No more disruption, NATO must evolve the alliance with dignity

 In this space last week I recounted with a mixture of sadness and amusement the farce of Greenland that had already almost reached Monty Python proportions. We now see that the only issue was whether the bases granted to the United States in Greenland to anchor its Golden Dome air defence system would be permanent as Trump demanded, like Britain’s in Cyprus, or temporary and subject to expulsion as the United States was in France and briefly in the Philippines. That the American president would insist upon an unconditional ability to maintain part of the ultimate air defence system of the West in Greenland was perfectly reasonable, but it was needlessly disruptive and belligerent of him to pound the table and empurple the air with such vigour that numerous NATO heads of government felt the need to rival each other in emitting unctuous and vapid pronunciamentos of defiance.

The capable Secretary-General of NATO, Mark Rutte, negotiated the obvious compromise that accommodated the Americans with no apparent difficulty. And the most ludicrous international crisis since Portugal demanded that Britain go to war with India to defend the Portuguese enclave of Goa in 1961 abruptly ended. The European NATO leaders have been meeting this week in an atmosphere of distinct hurt feelings, not only over Trump’s gratuitously rude handling of the Greenland affair, but particularly over his assertion that the US had unfailingly protected Europe and he had little confidence that Europe would act in solidarity with the United States if the roles were reversed.

Afghanistan was quickly offered as proof of the reliability of the Europeans and Canadians, and they did respond quickly after 9/11, the one occasion when Article 5 was invoked confirming that all NATO countries had been attacked in the terrorist outrages at the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. But sending forces to Afghanistan is hardly comparable to President Dwight Eisenhower’s exchange with Nikita Khrushchev in 1959 about Berlin. When Khrushchev said that he could easily evict the West from Berlin with conventional forces, Eisenhower instantly replied: “If you attack us in Germany there will be nothing conventional about our response.”  It was consistently understood by the Soviet leadership, starting from President Truman’s dispatch of atomic bomb-capable aircraft to Europe in the midst of the Berlin airlift in 1947-8, and on many subsequent occasions, that the United States would consider an attack anywhere on NATO as an act of war against itself.

It took a similar position in regard to the deployment of Soviet missiles to Cuba in 1962 (President Kennedy), and to Soviet threats to intervene directly in the Yom Kippur war in the Middle East in 1973 (President Nixon). Trump obviously did not get into specific episodes, but the fact remains that the only occasions when major NATO allies expressed unconditional support of the United States were General de Gaulle’s response to the Cuba Missile Crisis, and after 9/11, 2001, when the enemy was no particular state but an amorphous terrorist apparatus.

NATO was established as a framework of containment against Stalin’s Soviet Union in 1949. It has grown steadily and now includes states that were formerly provinces of the Soviet Union. It needs a redefinition as it is no longer directed solely at a designated potential enemy. In these circumstances, it is natural that the United States and other NATO countries have thought less in terms of collective security than of protecting and advancing national or even regional interest goals. This is a process that should have been discussed after careful thought by the leaders of the NATO countries and their principal advisors. My own view is that it should be expanded to be a world defensive alliance of adequately democratic countries, with specific arrangements with certain undemocratic countries that are strategic allies, and agree the borders and the legitimate strategic concerns of the entire membership. India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Israel, (with an asterisk about its ultimate frontiers), and much of Latin America and some African countries such as Morocco and Egypt, could all be invited to join or associate.

But whatever happens, the Europeans and Canadians have to stop sulking about the decline of collegiality in NATO when in fact the United States deploys almost all of the forces of the Alliance, military and economic, and the US government and its leader should resolve to work at the evolution of the Alliance with normal diplomatic discretion and the dignity which the most successful collective defence association of nations in all of history certainly deserves.