The Role and Growth of NATO Essay Example for Free

The Role and Growth of NATO Essay From Thucydides onward, moral philosophers, students of international politics, statesmen, and policy makers have been preoccupied and very often troubled by the role of morality in international politics. There has often been a tendency, in the discourse on political morality and the ethical conduct of statecraft, to alternatively exaggerate or deprecate the influence of morality in internationalpolitics, and hence succumb to either self-righteous moralism or cynicism and skepticism. The task of moral reasoning about international politics is neither a simple nor an easy one, and is made more difficult when moralism is confused with morality. Moralism involves the adoption of a single value or principle and applying it indiscriminately without due regard to circumstances, time, or space. Morality, on the other hand, is the endless search for what is right in the midst of sometimes competing, sometimes conflicting, and sometimes incompatible values and principles (Morgenthau 79). The normative form of political realism admonishes us to think morally, not moralistically, and not to confuse self-righteousness with morality. It reminds us that international politics are too complex to resemble a morality play, and that moral choices are never easy. Yet all is not well in Europe. The end of the Cold War and the subsequent disintegration of the Soviet Union ended the high-intensity threat to the West. Invasion is now implausible. However, the lacuna created by the absence of any high-intensity threat has been filled by low-intensity threats, taking the principal form of chronic instability in the Balkans and the outbreak of ethnic conflict stemming from the breakup of Yugoslavia. Indeed, the various Balkan wars are indicative of the fact that â€Å"history† and a particularly nasty and virulent form of nationalism persist quite stubbornly in that corner of Europe. The horrors and atrocities perpetrated in those wars were shocking to people who believed in â€Å"Never Again† and that European civilization had evolved beyond such behavior. This, of course, ought to be a sobering reminder that peace and stability can never be taken for granted, that liberal values are not as triumphant as some would like to believe, and that Locke, Kant, and Smith might have to make room for Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Hobbes as we are forced to reengage with history. How exactly are we to reengage with history? In the midst of peace and plenty, we have had the luxury of debating and rethinking our conceptions of security. Traditional state-centric notions of security, which privilege sovereignty over the rights and dignity of the individual, are called increasingly into question. They are deemed relics of the past, fig leaves hiding the intellectual paucity of Cold Warriors unable or unwilling to adapt themselves to an altered security environment. We are witnessing the rise of a rival orthodoxy regarding how we think and act about security, one that is centered on human rights and human security—consonant with our posthistorical values and sensibilities—and allegedly better suited to deal with the problems of intrastate warfare and ethnic conflict. This rival orthodoxy, we are to believe, is morally superior and more evolved than traditional notions of security. After all, what sort of person can be against human rights and human security? On 24 March 1999, NATO began Operation Allied Force, an aerial bombing campaign that was to last seventy-eight days. The Atlantic Alliance, arguably the most powerful and successful politico-military coalition in history, created originally to defend Western Europe against a Soviet onslaught, now went to war for human security. In the subsequent military campaign, NATO won and got what it wanted, and then some. The Alliance triumphed without a single combat casualty. Serbian military and paramilitary forces, looking remarkably unscathed despite the scope and intensity of NATO sorties, evacuated the province. A NATO-led military force moved in, and Kosovar refugees started returning home. Kosovo is now a de facto protectorate of NATO and the United Nations, even if the fiction that the province remains a sovereign and integral part of Yugoslavia is maintained. Kosovars are champing at the bit to cleanse the province ethnically of the remaining Serbian minority, even as we insist that our goal is to reconstitute a multiethnic and multicultural Kosovo. Slobodan Milosevic is gone but the genie of ethnic strife is already out of the bottle, and the Balkans remain as unstable as ever (An Electronic Journal of the U.S. Department of State March 2002). A question mark hangs over an â€Å"ethic of responsibility,† meanwhile, because the jury is still out as to whether we will be able to move toward such an ethic when it comes to future humanitarian interventions or whether â€Å"humanitarian warfare† is, as some argue, â€Å"an idea whose time has come, and gone† (Krauthammer 8). From the Balkans to the Caucasus, the environment remains ripe for massive and violent abuses of human rights—thus opportunities to intervene—even if NATO does not expand any further to the East. The temptation to intervene will be great. If CNN is present, we will have emotional and gut-wrenching scenes of human suffering beamed into our living rooms and there will be a clamor to â€Å"do something† (Hudson and Stanier 256).   And why not do something? The Alliance has already bent, if not broken international law over Kosovo. Surely it will be easier the second time around. Furthermore, NATO now possesses a template for â€Å"immaculate intervention.† The Alliance will not deploy ground troops but can instead rely on precision guided munitions dropped from on high, with little or no risk to its servicemen and women (Burk 53–78). Humanitarian intervention is characterized by motive and ends, the motive to do good, and the goal to put an end to human suffering. This is what is supposed to distinguish â€Å"moral† interventions from â€Å"immoral† ones (Abrams 74). It was said of the Gulf War that the West would not have come to the aid of Kuwait if that country had produced broccoli instead of oil. Kosovo possessed neither oil nor broccoli. Hence, we were told by President Bill Clinton that NATO’s actions were intended to â€Å"enable the Kosovar people to return to their homes with safety and self-government,† or alternatively to â€Å"protect thousands of innocent people in Kosovo from a mounting military offensive.† (Roberts 20) The Alliance’s objectives were thus to avert a humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo and/or to prevent a crisis from becoming a catastrophe. Kosovo was to be a new sort of war, one fought in the name of universal values and principles—to uphold human rights and prevent a humanitarian tragedy—rather than for narrow interests (Roberts 20). Yet motives and ends are dangerously unreliable as criteria for moral calculation and judgment. Moral judgment cannot be suspended simply because the motives are pure, the cause just, and the ends good. The decision to enlarge the Atlantic Alliance has opened debate as to whether an expanded alliance will help to sustain global peace or provoke greater tension, if not regional or global wars. International relations theorists are largely divided over the question, and the relationship between alliance enlargement and the question of war or peace is unclear and ambiguous. Alliances in general have often been blamed as one of the major factors helping to generate the fears and suspicions leading to World War I, as well as previous wars in European history, at least since the advent of the formal multipolar â€Å"balance of power† system in the mid-seventeenth century. American foreign policy from George Washington to World War II traditionally eschewed â€Å"entangling alliances.† On the other hand, the lack of strong alliances and of firm American commitments to Britain, France, and to key strategically positioned states such as Poland, for example, has been cited as one of the causes of World War II. Following Soviet retrenchment from eastern Europe after 1989, and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet state in 1991, the Atlantic Alliance has been praised as the most successful alliance in history. Without NATO, it is argued, the peace of Europe could not have been secured throughout the Cold War. Detractors, however, have argued that NATO’s formation in 1949 led to the counterformation of the 1950 Sino-Soviet alliance—and indirectly to the Korean War—in addition to the establishment of the Warsaw Pact following West Germany’s admission to NATO in 1955. These contrasting perspectives do not clarify the relationship between alliances and war in today’s geostrategic circumstances. The question remains as to whether German unification, followed by Soviet implosion, and now by NATO enlargement into east-central Europe, will prove stabilizing. The Alliance has opted to extend its membership to Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary within the former Soviet sphere of influence, raising some fears of a new partition of Europe. At the same time, NATO has promised to consider further enlarging its membership; it has advocated what has been deemed an â€Å"open NATO†Ã¢â‚¬â€in part to prevent a possible new partition between members and nonmembers. Alliance pronouncements promised that Romania and Slovenia would be granted first consideration in a second round, in addition to one or more of the Baltic states. Indeed, NATO has not left out the possibility of Russian membership, but has only taken limited steps in this direction (Kegley and Raymond 275–277). Despite the fact that NATO is one of the most institutionalized alliances ever created, with decades of experience in fostering close ties among its members, the United States chose not to use NATO to organize its response to the attacks. NATO was unable to provide a command structure—or even substantial capabilities—that would override U.S. concerns about using the NATO machinery. European contributions were incorporated on a bilateral basis, but NATO as an organization remained limited to conducting patrols over the United States and deploying ships to the eastern Mediterranean. This U.S. policy choice did not surprise many in the United States. Many U.S. policymakers believed that NATOs war in Kosovo was an unacceptable example of â€Å"war by committee,† where political interference from the alliances 19 members prevented a quick and decisive campaign. The policymakers were determined to retain sole command authority in Afghanistan, so that experience would not be repeated (Daalder and Gordon). The deployment of the NATO AWACS demonstrates this point. The United States did not want to deploy the NATO AWACS directly to Afghanistan, because it did not want to involve the North Atlantic Council in any command decisions. Instead, the NATO AWACS backfilled U.S. assets so the assets could redeploy to Afghanistan. A military official later described the U.S. decision in these terms: â€Å"If you were the US, would you want 18 other nations watering down your military planning?† (Fiorenza 22) However, many Europeans were dissatisfied with the small role that the alliance played in the response to the September 11 attacks and attributed it to U.S. unilateralism and arrogance. While they understood the need to ensure effective command and control, they felt that they had given the United States unconditional political support through the invocation of Article 5 and that they should at least be consulted about the direction of the military campaign. In part, these frustrations resulted from the fact that the military campaign did not fit the model all had come to expect during the Cold War— that an invocation of Article 5 would lead the alliance members to join together and defeat a common enemy (Kitfield). But these frustrations also reflected a fear that the U.S. decision to pursue the war on its own after invoking Article 5 would irrevocably weaken the core alliance principle of collective defense. To uncover a possible answer to the question as to whether an extended NATO alliance will prove stabilizing, I seek to explicate the views of international relations theorist, George Liska. Even though he was well known in the 1960s for his classic definition of alliances, Liska’s later comparative geohistorical perspective of the 1970s and 1980s has often been overlooked or not fully appreciated (Kegley). Although generally pessimistic, Liska argues that major power or systemic war is not inevitable and can be averted, yet only given a long-term strategy of cooptation of potential rivals into the interstate system. For Liska, alliances are neither inherently stabilizing or destabilizing. Like armaments, they do not in themselves cause war, but they can set the preconditions for generalized conflict depending on the manner and circumstances in which they are formed and depending on which specific states are included. Moreover, the expansion of an alliance formation is less likely to provoke major power war when the predominant states of a particular historical period are either overtly or tacitly included. Generalized wars, however, are more likely to occur when the predominant powers cannot participate in the key decision-making processes that affect their perceived vital interests, and thus cannot formulate truly concerted policies. Global conflict has largely stemmed from the apparently recurrent failures of the major contending states to forge long-term entente, or full-fledged alliance, relationships. Since 1991 the world has seen a new opportunities, but the weight of the millennial past continues to burden the present (Liska 17). Although the U.S.-Soviet wartime alliance against Germany, 1941–1945, collapsed after World War II, the superpowers were by contrast able to maintain a general state of peace, though not without intense regional conflicts often fought through surrogates. The ensuing struggle for control of former German spheres of influence, the quarantine of East Germany and other Soviet-bloc states, the formation of NATO, Soviet/Russian fears of a U.S./NATO alliance with the flanking states of Japan and the People’s Republic of China, collectively resemble the 477 to 461 B.C. phase of Athenian-Spartan relations, following the breakdown of their alignment against Persia. Throughout the Cold War, Washington and Moscow sustained a tacit multidimensional â€Å"double containment† of Germany and Japan, as well as other significant regional powers, including China, that helped to prevent open conflict between them. Yet it is precisely the Soviet/Russian role in this multidimensional double containment that has virtually disappeared following German unification (Gardner 7-9). The collapse of the Soviet Empire and its spheres of security parallel the instability that confronted Sparta. Continuing fears of national uprisings and Russian disaggregation, coupled with recurrent wars in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Afghanistan, recall the threats posed by the Helot revolution and the Third Messenian War. The United States and NATO now bid for control over former Soviet and Russian spheres of influence in Central and Eastern Europe much as Athens penetrated Sparta’s sphere in the Aegean and then the Ionian seas. Disputes over power and burden sharing within NATO, considered together with differences over the financing of the 1990 Persian Gulf war and the conduct wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, are reminiscent of Athenian efforts to sustain preeminence over its Delian league allies, regardless of the diminished Persian threat. Moreover, Pericles’ decision to forge a new â€Å"defensive† alliance with the insular power bears similarities to NATO’s decision to extend its alliance with Western Europe into Central Europe, a change depicted as defensive, involving no nuclear weapons or additional troops to be deployed on the territory of new NATO members (Gardner 20–26). Most crucially, should the United States and Russia not be able to reach a compromise over the question of the modalities of NATO enlargement into East-Central Europe, the two powers risk losing their tacit post-World War II alliance against Germany and Japan altogether. This would parallel the Athenian decision to drop entirely its deteriorating ties with Sparta after the new Athenian democratic leadership expelled Cimon. Moreover, American proposals to build a ballistic missile defense in possible violation of the ABM treaty could be interpreted by Russia in much the same way that Sparta interpreted the Athenian decision to build defensive walls around the city of Athens. In a word, the United States is presently poised either to renew its relations with Moscow or else let them sour to an even greater extent, thus risking another round of mutual imprecations that could degenerate into a wider conflict. Turning to another episode involving an essentially bipolar land/sea schism, namely the clash between Rome and Carthage over spheres of influence in Spain, Sicily, and the Mediterranean, raises additional questions about Soviet collapse and NATO enlargement. Much as the Peloponnesian wars can be viewed as a result of the breakdown of the Athenian-Spartan wartime alliance, the First Punic War can likewise be interpreted as a product of the termination of the 279–278 B.C. Roman-Carthaginian wartime alliance against Tarentum and Pyrrhus of Epirus. The alliance between Rome and Carthage followed the classic â€Å"Pyrrhic victory† at Ausculum that opened Sicily up to Greek conquest. The deterioration of that alliance was provoked by the Roman decision to assist the Mamertines against Syracuse in 264 B.C. and to take Messana under Roman protection. This unexpected action led Carthage to support Syracuse in response. This in turn represented a reversal in alliances equally unanticipated by Rome, as Carthage and Syracuse had traditionally been enemies (Harris 187). Carthage subsequently accused Rome of a violation of its previous agreements, which, according to Carthaginian sources, forbade the Romans to cross into Sicily and the Carthaginians to cross into Roman spheres. In fact, Rome and Carthage did sign three treaties in 510–509, 348, and 306 B.C., designed to sustain Carthagian spheres of influence over Western Sicily, Sardinia, Libya, and the Iberian peninsula, but there was no agreement addressing specifically the changing status of a divided Sicily. The 510–509 B.C. treaty, signed in the year that marks the formation of the Roman Republic, sought to affirm Roman agreement to abide by the historically positive relations between Carthage and Etrusca. In the 306 B.C. treaty, Rome vowed not to cross the Straits of Messina in exchange for a Carthagian concession to permit Rome full liberty of maneuver in the Italian peninsula. Moreover, even if there was no formal treaty in 279–278 B.C., there may have been a tacit understanding involving a vague mutual recognition of respective military and commercial spheres of influence that was at least proposed during the 279–278 B.C. wartime alliance against Pyrrhus (Eckstein 79). Whether a formal treaty actually existed is really secondary to the point that Carthage at least operated under the assumption that some type of accord existed in order to justify its previous alliance relationship, and it jealously guarded Western Sicily as the central strategic keystone to its insular defense. On the other hand, Roman expansion to Calabria diminished the size of the buffer region between the two states. As an expanding continental power seeking amphibious status, Rome began to regard the Carthagian presence on Sicily as a potential â€Å"encirclement.† Carthage was regarded as threatening Rome’s maritime trade from ports on the Ionian Sea and in the Gulf of Tarante. The charge that a tacit agreement was violated is not unlike the debate between the United States and Russia, as to whether Washington affirmed absolutely in 1989–1990 that it would not extend NATO into East-Central Europe. Moscow has argued that the decision to enlarge NATO into what it has considered its central strategic region of continental defense contravenes the spirit of the â€Å"two plus four† treaty on German unification not to permit NATO forces into the territory of the former East Germany, as well as the â€Å"gentleman’s agreement† made between George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 against NATO expansion. As a rising land power seeking amphibious status, Rome expanded into Calabria and thereby diminished the historic buffer between Etrucsa/Rome and Carthage, a power in relative decline. In contemporary geopolitics, NATO enlargement into former Soviet and historic Russian spheres of influence similarly risks undermining the post-1945 security buffer between the United States and its German ally and a Russia now in a state of near absolute collapse. Works Cited Abrams, Elliott. â€Å"To Fight the Good Fight.† National Interest 59 (spring 2000): 74. Burk, James. â€Å"Public Support for Peacekeeping in Lebanon and Somalia: Assessing the Casualties Hypothesis.† Political Science Quarterly 114, no. 1 (2003): 53–78. Eckstein, Arthur M. â€Å"Senate and General.† Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987, p. 79. Fiorenza, Nicholas. â€Å"Alliance Solidarity,† Armed Forces Journal International, December 2004, p. 22. Daalder, Ivo H. and Gordon, Philip R. â€Å"Euro-Trashing,† Washington Post, May 29, 2002. Retrieved July 9, 2007 from http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-361506.html. 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