Dan PleschOctober 10, 2002
Next month George Bush will address the Nato summit in Prague. His advisers intend that Europe will agree that his doctrine of pre-emptive attack be added to Nato's policy toolkit. No doubt he will use spin and coercion to try to get his way, but now is not the time for Nato to sign up to the Bush doctrine. Instead, the strength of its 19 democracies must be applied to containing the US administration and reinforcing Nato's historical role.
Ever since Chancellor Schröder spoke out against President Bush's policies there has been much talk of how Germany is turning its back on the United States. Nothing could be further from the truth. Take a look at the Atlantic charter that both Nato and the UN describe as being the foundation of their organisations. This document was issued by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt and inspired the young Nelson Mandela. It was published in August 1941 at the lowest ebb of modern civilisation. The Soviet Union was on the verge of defeat by the Nazi armies, after which Hitler would have devoted his undivided attention to destroying Britain. But even at such a time, Churchill laid out the vision of a post-war world not just of free enterprise, but of the control of arms and that "all the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the use of force by all nations".
Today, President Bush is seeking to adopt Churchill's aura, while overturning these principles and re-introducing anarchy into international relations. The attacks of September 11 were terrible, but materially they do not compare with the devastation of two world wars. We learned from those lessons that we had to evolve to a system of security for all through the UN. Until now Nato has operated, not always easily, within the UN context. Deterrence and arms control are still central to its strategy. In answer to criticism that Nato was prepared to use its nuclear weapons first in the event of a Russian attack, Nato used to argue, and I can hear Margaret Thatcher's sanctimonious tones even now, that it would never be the first to use force. Now the US administration is seeking to overturn this approach and tear up the principles born of so much earlier suffering. We cannot allow this to be done.
There is a traditional process that the US has used in the past to get agreement at Nato from reluctant allies. It consists of distracting attention from the main issues, which are then agreed in secret documents which the Europeans do not have to account for to their parliaments. First of all there will be the usual distractions such as: "Is Nato relevant if it won't invade Iraq?" "Will the US stay committed in the Balkans?" "We must form (yet another) rapid reaction force." The reality is that the US has a long-term strategic interest in Europe and, in fact, the more independence Europe shows in defence policy, the more, not less, likely the US is to want to stay involved.
Were the US to pull out of Europe it would leave a yawning gap in its global command structure. For Nato's supreme commander, the US marine General James Jones, Nato is just part of his responsibilities, which stretch from South Africa to Siberia. Four other US officers are tasked with controlling the rest of the world and "shaping" their regions to suit US interests.
Full Spectrum Dominance is the central idea in US military planning developed by President Clinton and given new force under Mr Bush. You may want the Pentagon to take home its nukes and troops if we reject its strategy and back the international criminal court, but they aren't going anywhere. So this is a bluff that can be called.
Many Europeans still find US forces reassuring and it was only a couple of years ago that their presence in the Balkans was applauded, but this means that the US can exact unconditional support for a contribution to Europe that is also in its own interests.
So after we set aside the distractions we can focus on the real policy-making process. "Secret agreements by US and European generals are the usual way that the US gets Nato agreement to controversial policies," according to the German analyst Otfried Nassauer, one of Europe's most informed critics of alliance policy making. In the US, the Congress looks in detail at military strategy. In European parliamentary democracies, elected politicians have far less access. Even ministers often have little understanding of the documents they are asked to rubber stamp.
Unless there is a clear demand across Europe for US-style transparency in military planning we will find that our government has secretly agreed to help in the new policy of attack first, ask questions later. We may also find that all the attention on intervention has meant that we are still not protected against attacks at home. The recent attack on a French oil tanker could have been at Rotterdam or Milford Haven.
· Dan Plesch is senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and author of Sheriff and Outlaws in the Global Village
