Nineteen flags flutter over the concrete blast barriers and razor wire surrounding the entrance to Nato’s Brussels headquarters, where armed guards with sniffer dogs screen cars and visitors with extra care these days.
Heightened security has become routine at the sprawling compound since the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States — the moment that forced the Atlantic alliance to prove that it has a role to play in a changed world.
At the alliance’s summit in Prague on Thursday, President George W Bush and his European allies sought to demonstrate that they have reinvented Nato — no longer required to fight Soviet tank divisions on the East German plain, but ready and willing to tackle new threats across the globe.
”It is not enough for Nato simply to carry on doing what it has always done, no matter how successful it might have been,” George Robertson, its Secretary General, admitted recently. ”No organisation can take itself for granted, especially in the post-September 11 world.”
Robertson has spent the past year arguing himself hoarse that Nato does not live up to its jokey old post-Cold War acronym: ”Now Almost Totally Obsolete”.
It certainly looked that way when the US, deep in shock, coolly said ”thanks, but no thanks” to the unprecedented invocation of the alliance’s mutual defence clause on September 12 last year.
But now, says the pugnacious former British minister, the watchword is ”relevance”, a point that will be underlined when the summiteers mandate Nato to support the international security force in Kabul, the alliance’s first formal job inside Afghanistan, though, crucially, still not a front line one.
Whether it will end up contributing more to the looming US-led war against Iraq is the crucial question for the coming months and years. The Prague summit’s main business is to pledge radical new missions and fighting capabilities. Signing up new members, originally the centrepiece of the two-day event, has become the easy bit.
Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania will be invited to follow in the footsteps of former Warsaw Pact stalwarts Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, which joined in 1999.
Russia, which objected to the inclusion of the Baltic states, has been bought off with a flattering new strategic partnership, helping President Vladimir Putin to argue that his fight against Chechen rebels fits into the overarching ”global war on terrorism”.
Extending Nato’s reach far out of its traditional European area of operations will also extend opportunities for the summit’s most controversial novelty — the multinational Nato Response Force (NRF), which is being pushed hard by the US.
Planners say the 20 000-strong NRF will be sent anywhere at short notice to fight terrorists, or operate in failed states that are seeking weapons of mass destruction, another post-September 11 buzz word.
Shifting from collective defence to possible pre-emptive action against al-Qaeda cells in the Middle East or Asia is a giant leap. With European concern about US unilateralism never far below the surface, it is intriguing to speculate how rapidly a consensus-based alliance of 26 members will bow to inevitable US pressure to deploy such a force.
Yet without new capabilities, none of the above really matters.
Fielding troops and high-tech equipment has been the toughest issue since Kosovo showed US effectiveness while Europeans basked under the American security umbrella. ”Kosovo will prove to be Nato’s first and last war unless the Europeans provide some useful military capabilities,” said a British defence analyst, Tim Garden.
Nato has to slim down and toughen up: it needs fewer tanks and more big transport planes, precision-guided weapons, ground-surveillance systems and protection against chemical and biological arms. But apart from those in Britain and France, European Union defence budgets are declining as governments are constrained by eurozone spending limits and by force of habit. Europeans shell out $150-billion a year, less than 2% of their gross domestic product, compared with the US’s 3,5% — $360-billion.
Peer pressure and bullying means that Prague will register improvements, but the gap between Europe and the US will remain. ”It’s like the poor,” one policymaker quipped. ”It will always be there.”
But Pentagon hawks are still deeply suspicious of Nato, arguing that the mission should determine the coalition, not the other way round. Yet optimists believe the alliance’s unique ability to serve as a multi-purpose ”toolkit” for global military intervention will outlast the hostility of parts of the Bush administration. And it has no European rival.
On both sides of the Atlantic there is a recognition that Nato has to be saved from the twin pressures of American unilateralism and Europeans such as the German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, who so infuriated Bush by opposing a war against Iraq.
Nato ”will continue to be the military organisation of choice for the majority of Europeans”, US foreign policy analyst Robert Kagan predicted. ”It does still chug along and the answer will be not to ask it to do more than it can.”
September 11 accelerated the crisis that Nato has faced since the collapse of communism, masked briefly by the Kosovo War. Now, with the world changing faster than institutions, the alliance has to become something different, or disappear.
”We’ve had a whole year debating whether Nato is dead or irrelevant,” a top alliance official said. ”But the fact is that we need this institution and it needs to transform itself so that it can be on the front lines.” — (c) Guardian Newspapers 2002