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| International-UN-NGOs |
| NATO and the Long WAr |
| 2007-10-06 |
| An article by Tony Corn, who is currently writing a book on the Long War. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Paris and is a graduate of the U.S. Naval War College. ... Ever since the 1999 intervention in Kosovo, NATO has been eager to prove that it stands for more than “No Action, Talk Only.” But the adoption by the Alliance of the Marge Simpson doctrine (“Are we gonna just stand there like the French, or are we gonna do something?”) has proved to be no substitute for a new strategic concept. Kosovo itself, waged in no small part to maintain the credibility of the Alliance, ended up paradoxically weakening NATO’s credibility and the mutual bad blood afterwards constituted the single most important underlying reason of the 2003 near-death experience over Iraq. …. Enlargement [of NATO] has been a bold move that played a critical (and often underappreciated) role in the successful transition to democracy of the former captive Europe, but for every action there is a reaction, and the gradual enlargement of NATO to the East has been the main cause of Russia’s gradual rapprochement with China. …. An astounding percentage of the allegedly sophisticated EU elites have the hardest time grasping what any American redneck knows intuitively: namely, that the collective threat to use force is still the best way to avoid having recourse to actual force. Fifty years of increasing focus on intra-EU politics has led EU elites to mistake “multi-level governance” (read: horse-trading by capitals in Brussels) for the whole of statecraft. …. Forget the “Americans are from Mars, Europeans from Venus” mantra that gave the Brussels Eurocracy the vapors in the summer of 2002. …. Between the shock-and-awe slogans of the military Mars, and the human security fairy tales of the civilian Venus, Strategy in the West has been MIA for too long. Since the real Revolution in Strategic Affairs happens to be a non-Western affair, NATO leaders will have to start by learning the new grammar and logic of the kind of unrestricted warfare elaborated by the Chinese and the fourth-generation warfare practiced by Islamists. …. As U.S. NATO Ambassador Victoria Nuland argued, “if the divisive debate over Iraq taught us one thing, it is that NATO must be the place where we talk about all the issues affecting our future — the Middle East, Iraq, North Korea, China, Iran, just to name a few.” The North Atlantic Council has recently broadened its range of consultations to include global issues ranging from energy security to transnational terrorism. …. Enhancing the strategic literacy of NATO’s stakeholders should be the logical prerequisite to a debate about the future NATO strategic concept. In the past hundred years, the instrumentalization of Islam has been a recurrent temptation on the part of every rising power, be it Wilhemine Germany or Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, not to mention America itself. As the latest rising power, China itself would not be immune to that temptation even if it were energy self-sufficient. The fact that China’s energy needs are huge guarantees that the constitution of a Sino-Islamic axis is for Beijing not just a tactical option, but a strategic necessity. While the pivotal states of this strategy appear to be Pakistan, Iran, and (more recently) Saudi Arabia, the geopolitical situation of Iran puts it in a class by itself, as the most precious proxy in China’s “indirect approach” against American primacy. It is therefore no surprise to learn that China is using Iran as a conduit for the delivery of arms to both Iraqi and Afghan insurgents, and providing Iran itself the kind of small boats needed to conduct attacks against commercial shipping or the U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf. If the instrumentalization of Islam constitutes the geographical axis of China’s grand strategy, the functional axis is — or ought to be — of equal interest to NATO …. Unlike China, Russia is energy self-sufficient; and unlike China’s Confucianism, Russia’s Eurasianism actually comes in two opposite versions: one pro-West and anti-Islam; the other pro-Islam and anti-West. American Putin-bashers would do well to realize that the Putin regime clearly favors the former version —– which may not be the case for his successor. Putin’s Russia is a mystery wrapped in an enigma only for those caught in a 15-year time warp. In a nutshell: While Yelstin’s choice of an alleged Polish model of transition in 1992 resulted, by 1999, in 38 percent of the population living below the poverty line, Putin’s reorientation toward a Chinese model has since created an annual growth rate of 6 percent for Russia — and a 70 percent approval rating for Putin. Having taken considerable domestic risks by siding with America after 9/11, Putin, for the past 5 years, has received nothing in return — other than a seemingly endless enlargement of NATO in his own backyard. Now that Russia is rich with oil money and has paid its debts to the West, what Russia wants from the West is respect. Russia’s nuisance capacity should not be underestimated …. Unlike China, Russia is not a rising power. Russian hearts and mind are still up for grabs, though, and there are three reasons why it would be grossly irresponsible to alienate Russia gratuitously. In the short term, Russia’s support is critical to solve (militarily or not) the Iranian question; in the middle-term, Russia has considerable leverage over Europe …. The current demonization of Russia in some American quarters is thus incomprehensible, unless one keeps in mind the particular conceit of democracies at war that Kennan, following Tocqueville, pointed out long ago: “There is nothing in nature more egocentrical than the embattled democracy. It soon becomes the victim of its own propaganda. It then tends to attach to its own cause an absolute value which distorts its own vision of everything else. . . . People who have got themselves into this frame of mind have little understanding for the issues of any contest other than the one in which they are involved.” This tunnel vision, and the incapacity to distinguish between the essential and the peripheral, is all the more surprising when it comes from the neoconservative side. Among the new generation of neocons, many seem to have forgotten the lessons of the older generation, as captured in Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s celebrated 1979 essay on “Dictatorships and Double Standards.” Simply put: when all is said and done, there is a difference in kind between totalitarianism and authoritarianism. If Islamist totalitarianism is the main enemy, as the neocons rightly claim, then it follows logically that Russian authoritarianism, however unpalatable to democratic sensibilities, is something we can live with. …. The wise American policy is to establish close relations with both Russia and China. And we should conduct it on the basis that whenever possible there should always be at least equal if not greater incentives or prospect of risks to cooperate with the United States than with each other. Similarly, a wise NATO policy should always make sure that NATO-Russia security cooperation is always stronger than Russia-China security cooperation. …. In the West itself, the current fixation of America on Central Asia and of Europe on the Middle East — the closest thing to a “Western” geopolitical vision — is based on two flawed premises. To put it crudely: Americans believe that Caspian Sea oil is the key to success in the Great Game; Europeans are convinced that the resolution of the Palestinian question holds the key to victory in the Long War. Talk about intellectual sloppiness: Warnings about a Caspian mirage were already common among energy experts a decade ago, and time has only made them more relevant: “The current fixation with the Caspian Basin’s alleged resource bonanza is exaggerating the region’s commercial and strategic significance, distorting US foreign policy calculations and raising the risk of unnecessary contention with other actors, particularly Russia and Iran. . . . Russian analysts could be forgiven for construing US/NATO policies as encirclement from the West through open-ended NATO expansion. . . . The myth [of Central Asia and the Caucasus as a region of independent democracies buoyed by new-found oil wealth and part of an expanding “Euro-Atlantic community”] is diverting policy-makers from a far more profound geopolitical challenge to energy security in the twenty-first century: the rising dependence of Asian nations on Persian Gulf oil. . . .” …. If American fixation on Central Asia is questionable, European fixation on the Palestinian question as the panacea of the Greater Middle East is downright irrational. …. This European fixation is all the more irrational in that as far as the proverbial Arab Street is concerned, the resolution of the Palestinian question ranks only seventh in importance, way behind the usual bread-and-butter issues (employment, health, corruption, education, and even combating extremism and protecting civil rights). And who can blame Ali Six-Pack for his lack of interest? Unlike the Kurds, who have proven capable of self-government, Palestinian leaders have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, as the saying holds. The pathetic clash between Fatahland and Hamastan is today leading many Palestinians themselves to reconsider the long-abandoned possibility of forming a confederation with Jordan. It is time for Europeans to realize that, as Joseph Joffe demonstrated in a seminal article, “far from creating tensions, Israel actually contains more antagonisms than it causes” …. During World War II Spykman had challenged the centrality of the concept of the “Heartland” developed a generation earlier by Halford Mackinder (against Mahan’s sea power thesis), and focused instead on what he called the “Rimland,” by which he meant essentially continental countries with a maritime facade. … the Rimland “functions as a vast buffer zone of conflict between sea power and land power. Looking in both directions, it must function amphibiously and defend itself on land and sea.” …. Today’s Rimland is a 400-mile wide amphibious area. …. this overpopulated Rimland, with 4 billion people living within 200-mile wide coastlands, is the “epicenter of all conflicts.” …. As a military alliance, NATO cannot afford to ignore the increasing covergence of littoral warfare, amphibious warfare and urban warfare — an issue to which the U.S. Navy, Coast Guard, and Marine Corps are devoting increasing attention. …. Equally interesting is the other phenomenon happening on the new Rimland: the so-called territorialization of the seas. The belated implementation, in the 1990s, of the 1982 Law of the Sea (UNLOS) and in particular of the 200 mile Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ), has had over time unintended effects. Due to the existence of more than one hundred EEZs, 32 percent of the ocean is today under some sort of national jurisdiction. .... The process of territorialization of the seas has been twofold: the “enlarging” of territorial waters from 12 miles to 200 miles, but also the “deepening” of territorialization. … For all the post-Cold War talk about the decline of the state, there is at least one domain where the state is in expansion, and it is the sea. And for all the talk about a Great Game in Central Asia, it is worth keeping in mind that more than 30 percent of the world’s oil and 50 percent of the world’s natural gas is produced offshore. The …. For now, the Great Game at sea affects the Pacific more than the Atlantic, and as such has not directly affected NATO. But it certainly affects NATO’s new global partners (Australia and Japan, Korea and New Zealand), who all happen to be maritime powers in the Pacific, and this is something that NATO will have to factor in when deciding the nature of its relationship with non-Atlantic powers. Global partnerships will have to be a two-way street, or there will be no global partnership. …. New perils, then, but also new promises. The maritime dimension is an opportunity for European allies to go beyond the “EU sandbox” and play a global role at relatively little cost, if only because public opinion will always find a maritime commitment more palatable than a continental one. For many allies like Norway and Greece, a greater maritime commitment on the part of NATO would also be a way to display niche capabilities (it’s not as if the U.S. Navy had a surplus of mine-sweepers) that they don’t necessarily possess in land operations. Last but not least, for a country like France, a middle-sized power as a land power but a maritime superpower of sorts (the third largest EEZ in the world thanks to its South Pacific possessions), a greater maritime commitment would be a way to maintain a leadership position. …. Before the attack on the Twin Towers, the attack on the USS Cole gave the West an idea of what asymmetric warfare can accomplish (17 sailors killed and $250 million worth of repairs for a terrorist operation that cost $40,000 to launch). That asymmetric warfare at sea shows great promise has not been lost on the jihadists who, when all is said and done, are less interested in restoring a caliphate (a goal they know is beyond their reach) than in making the West bleed to death economically. Nine million containers enter U.S. ports each year, and 80 percent of U.S. port facilities these days are owned by foreign companies. It is estimated that the detonation of a 10-to-20 kiloton nuclear weapon in a container would cause a disruption of trade valued at $100 billion to $300 billion, property damage of $50 billion to $500 billion, and the loss of 50,000 to 1 million lives. A mere dirty bomb smuggled in a container would kill very few people, but the disruption would cost $58 billion and it would take 19 days for ports to resume normal operations and 92 days to stabilize the container backlog — by which time the disruption could well spawn a recession. …. Eighty percent of world trade travels by sea, and 60 percent of the world’s oil is shipped by about 4,000 tankers: ….. A rogue nuclear missile on Paris or Berlin is decidedly more unlikely in the next five years than the hijacking and sinking of a couple of supertankers in the Strait of Gibraltar or the Bosphorus. The latter, in particular, is less than a mile wide in some areas, and 10 percent of the 50,000 ships that pass through it each year are tankers carrying Russian and Caspian oil. In the Turkish strait in 1996, the nine pro-Chechen gunmen who hijacked a Turkish ferry and held 255 passengers hostage for three days had first considered the possibility of sabotaging one of the two suspension bridges with explosives to bring down the bridge and close shipping traffic. The worst case scenario, now that the Russian Duma has passed a bill to transport 20,000 tons of nuclear waste through the straits in the next ten years, is the possibility of one of these tankers being hijacked in the vicinity of Istanbul, a city of 12 million inhabitants. It is expected that traffic on the Bosphorus will be 50 percent higher in 2010 than it was in 2005, and so will the opportunities to create catastrophic mischief. …. There has been both a relative and an absolute decline of U.S. seapower, with a U.S. Navy today at its lowest level in the post-World War II era. For the first time in 20 years, the U.S. is in the process of drafting a new maritime strategy, but with a considerably reduced force that went from 600 to fewer than 300 ships, and with new responsibilities in terms of nonmilitary maritime security. Hence the concept of the Thousand Ship Navy, which is meant to create a global maritime partnership with foreign navies. TSN is much more than an attempt to make a virtue of necessity. …. NATO has gone global geographically (50,000 troops deployed now on three continents) and functionally (broadening of political consultations in the NAC). It is also beginning to go global in its cooperation with non-Atlantic partners like Japan to Australia. In some American and European quarters, this globalization of NATO has led some observers to assert rather boldly that “NATO’s next move must be to open its membership to any democratic state in the world that is willing and able to contribute to the fulfillment of NATO’s new responsibilities.” But to add four or five global partners is one thing, to add the 88 countries recognized as democracies by Freedom House is quite another. The most cursory examination of twentieth-century history shows that transatlantic time lags have always been the rule rather than the exception. The First World War began in 1914, the U.S. only joined in 1917. The Second World War began in 1939, the U.S. only joined in 1942. The Cold War began in 1947, and it took Europe a full two years to give up the temptation of neutrality and side with the U.S. Since the Long War is of an asymmetric kind, it is no surprise if it took longer than usual for America and Europe to synchronize their chronopolitical watches. …. |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |