NATO 2006 – The year of global dilution and of EU/US decoupling

Riga, November 28-29, 2006 – The upcoming NATO summit , which chose to take place on former soviet soil in order to symbolize the success of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, is likely to be remembered as the Summit where two opposite trends thrust the Alliance into the ongoing global systemic crisis, and as the symbol of « the end of the western world we have known since 1945 ».

The economic, financial or monetary aspects were only three of the seven facets of the crisis described by the LEAP/E2020 research team, and announced in the February 2006 “GlobalEurope Anticipation Bulletin”. A first class strategic and military crisis is also triggered this year, via the Iran nuclear problem plus three other key-factors: the financing and development of the “21st-century air-fighter”, the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF); the divergence between Europeans and Americans in terms of threat perception; the confidence crisis among European public opinion and decision makers as regards US capacity and skill in handling an efficient and responsible leadership of the Alliance.

The Alliance is ill. This is a commonplace, hardly concealed by official statements knowing that the re-launch of NATO and the redefinition of its missions have become recurrent topics of all transatlantic meetings. The illness results from the disappearing of the Alliance’s main reason-to-be: the fight against a lethal enemy, common to Americans and Western Europeans: USSR. Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, NATO no longer knows what it stands for. It is called upon to protect the Olympic Games of Athens or Turin, to transport third world aid and to intervene on limited crises (Kosovo, Afghanistan security enforcement…); but on the two major military operations of the past decade, it was dismissed. The United-States rejected it to attack Afghanistan after 9/11 (despite European offers). The Europeans refused to activate it when Iraq was invaded in 2003 (despite US demands). A strategic alliance which is inoperative in case of major military events, because either one or the other partner refuses it to be activated, is an alliance with nothing left of strategic. The question now is whether it has anything left of an alliance, or if little by little NATO is turning into something else.

According to LEAP/E2020, the transformation « into something else » is already on the go. In 2006, because of the Iran crisis - but also due to a whole range of factors out of which three in particular (JSF, threat perception, global distrust) are described in this “GlobalEurope Anticipation Bulletin” -, the Alliance will experience a political expansion of its geographic territory and turn into a “global alliance of democracies”; while the military organisation will have to leave the Europeans accelerate the creation of a common defence independent from the Alliance.

These trends will be seen as positive ones by a large number of players within NATO itself and in the rest of the world. The geographic enlargement results from Washington’s assertive will (1); meanwhile the acceleration of an independent common European defence has been expected by a large majority of Europeans for many years already (2).

This is an example of the fact that the ongoing global systemic crisis does not convey catastrophes and problems only; it is a historic “passage” between two more stable eras. But the process will often affect the players themselves in an unpredicted (though not unpredictable) manner; indeed a dominant player can manage to have a decision of his own adopted, and end up unpleasantly surprised by the real consequences of this decision. The invasion of Iraq is there to illustrate this feature. As regards NATO, part of the trends described by LEAP/E2020 belongs to the same logics, with reforms initiated by Washington likely to result in a major weakening of the Alliance and of Washington’s strategic weight in Europe and worldwide, and, in the end, in the tearing apart of this “transatlantic pact” that guaranteed US global pre-eminence since 1945.

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Notes :
(1) As reminded last March 28 by Kurt Volker, Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs of the US State Department, in an address to the Naval Postgraduate School of Monterey (California)
(2) The April 2006 GlobalEurometre confirms this heavy trend and shows that 83% of the people surveyed are in favour of a common European defence, while 88% consider that NATO’s geographic expansion strengthens the necessity of such common defence.