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http://www.janes.com/security/international_security/news/fr/fr020425_1_n.shtml Jane's Defence Weekly Britain rethinks NATO's role: do the Americans need it? As far as media attention is concerned, the only question facing the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation this year is how many new members, drawn from the ranks of the former Warsaw Pact, are going to be invited to join the Alliance. Scenarios range from one invited country (Slovenia) to five (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia and Slovenia) and even seven (all the above, plus Romania and Bulgaria). Most Western governments are engaged in either dismissing or encouraging one of these scenarios. The received wisdom from Washington, the capital which, as always, will have the final say over such matters, is that at the NATO summit, which is scheduled to take place in Prague this November, all seven candidates will be admitted together. For the Alliance, this seems like a good compromise: unlike previous enlargements, there will be no disappointed candidates this time. However, there is one NATO member state that is unhappy about the entire debate: the UK. The British are not against enlargement itself, yet they are irritated that an Alliance which is facing a critical test for its very survival seems more preoccupied with counting its new members than putting its own house in order. The British government has thus put together an elaborate and ambitious plan for the rejuvenation of the Alliance. Like many European countries, the British are alarmed by the fact that the Americans do not trust the Alliance's decision-making capacity. The reason for this mistrust is Washington's experience during the Kosovo war in 1999. The overwhelming majority of the military assets deployed against Yugoslavia at that time were American, as were the satellites that identified targets for air strikes. However, the USA had to get the agreement of all other 18 member states before any operation, and often this involved heated debates and compromises, sometimes over single targets. The Europeans may be right to claim that this debate was a necessary price to pay in order to maintain Alliance solidarity; the Pentagon in Washington, however, saw it as an unnecessary encumbrance which should not be repeated. So, when NATO responded to the terrorist atrocities in the USA last September by invoking the famed Article 5 in its founding treaty (which deems an attack against one member state as an attack against them all), the USA thanked the Alliance for its concern, but proceeded to mount its own independent operation in Afghanistan. The Europeans were duly involved in this operation but as individual allies of the USA rather than as part of the Alliance. In most European capitals this was seen as nothing but another indication of the Bush administration's alleged unilateralist sentiments, an inevitable trend which has no immediate cure. Not so in London: the British government is determined to rectify the situation in order to make clear that NATO will again become the centrepiece of American security arrangements. The British are aware that the institutional changes which they propose cannot be made legally binding: the Treaty of Washington which founded the Alliance more than half a century ago is a document that cannot be easily amended. The British strategy, therefore, is to introduce informal changes designed to address American concerns at least in practice if not in a formal legal sense. NATO operates on the principle of equality: theoretically, Luxembourg can veto any Alliance action. But the British point out that times have changed. During the Cold War, NATO fully expected to go into battle with all its members at the same time. Today, the Alliance may mount various operations - such as those in the Balkans - but none of them critically affects the security of the entire continent and few of them require the contribution of all member states. The result is what NATO military planners call 'Coalitions of the Willing' - ad hoc arrangements in which a number of countries are involved. The British proposal is that every member state should have the freedom to decide whether or not to contribute to individual operations - in return, if a country does not contribute to the operation, it cannot expect to have the same say over its conduct. The result of the proposal would be that if the USA provides a majority of troops to an operation it would also call all the political shots - precisely what the Americans have always demanded. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! 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