The British, says Bastian Giegerich of the influential International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), "have little motivation" to speak softly in their relations with Russia. The Labor administration of Prime Minister Gordon Brown likewise has little interest in escalating the conflict within the NATO alliance.
29 March 2008: Spiegel International
By Sebastian Borger in London
Britain has been careful recently to avoid making waves within NATO. Not only has Prime Minister Gordon Brown been mum on Georgia and Ukraine, but his tone regarding Afghanistan has softened as well.
The conflict as to whether to offer NATO membership to Georgia and Ukraine has been raging for months. But Great Britain has so far managed to stay out of it. London's relations with Moscow have long been at a low point -- ever since former KGB agent Alexander Litvenenko was poisoned to death by radioactive polonium in the British capital, Russia has refused to extradite the primary suspect.
The British, says Bastian Giegerich of the influential International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), "have little motivation" to speak softly in their relations with Russia. The Labor administration of Prime Minister Gordon Brown likewise has little interest in escalating the conflict within the NATO alliance.
Out of concern for such an escalation, the British Foreign Office has been doing what it can to keep negotiations on the conflict behind closed doors. The official position, says a spokesperson, is that Great Britain "supports a Membership Action Plan" -- the first official step toward NATO membership -- "for both Ukraine and for Georgia."
A more important issue for London, however, is the ongoing NATO engagement in Afghanistan. Britain is pleased that a number of European NATO members have expressed a willingness to increase their troop contingents in Afghanistan. As recently as the beginning of the year, Britain had expressed impatience at limitations placed on NATO's ability to go on the offensive in southern Afghanistan due to many member-states' unwillingness to fight there. London singled out Germany for particular critique. Now, however, the government has found a more balanced rhetoric, and has said that Germany, by training Afghan police units, is making "an important and welcome contribution."
Important for Brown is an improved coordination between military aid to the Afghan army and civilian aid projects. Afghanistan's President Hamid Karsai recently vetoed the British candidate for the office of UN envoy to Afghanistan, former UN High Commissioner for Bosnia Paddy Ashdown. But Brown last week announced the creation of a civilian task force -- to be made up of 1,000 civil servants, police and judiciary experts -- for Afghanistan. The move is seen as an olive branch to Germany and France, both of which have long held the position that Afghanistan cannot be pacified by military means alone. In addition, Brown agreed with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who visited London earlier in the week, to make urgently needed helicopters available to the alliance in Afghanistan.
While in London, Sarkozy also reopened an ongoing debate regarding the development of a European dimension of collective defense. Specifically at issue, says IISS expert Giegerich, is a European planning capacity. Such a capacity has long been under discussion as the European Security and Defense Policy. Although the British were involved in launching the ESDP in 1998, they have long been distrustful of formalizing the idea. Their opposition has weakened recently since the US gave up its uncompromising opposition to the ESDP.
