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Does Nato have a purpose any longer?

US defence secretary Robert Gates is right to be worried about the alliance's future
The Observer, Sunday 12 June 2011

It is an irony of history that it should be a departing US defence secretary, Robert Gates, who should break a long taboo and pronounce Nato faces a "dim, if not dismal future", as he did on Friday while delivering a valedictory address.

The US has made no secret in the last few years of its frustrations with some of its European partners in the transatlantic mutual defence pact, not least over Afghanistan. But to make this bleak assessment as the organisation is involved in two wars signals a highly significant moment for an organisation three-quarters of whose funding comes from the US. Indeed, as Gates pointed out, only five of the 28 members – the US, Britain, France, Greece and Albania –spend the 2% of GDP on defence as required by the organisation.

In venting American anger, Gates has articulated the existential questions that have been hanging over Nato since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 when its primary purpose evaporated: what is Nato for and can it actually deliver?

Founded in 1949 as a mutual defence pact, it has only once in more than 60 years of history invoked its Article 5 which deems an attack on one member an attack on all and then only largely symbolically after 9/11. Instead, one of the few things Nato has pursued aggressively is attempting to justify its own existence in ever more imaginative ways.

Lacking the clear central purpose that once united it in the aftermath of the Second World War – protecting Europe from the threat of Soviet aggression – it has struggled to find agreement among its members on the roles it has defined for itself. Indeed, what operations Nato has conducted in recent years have either been controversial, such as the bombing of Belgrade in 1999 – hardly impressive – or have provided little more than political cover for US-led military campaigns.

In Afghanistan, faced with a Taliban not yet ready to sue for peace, the performance of troop-contributing countries to the Nato mission has been marked by huge disparities in their willingness to share the burden of the fighting.

In Libya, as Gates sharply remarked on Friday with a hint of sarcasm, "the mightiest military alliance in history is only 11 weeks into an operation against a poorly armed regime… yet many allies are beginning to run short of munitions, requiring the US to make up the difference". On the same day – as if to underline Gates's point – Norway announced it was withdrawing unilaterally from Nato's Libyan operation on 1 August.

Its other front of activity – the ill thought-through policy of expanding membership east to the Russian border – has not fared much better, hitting the skids after Georgia initiated a hopeless five-day war in South Ossetia with Russian forces. The reality is that Nato feels like an anachronism, risk-averse, bloated and militarily inefficient, whose purpose increasingly has been usurped by so-called "coalitions of the willing".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...nato-usa/print