Nick Witney, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, spoke about the future of transatlantic relations at the Boell Foundation's Annual Foreign Policy Conference:
Original Video Credit: CC 3.0 by Boell Stiftung.
Every day, NATO does very good work, but it is “a bit of an anachronism.” It represents a world that has “rapidly begun to evaporate.” Talk of a Euro-Atlantic security community and the unity of the West harks back to an era when the West stuck together out of necessity to "survive against the Soviet Union's threat."
But "we don’t need American protection anymore." Europe and the United States diverge geostrategicaly. While the United States is very sensibly focusing on the Pacific, what matters to Europe is its neighborhood, which is "turbulent and interesting and full of opportunity, but its not actually full of military threat." This is why Robert Gates' words "have fallen on deaf ears."
Europe's sense of safety is "accentuated by the stabilisation of…the eastern front." Russia is a European pole of power. It is not a military threat but a power pole with which Europe needs to engage to manage common interests such as frozen conflicts and energy issues.
As a third pole, Turkey is a "hugely important growing regional power with which we as Europeans need to engage on that basis for the management of our shared neighbourhood."
The United States represents a further pole, and the transatlantic relationship is "one of the few relationships in the world that can properly be called a strategic partnership."
European integration is necessary to build a new security architecture. "And thats a problem." This process seems to have not merely stalled "but actually…gone into reverse."
Nick Witney spoke on the panel "New challenges and old alliances? EU, NATO and a security architecture for the 21st century" moderated by Dr. Ulrike Guérot, Head of the Berlin Office of the European Council on Foreign Relation's (ECFR). You can watch the recorded livestream from the entire panel with Dr. Stefanie Babst, NATO's Acting Assistant Secretary General for Public Diplomacy Division, Walter Stevens, Head of Crisis Management and Planning Department at the European External Action Service, and Dr. Dimitar Bechev, Head of the Sofia Office of the ECFR.
Nick Witney's panel contribution summarised here by Joerg Wolf and Elias Gladstone from atlantic-community.org's editorial team.
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June 30, 2011
Greg Randolph Lawson, Wikistrat, Platinum Contributor (507)
"Without the Soviet empire looming to the east, NATO has simply been unable to find and embrace a broad based, yet coherent strategic concept that gives it the impetus to continue being the "greatest alliance" in world history. By contrast, it seems more of a regional security mechanism that is trying to show itself capable of more than its infrastructure can actually bear.
NATO will always have a usefulness for intra-European issues like the Kosovo situation in the late 90s, but it will not be able to punch at its expected weight in external situations unless it has to to confront a threat of large proportion.
This isn't meant to denigrate NATO or suggest it be ignored. It is merely a call that policymakers begin adapting their plans to reflect an underlying reality as opposed to continuing to foist unrealistic objectives upon it."
In short, NATO needs to remain focused on European security, especially vis a vis Russia. While Russia seems not to be a problem today (nor should it necessarily or by definition ever need be adversarial), it COULD be in the future depending greatly on its internal political developments. Again, I reiterate, there are many reasons to seek as much a positive relationship with Russia as possible . However, NATO was famously said to have been developed to keep America in, the Germans down, and the Russians (then Soviets) out.
Notwithstanding Afghanistan and now Libya, why should that former idea fundamentally change? Europe really doesn't want it to, despite any rhetoric to the contrary. After all, if they did, Secretary Gates' words would indeed have already had greater resonance.
Given Europe's other challenges in terms of its economic (and perhaps, eventually, political) union, why should it seek out additional burdens that are, at best, of only tangential strategic importance?
NATO should exist but it should be circumscribed and focused, rather than amorphous and unfocused.