|
| | NATO-Russia interests |
| | 22 Nov 2006 |
raiting (-1/5) |
| | viewed (535) |
| |
 With less than a month to go before the upcoming NATO summit in Riga, some Russian politicians are once again talking about the "aggressive nature of the alliance" and measures that Russia should take to neutralize the "threats" posed by its enlargement.
Two weeks ago, NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer visited Moscow, where he met with President Vladimir Putin, Russian Security Council Secretary Igor Ivanov, and Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov. He discussed international terrorism and de-escalation of tensions in Russian-Georgian relations, among other things.
This is quite understandable.
The Georgian president is feverishly looking for ways to resolve his principal political problem - bringing its breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia back into the Georgian fold both de facto and de jure - and is irked to see that neither the United States nor NATO is going to use its influence or force to resolve this problem for him. Apparently this is yet another area of shared interest between Russia and the alliance.
But at the final news conference, the Russian defense minister spoke not so much about the common Russian-NATO interests as about the threats posed by the alliance's policy. Sergei Ivanov began the enumeration of Moscow's current disagreements with "NATO's military expansion toward Russia's borders."
He said accession of former Warsaw Pact countries to NATO "will require Russia to review its military policy and take the necessary precautions."
"On its Way Out"
What is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization like today and does it really pose a military threat to Russia?
NATO was originally built as a system of U.S. security, not lest nuclear guarantees for allied Europe. By a quirk, Article 5 of the Treaty, providing that an "armed attack against one or more of the parties will be considered an attack against them all," was first used when the United States itself came under attack (9/11). But what was even more unexpected and possibly even tragic for the alliance was that America effectively rejected assistance from its allies. NATO proved almost useless in the war on terror.
NATO's 2002 Prague Summit, where seven European states were invited to join the alliance, did not bring about any drastic changes in the situation. But "quality standards" for the admission of new states to NATO are substantially lower-even compared with those that were set for Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. The militaries of virtually all candidate members are insufficiently equipped, trained or prepared to ensure interoperability with the U.S. armed forces. If the talk about NATO plans to admit Croatia, Macedonia and Albania to full membership in the foreseeable future is taken at face value, military standards for alliance members and their ability for joint operations are no longer relevant. According to George Robertson, a former NATO secretary general, today the alliance gives greater priority to the candidate members' commitment to democratic values, human rights and market principles than to the quality of their armed forces.
One key element in the plan for the alliance's reorganization that was adopted at the Prague Summit is the creation of a rapid reaction corps, a 21,000-person force designed to provide support to U.S. military operations outside the alliance's traditional zone of responsibility. For a military union comprising 26 states with a total numerical strength of 3.5 million servicemen, this looks more than modest. All of these changes suggest that the United States is not planning any serious joint operations with all or the majority of NATO member countries in the foreseeable future and that the alliance's main traditional goal - collective defense of Europe with the armed forces of all of its member states - is no longer part of U.S. military planning, being as it is totally out of synch with political and military reality.
Nor was NATO given any role in the military part of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan. The United States' allies there were Pakistan, Russia and up to a certain degree Great Britain - not, however, because Britain is a member of the bloc, but due to its own colonial-era experience in Afghanistan, which proved useful for the Americans. Now it is absolutely clear that the most unpleasant thing that can happen to a military-political and collective defense alliance has happened to NATO - i.e., the loss of adversary and the loss of mission. Unless a new mission is found soon, the prospect of becoming irrelevant will be imminent. In this situation, admission of new members is unlikely to help NATO in any way.
There has been much talk about a new NATO doctrine, including such new functions as fighting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, drug trafficking, illegal migration, and so on. Clearly the alliance will need substantial resources to deal with the new threats and challenges, but in certain cases this will be simply impossible since the current situation differs too much from the organization's original tasks and objectives.
Russia, a Viable Partner
NATO's future will to a very large extent hinge not on how many new states will be invited to join the alliance as on an entirely different array of factors. The main question today is how viable the NATO-Russia partnership can be. There is good reason to say that a new mission for NATO is predicated on its close partnership with Russia.
Whatever the case, it is obvious beyond doubt that de facto NATO is no longer a collective defense alliance but rather a collective security organization. It is also obvious that such huge military-political blocs are a holdover from the Cold War era, which is history now. New threats demand a transition to more flexible structures, making it possible to respond to new challenges in a prompt and effective manner. Still, today NATO provides the only viable international military infrastructure in the Euro-Atlantic area. It could be adapted to effectively counter fundamentally new threats. But transformation of the "Cold War relic" into a modern security system in the 21st century is impossible without the collective efforts of the EU, Russia and the U.S. Now that the United States has bogged down in Iraq and coming up against some very serious problems in relations with Iran, North Korea and even Venezuela, NATO is becoming an important military asset, above all in fighting international terrorism. As for the European theater, NATO does not pose any real military threats to Russia and is unlikely to in the foreseeable future. This does not mean, however, that we cannot have a conflict of interests or elementary misunderstanding about each other's motives.
To minimize the effects of such conflicts, it is necessary to take a realistic view of one's own economic capability and real, not hypothetical threats to national security. From this perspective, the vision of NATO as a source of military threat to Russia is, rather, a method of agitating public opinion and playing on the rising anti-Western mood. Quite some time has passed since the Baltic states were admitted to NATO, but the widely predicted military threats have failed to materialize. Not even the fact that the newly admitted member states do not have their own military aviation and fighters from other NATO countries regularly come to an air base in Lithuania to patrol air space has changed anything in that respect.
Russia has been overreacting to the redeployment of U.S. bases to Bulgaria and Romania and possibly also to Poland. But then it is absurd to keep the main forces in Germany, which has now become a strategic logistics area, while new threats are concentrating mainly in the south, where the military contingent is in fact shrinking. It is equally obvious that maintenance of a military base in Poland or Bulgaria will be several times cheaper than in Germany.
It would be politically and economically ill-advised in response to NATO's eastward enlargement to review our military policy and deploy large forces in the west or generally to regard this area as a primary source of threat. We should never forget that the Cold War ended a very long time ago.
By Aleksandr Konovalov, president, the Institute of Strategic studies |
| |
|
Source:
|
|
NATO-Russia interests
|
News
