Redefine the alliance

OPINION:

Today marks the start of the two-day NATO Summit Meetings of Heads of State and Government in Bucharest, Romania. The main agenda items for NATO’s twenty-six members and some two dozen other participating states are alliance admission for Albania, Croatia and Macedonia; whether or not to make Ukraine and Georgia part of the Membership Action Program (and deal with Russian reactions); and drafting a comprehensive plan for Afghanistan’s future stability and reconstruction.

Missing in action from this agenda, however, are the overarching issues on which NATO’s future cohesion and solidarity rest. The most important of these issues concerns NATO’s purpose. NATO was and remains a military alliance originally designed to counter the long-ago imploded Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact partners, most of whom are now in NATO. During the Cold War, security was defined largely in terms of defense in which military force deterred and contained Soviet ambitions. Today’s security can no longer be measured in such narrow terms, if it ever could. Climate change, environment, infrastructure protection, energy, terrorism and the threat of mass destruction weapons are part and parcel of a more useful understanding of security.

Despite attempts to grapple with these realities, NATO has not completed the effort of redefining its mission. Alliance members concede that security no longer can be viewed strictly in terms of geography and protection of borders from direct military attack, the central core of the Washington Treaty that created NATO in 1949. That NATO is deployed in Afghanistan underscores the global nature of the dangers and the necessary responses. The cyber-attacks against Estonia last year that can originate from anywhere in the world with Internet access underscore the porous nature of national boundaries.

NATO is based on consensus. Unanimity is therefore required in decisionmaking. As a result, the lowest common denominator normally wins out. That is fine if the alliance’s survival is not at stake. However, make no mistake. The future of the alliance rests on responding to the broader security environment and succeeding in Afghanistan. But a profound split exists among the members over moving NATO from a military to a broader-based security alliance. That disagreement also extends to the NATO mission in Afghanistan and whether the alliance is there for security and reconstruction or only peacekeeping purposes. This debate and tension lead to a third vital issue that should be raised at Bucharest — the absence of urgency in recognizing that civil-sector reform is critical to “winning” in Afghanistan and thus relative indifference to rallying the international community to take responsibility beyond NATO’s mandate can no longer be tolerated.

The alliance has offered several rather transparent reasons why it will not or cannot address either the need for a new strategic raison d’etre at Bucharest or the lack of urgency regarding the need for civil reform in Afghanistan. NATO members worry that with U.S. elections in November, any new strategic rationale cannot be shaped before a new American president settles into office in 2009, as his or her approval will be needed.

Second, NATO members are divided over what to do in Afghanistan (and most remain opposed to the U.S. occupation of Iraq). That is no reason for the United States not to make a more forceful case that civil reform is crucial to progress in Afghanistan. In part this has not been done because the Bush administration has overly fixated on Iraq and has not seized on the need for the international community, possibly through the UN, to accept the broader responsibility for Afghanistan’s future.

If NATO members cannot develop or create political consensus to address these challenges head on, a tragedy is in the making. NATO is the centerpiece not only for Western security. In a globalized age, ironically, NATO’s importance may be greater than during the Cold War in assuring peace and stability in a dangerous world. Yet, unlike the Cold War when there was a palpable and understandable threat, today’s dangers are more difficult to define. And these dangers are even more difficult to explain to publics already made cynical and skeptical by American intervention in Iraq over weapons that did not exist and treatment of enemy combatants with detention and interrogation techniques that fly in the face of traditional Western democratic values.

Without U.S. leadership at this summit, the alliance will take the path of least resistance and paper over these potentially existential issues in order to present a united front. Given the political realities that constrain the alliance and the absence of what is an agreed upon clear and present danger, that reaction is understandable. But it is not tolerable. The nations of the West will suffer as long as NATO defers to a later, unspecified date confronting the greatest challenges and dangers to our collective futures rather than doing so now at Bucharest.