Divided Nato must rethink its purpose

A lot of what is being said now by Moscow and Washington in the aftermath of the Georgia crisis is diplomatic posturing and militaristic bluster. As Russian columns were heading through South Ossetia to Gori, Vice-President Dick Cheney said that "the Russians will be made to pay". To which Robert Hunter, one of the most accomplished former US ambassadors to Nato, countered that there was no point in the American leadership dishing out vague threats that they had little chance of carrying out.
 
Similarly, the deliberately leaked story from Moscow over the weekend that the Russian Baltic Fleet is to be radically modernised with new nuclear weaponry - in reaction to Poland's decision to deploy key parts of the US anti-missile shield - appears a flight of military wishful thinking. The Russian navy is still a shadow of the old Soviet navy in its pomp, and the Russian defence budget is on paper smaller than Britain's. Moscow can't afford a fully nuclear Baltic Fleet, and, besides, what could it achieve – apart from starting a nuclear World War III?
 
There is something equally unrealistic about Nato's stance today. Nato was set up 60 years ago to protect and defend the security area 'from the Urals to the Atlantic'; in other words, from Turkey in the southeast to Canada in the northwest. By the time the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, the alliance had accomplished its mission of keeping its member nations safe from a nuclear-armed Soviet Union and its allies in the Warsaw Pact.
 
At the end of the Cold War, the key to the arrangement between 16 nations lay in Article 5 of the founding Atlantic Treaty, which said that an attack on any one member would be considered an attack on all, and all member nations were obliged to respond. This was only invoked once - by George Bush after 9/11 to launch his global 'War on Terror', on the grounds that the al-Qaeda suicide plane attacks were the hostile acts of a foreign power on US sovereign territory.
 
But Nato's original purpose was primarily as a defensive alliance. Did it really have a future with its old role and its old Soviet foe gone?
 
This is the question the alliance's leaders still have to answer satisfactorily, and the conduct of Nato over Georgia, and in its first big expeditionary 'out of area' mission in Afghanistan, suggest it is in urgent need of a rethink, and possible replacement.
 
Since the end of the Cold War, Nato has accrued new members in eastern Europe, including the three former Soviet Baltic states, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. In doing so it has sent two unfortunate messages - which may turn out to be disastrous.
 
In the case of the Baltics, it appeared to be offering a promissory note that Nato allies would actually fight for these states, which it had no intention of redeeming. Imagine if Georgia had been a Nato member this summer, as France and America want. Would we be diverting troops now from Basra and Helmand to defend Gori and Poti?
 
The second unfortunate message was that Nato's expansion was a bid by America and its allies to contain and confine Russia. Yet the world is no longer involved in a confrontation along the old lines, over the conquest of Europe and the free world by Soviet Communism, nor is Russia threatening to send its armoured columns across the Rhine. Georgia is a 21st century crisis of minority interests, new security spheres and access to the global economy.

Yet the barrage of rhetoric from the US and the nationalists in Nato seems to treat Putin's Russia like Stalin's or Brezhnev's Russia, which patently it is not. And this is proving to be the biggest single failure of Nato politicians and diplomats since 1989.
 
The sense of confusion and muddle at the core of Nato is compounded by the lack of direction and common purpose in its running of the International Security and Assistance Force, the 37-nation operation to destroy the Taliban in Afghanistan. This is in line with new roles adopted by Nato at its 50th anniversary Washington summit in 1999. Known as 'the new strategic concept', Nato would now wander near and far across the world in peace-keeping, stabilisation and reconstruction missions, of which Afghanistan has been the biggest so far.
 
There the Nato allies cannot often agree on common goals and policies, and fewer than one-third of the member nations' forces are prepared to do any serious fighting at all. Of the forces now fighting, the Dutch are likely to be withdrawn next year, and the Canadians halved.
 
The crisis in Georgia, and the battle of words over the missile shield, is developing into a dangerous game of chicken between Russia and the Nato countries. Russia is showing that it believes in maintaining its own 'neighbourhood security space'. Its acts and motives are questionable in many respects, but Moscow is surely right to query that the missile shield is only 'to deter rogue states, like Iran'.
 
Nato has to get real about what it is about, and what it can and cannot do. It should not engage in long-term, long-distance missions such as Afghanistan – and it must understand that Russia is not the old Soviet Union. All alliances have their day, and it is perhaps time that Nato is replaced with something more effective and attuned to the needs of the present day, and not the Cold War. ·