The End of NATO
Opinion Journal ^ | 02/10/03 | editorial board
Posted on 02/09/2003 9:11 PM PST by Pokey78
An alliance that defend a member nation is useless.
France and Germany continued this weekend to gamble with the institutions that have kept something called the Western alliance united for half a century. The question to contemplate now is whether that alliance, formally known as NATO, continues to serve the interests of the United States.
This may seem a radical thought, but it is certainly warranted by the astonishing recent behavior of nations thought to be U.S. allies. Three countries--France, Germany and their mini-me minion, Belgium--have moved from opposition to U.S. policy toward Iraq into formal, and consequential, obstructionism. If this is what the U.S. gets from NATO, maybe it's time America considered leaving this Cold War institution and re-forming an alliance of nations that understand the new threats to world order.
This weekend the Germans surprised everyone by floating a trial balloon suggesting that Iraq, like Bosnia in 1995, could be turned over to U.N. "peacekeepers." The little problem of persuading Saddam Hussein to turn his country over to U.N. receivership seems to be saved for later discussion. The real point of this exercise is to prevent the U.S. from enforcing the U.N.'s own resolutions.
Meanwhile, Belgium announced yesterday that it would do Paris's bidding and veto Turkey's request for NATO resources to defend itself against Iraq. The Turks are of course a frontline state with Iraq, and if there is a war will face the danger of direct attack that is not feared in the chocolate shops of Brussels. The Turks have reason to worry about Scud missiles, and so want AWAC reconnaissance planes and Patriot anti-missile batteries now based in Europe to be deployed to Turkey. For Belgium to block such a request for self-defense from another NATO ally is to drive a stake into the heart of the alliance.
"Shameful, for me it's truly shameful" is how Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld described to La Repubblica this Belgian behavior at the hands of its Franco-German masters. He also told journalists at a defense conference in Munich that, "Turkey will not be hurt. The United States and the countries in NATO will go right ahead and do it. What will be hurt will be NATO, not Turkey." Clinton-era defense officials on hand for the Munich event were just as appalled.
Mr. Rumsfeld also confronted his German counterpart Peter Struck about the Iraq "peacekeepers" idea. Mr. Struck replied, "we're not ready to talk yet." However, someone in the German government was apparently willing to talk to the German magazine Der Spiegel, which publishes details of the plan today.
The magazine quotes an adviser to Chancellor Gerhard Schr�der saying that the U.N. would flood Iraq with blue-helmeted "peacekeepers," turning it into a "virtual protectorate of the U.N." for years. And why would Saddam agree peacefully to give up power? Because he wouldn't have to. Der Spiegel reports that Saddam would remain "formally, the commander of the country."
The plan is reminiscent of the fiasco of "peacekeeping" the U.N. tried to enforce in Bosnia in 1995. Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic "literally chained the blue helmets to targets. Saddam would do the same thing to prevent the U.S. from launching an attack," says David Phillips, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who advised the Bosnian presidency at the time. The U.S. will surely kill any formal such proposal, but the fact that Germany would even consider offering it suggests an agenda aimed less at defusing war than at actively promoting American defeat.
We realize the end of NATO has been trumpeted prematurely before. It's also true that the three obstructionist countries hardly speak for all of NATO, which did vote 16-3 in favor of the Turkish request. NATO has also expanded in recent years to include nations to the east, most of which understand better than the French do that the U.S. is the ultimate guarantor of their own security.
But the Cold War is over, and the main threat to the West now is global
terrorism employing nuclear and bioweapons. If NATO cannot adapt to this reality
by moving its resources to meet that threat, then as currently constructed it
has outlived its usefulness. What President Bush calls a "coalition of the
willing" will become America's new security alliance.
