NATO’s priorities and Ukraine’s chances

It is becoming clear after the latest statements and proposals made during and after the Munich Conference on Security that the NATO summit in Istanbul will have every chance to be as historic as the one held in Washington in 1999. The latter was about the first wave of the North Atlantic alliance’s eastward expansion and announced for the first time that NATO’s area of responsibility, until then confined to the borders of its member states, would go beyond these limits. What is now in question is furnishing NATO with a fundamentally new role (in compliance with decisions made in Washington and Prague) and, hence, creating a fundamentally new decision-making mechanism, redistributing the functional roles between the United States and its European allies, as well as seriously reforming the alliance itself.

NATO Assistant Secretary General for Public Diplomacy Jean Fournet said there was a decision-making imbalance between Europe and the US and “something must be changed on both sides of the Atlantic,” thereby becoming the first top NATO official who confirmed what a Western expert had told The Day eighteen months ago: NATO needs structural reform, and this will be done in due course. It has not yet been revealed how exactly this will be carried out: all we know is that its bloated bureaucracy should be slimmed down, the number of committees should be reduced, and the Atlantic Council (consisting of the ambassadors of NATO member states) should transfer some of its functions to the committees. Yet, the obvious differences of views between what is called Old Europe and the United States, the alliance’s enlargement to 26 members (which is slated to be officially announced in Istanbul), and plans to admit at least three more new members (Croatia, Macedonia, and Albania) will indeed require new approaches, if not a new philosophy. Differences in the views of the leading NATO members caught the public eye for the first time during the Iraq crisis, when Germany, France, and Belgium did not agree to the decisions proposed by the USA. However, nobody called the very existence of NATO into question, nor were any of the dissident countries about to withdraw from NATO.

Differences arose again during the Munich Conference over the US call to get NATO involved in the Middle East settlement effort. As the discussion of this problem showed, disputes are also rife within Old Europe and among other allies. It is still clear that this subject will be in the spotlight of the Istanbul summit. One of the ways of solving this problem has been proposed by Italy: news agencies quoted that country’s Foreign Minister Franco Frattini as saying that on March 3 at an Atlantic Council session that Rome will advance the idea of a pact between NATO and the Mediterranean countries on combating terrorism. This would turn the current routine relations into a privileged partnership (until now only Russia and Ukraine have had a kind of special partnership with the alliance). According to Mr. Frattini, this pact could be further expanded to admit the Middle Eastern countries, including Iraq.

If successfully implemented, this idea would mean the third instance when NATO has crossed the boundaries of the organization’s own territory. It did so for the first time in 1999 by bombing Yugoslavia, a dubious act from the legal standpoint, and the second instance is still going on as the alliance spearheads operations in Afghanistan. A Mideast accent” could become NATO’s first serious bid for global status, but only on condition that the alliance reaches internal consensus, seemingly a remote prospect, and successfully accomplishes the mission itself. This bid would require that the alliance to seriously review its functions, current role in the system of international relations and, moreover, its relations with Russia, which is already demanding permission to inspect NATO bases to make sure that the admission of the Baltic states does not present any danger to it. It is easy to suppose that the problem of the alliance’s preparedness for these changes will be in the focus of not only the Istanbul summit.

The preparedness of NATO’s European member states for independent action has been a burning issue since the end of the Cold War. The much-advertised Franco-British “European defense initiative” seems to have slowed down a bit. These states have so far failed to form a European rapid deployment corps capable of engaging in action on any point of the globe in the shortest possible time. All France and Britain have really done is make a decision to establish a 1,500-strong joint force deployable anywhere within two weeks. According to The Financial Times, this force, to be formed by 2007, is not supposed to rival NATO. The “Eurocorps” of five EU member states has not yet faced its baptism of fire. However, EU countries in any case have no alternative to NATO as the existing security mechanism whose European element could well be a self-sufficient structure.

It has been repeatedly stated that the current wave of NATO enlargement is by no means the last. Next in line, after Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, is Croatia, whose substantial progress was noted by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as well as Macedonia and Albania, whose prospective membership is part of the Balkans reconstruction plan. This Balkan dimension might become a far more serious challenge than the Eastern one, but even this is not the final chord. What used to be called Atlanticism is gradually embracing the Black Sea, so Ukraine, good at playing the role of partner, stands every chance to fit in with a new security setup. Until recently this process was delayed by the problems of the development of Ukraine and NATO themselves as well as the role of Russia. Now both Ukrainian and Western experts claim that, despite having a somewhat sullied reputation on the eve of the elections, Ukraine will have ample chances to persuade the Atlantic community even before the Istanbul summit to assume a new quality of relations. This could be based not so much on the Special Partnership Charter as perhaps on an agreement that calls for joining the Membership Action Plan and conducting a more meaningful political dialog, which, incidentally, was supposed to be discussed at the Prague summit.