreign policy. It often opposes Western initiatives beyond Europe more to prove its independence than to advance its genuine strategic interests. Yet it remains important for Western powers to define a specific Russia policy ensuring that important strategic interests are met, and that distinguishes between desirable and necessary outcomes.
For a brief period following the Georgia-Russia war the worst instincts of the West and Russia were accentuated, with some Western policy makers urging the need for a more robust and determined attitude to NATO enlargement, and certain Russian personalities advocating the militarization of Moscow’s foreign policy towards its European neighbors. That moment of tension reminded cooler heads that the rhetoric of a new Cold War was misplaced, not least because neither side wants one and the stakes are too low to warrant one.
But to reduce tensions and invite more structured cooperation with Russia on important strategic issues, especially in the Middle East, it will be important to diminish the importance of enlargement policy in NATO’s political stance. NATO has no intrinsic need to expand in order to improve its capacities to organize military power in the service of self-defense and stabilization missions. Good regional diplomacy, not just adhesion to an alliance, is the key to security for most countries. Strategic good governance is as important as economic good governance, and NATO should encourage aspirant countries to develop effective regional diplomacy to protect their interests, without suggesting that the only path to true security lies in NATO membership. In sum, NATO enlargement policy must be a means to an end, not an institutional goal in itself, and certainly not a game of Russian roulette.
While Russia has no veto on NATO membership, mere perception of a threat should not be considered an automatic ticket to entry. In Munich, European leaders may want to invite the U.S. to think strategically, not nostalgically, about the weight it wishes to attach to NATO enlargement in its regional policy so that member states can concentrate more on developing common interests with Russia and addressing the widening threats to security. This means finding ways to resurrect NATO-Russia cooperation and being open to at least discussing President Medvedev’s ideas, vague as they are, for new European security arrangements.
NATO challenges in the European near abroad remain substantial, and Munich participants should find inventive ways to establish more effective NATO-EU partnerships in conflict resolution. The EU would do well to develop a more robust strategic outlook, drawing inspiration, as the French government has sometimes suggested, from the impressive intellectual sweep of the 2008 French defense White Paper, which admirably and pragmatically set out the threats to European security in both their thematic and geographic contexts. But the EU will need to more obviously set out its priorities for action, rather than simply advertise its availability to conduct ad-hoc missions.
More important than enlargement politics for NATO is the consolidation of its capacities and a sense of current purpose in stabilization missions. That is why a review of NATO’s strategic concept remains necessary, to align NATO strategies more obviously to the stabilization missions that are at the core of its current and likely future missions and pave the way for reforming the command structure to support this kind of activity. NATO leaders must accept that they cannot do everything and therefore limit talk of “global partnerships” that only expose the alliance’s limitations. NATO is an enabler of military power; its communiqués and summits should emphasize that – rather than wider ambitions to play a global role.
Indeed, President Obama will want NATO to work not just in poetry but in prose.
Recently, the alliance has been stung by the serial exceptionalism demanded of so many coalition partners in the Afghanistan mission. An alliance that has caveats and special rules of engagement for every individual member involved in a mission as dangerous and complex as Afghanistan risks diluting the alliance concept beyond repair.
European politicians must be honest about the true capabilities of their armed forces. A recent essay published by The International Institute for Strategic Studies revealed that European nations possess 1,437 helicopters, of which 551 are “NATO deployable,” yet only 44 of which could be identified by the 2006 NATO Defense Planning Questionnaire (DPQ) as potentially meeting the operational requirements of Afghanistan. European defense ministries need to look at the true effectiveness of their military power and prepare that power to meet likely future contingencies.
Threats today come largely from non-state actors, or indeed from states using non-state actors and their asymmetric techniques, to confront Western interests. Many of these threats are inspired and marinated in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. Combining effective diplomatic approaches to Afghanistan, Iran, and the Middle East peace process needs to be a core element of a strategic approach to defending Western interests. Munich participants need to suggest ways in which a more assertive joint diplomacy to these two areas can be developed. Statements of policy cannot be substitutes for strategy.
In the new partnership between Europe and America that the Obama administration invites, Europeans must play their role in shaping the strategic environment confronting the West, rather than find themselves, as they have in the past, sniping at the sidelines about a U.S. policy they disagree with. That extrovert attitude will be the recipe to more effective transatlantic co-operation. Strategie oblige.
