Is the Transatlantic Alliance at stake?
DURING the period of the Cold War, the US-dominated NATO alliance was the cornerstone of western military policy in world politics. Now, nearly two decades after the collapse of the former Soviet Union and under conditions of a growing financial and political crisis in the US itself, several political commentators are stressing the opening up of a series of intense differences between Europe and the US which threatens the very existence of the alliance. In an article for the British Independent titled: "Time to disband NATO now the Cold War is over?", Adrian Hamilton lists the points of arguments at the 20th NATO Summit held at Bucharest, capital of Romania: "The participants are at odds over expansion to the East, with the US, backed by the new entrants, urging Georgian and Ukrainian membership against the public doubts of Germany and the vehement opposition of Russia. The core members are at odds over their individual contributions to the war in Afghanistan. Even on what should be the relatively noncontentious issue of bringing Macedonia into the organization, the Greeks are threatening to veto the move unless the new member changes its name." Hamilton goes on: "If this were a family it would compete with the Royal Tenenbaums for disfunctionality." And he concludes: "The fearful prospect at Bucharest is that, by allowing NATO to be driven in new directions without confronting the hard questions on its future, we are in danger of breaking the whole alliance on which it is founded." The former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, addresses the future of NATO alliance as the growing conflict between Germany and America to be at the heart of the differences in Bucharest. According to Fischer writing in Die Zeit on Monday: "The future of NATO as a global alliance for intervention and security is not on the official agenda of the NATO summit from Bucharest but this is precisely the issue at stake." Listing three central issues of dispute at the summit- Afghanistan, NATO expansion, NATO-Russian relations - Fischer infers: "It is notable that on all three decisive questions in Bucharest, the German government stands in opposition to the Bush government," examining Merkel's comments more closely. Unlike her predecessor, SPD leader Gerhard Schröder, Angela Merkel declared her support for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Had she held power then, it is likely that German troops would have been involved in the Iraq quagmire. Since assuming power in 2004, she has sought to overcome the breach in relations which resulted from Schröder's refusal to openly defend the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. But now, according to Fischer, despite her best efforts, the German chancellor finds herself disagreeing with the American president on three critical areas of foreign policy. While Germany is keen to preserve good working relations with Russia, a country on which it is heavily dependent for energy supplies, the current ventures by Washington to revive the Cold War, with Russia playing the role of the former Soviet Union, are inadequate to account for the intensity of the conflicts between Germany and its closest post-war ally. Following the Second World War, western European nations and Germany in particular looked to the US as a bastion of economic and political stability. Depending on the ability of US economic support and its military power codified in the NATO alliance, Germany and other European countries were able to rebuild their devastated economies after the Second World War. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the leading political circles in both Eastern and Western Europe regarded America as a role model for economic and political development. Now at the start of the twenty-first century, this scenario looks different. The first major body blow to the NATO alliance in this century was delivered by the Bush administration with its "coalition of the willing" to help fight its war to secure oil resources in the Middle East. Assembling of a coalition of powers outside the existing international structures which the US had pioneered after the Second World War was correctly seen by European powers as a take on by Washington to compensate for its declining influence in the United Nations and NATO. The debacle of the five-year-old war in Iraq is being matched by the mounting reverses for coalition troops in Afghanistan. Bush has gone to Bucharest intent on drumming up more troops to fight in that ravaged land, but European leaders are aware that the war is fiercely unpopular with their electorates. Only French president Nicholas Sarkozy has responded to Bush's latest appeal and agreed, above the head of the French parliament, to send 700 French troops to the east of Afghanistan. To put this figure in proportion: the commanding general for Afghanistan Dan McNeill declared a week ago that to be able to effectively fight the Taliban the US-led alliance needed more than 400,000 troops in the region. After seven years of war and amid growing symptoms of increased Taliban activity, McNeill now has fewer than 60,000 soldiers at his disposal. Fischer, like Merkel, knows of the debt owed by post-war German capitalism to America, but concludes the Bush government is too "weak" and "incompetent" to complete the job in Afghanistan. Germany must overcome its scruples over sending combat troops into dangerous war zones, Fischer argues, and help pull the US chestnuts out of the fire by sending soldiers to war-torn Southern Afghanistan. During Bush's last months in office, the foreign policy of the American president is assuming an increasingly unpredictable and aggressive character. This has sounded the alarm bells in European political circles and at the same time forced European powers to take an increasingly independent stand on security and defense. Already in the run up to the Bucharest summit, the influential German political magazine IP ran a debate on the future of NATO. Speaking against the continuation of the alliance, a Dutch defense expert, Peter van Ham, argued: "It seems to be just a matter of time before the EU replaces NATO as the guarantor of security and defense in Europe." Ham accuses the US of debasing NATO: "For them NATO is nothing more than a sort of security saloon where the American sheriff rustles up his posse to go hunt down the bad guys. In drawing up its alliance the US is able to acquire the stamp of international legitimacy without having to make any major incursions on its foreign policy playing field." Arguing against this position, a more experienced security expert, Professor Karl Kaiser, recalled the original notion behind the setting up of the NATO alliance was not to combat an external threat, but in fact to prevent war amongst its constituent members. In other words, the centrifugal pressures obvious in Bucharest, which are now threatening to tear NATO apart, also create the conditions for renewed military confrontation between the major imperialist powers. The author is a Columnist & Researcher.
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