LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

NATO was paralysed by crisis in the Balkans, ‘Clinton and his advisors decided’, one official noted, ‘that the only way to end the disagreements among the allies was to stop listening to them.’ American officials ‘would settle on a course of action’ and then expect the allies to fall in line.⁴¹

      After 9/11, American foreign policy shifted to the self-declared ‘global war on terror’. The so-called ‘Bush Doctrine’ that emerged in response was premised on ‘tak[ing] the fight to the enemy before they can attack us […] confront[ing] threats before they fully materialize [and] advanc[ing] liberty and hope as an alternative to the enemy’s ideology of repression and fear’.⁴² Such ideas lay behind the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US rendition programme and American counter-terrorist measures in places as far afield as the Philippines, Pakistan, the Horn of Africa and Yemen. Much of this activity was clandestine and unilateral. Where it did involve partners, it was often done ad hoc through coalitions of the willing. Insofar as NATO mattered, it was through the development of capabilities and doctrine that would support American efforts. US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld thus demanded in September 2002 that the allies develop expeditionary and rapid response forces. NATO’s answer was the 2002 Prague Capabilities Commitments, the development of the NATO Response Force, a major command structure reform and the 2002 Military Concept for Defence against Terrorism. ISAF, as we have seen, would be the signature mission that bore NATO’s commitment to this new global agenda, but NATO also mounted a training mission in Iraq and lent its support to the African Union in Somalia and Sudan.

The Obama administration came to power with the intention of getting America off its war footing – emphasizing diplomacy over intervention, and coalition building over unilateral endeavour. To its supporters, Obama’s foreign policy was characterized by caution, patience and empathy. Obama committed the US to the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Iran nuclear deal, opened up relations with long-time foes such as Cuba and ‘reset’ relations with Russia.⁴³ Yet for all this, Obama remained committed to American exceptionalism and global military primacy. Distancing itself from Bush’s war on terror, the administration still managed to pursue an extensive policy of targeted assassinations and drone strikes. A desire to curtail overseas commitments was also only partial. The US drew down its forces in Iraq but changed tack in 2014 in order to counter the threat from ISIS. And in Afghanistan, while NATO’s combat mission was terminated in 2014, the smaller Resolute Support mission was committed to the country for the long term. Within this context, Obama expected much of the allies. All US administrations have bemoaned the problem of burden-sharing (see Chapter 3) and Obama, too, was clear on this point. If the US was to pour its energies into local crises, then it would do so, in the words of the 2015 National Security Strategy, by ‘mobiliz[ing] allies and partners to share the burden and achieve lasting outcomes’.⁴⁴ Yet deferring to allies was good only insofar as America’s partners had something to offer. On matters of collective defence in Europe, the US remained as essential as ever. NATO’s Readiness Action Plan launched in the wake of the 2014 Ukraine crisis brought significant European and Canadian resources to the fore but was overshadowed by the US-led Operation Atlantic Resolve and the European Reassurance Initiative (which, despite the name, was an American effort).

Obama’s successor Donald Trump struck an intemperate attitude toward NATO. But even in the face of Trump’s criticisms, the Alliance was unable to break the spell of American leadership. The allies under pressure from Washington recommitted to increased defence spending and re-emphasized NATO’s role in countering terrorism. Insofar as the Trump administration could claim to have a signature foreign policy, it was to balance regional and global challengers – Russia and China (and, of a lesser order, Iran) – in a new era of great power competition. Alliances such as NATO were seen as material to that effort.⁴⁵ In the case of Russia, that sat well with NATO’s traditional mission. But a policy for China (alluded to at the 2019 NATO Leaders’ Meeting) took the Alliance off into uncertain territory. Trump’s suggestion that NATO expand its mission and membership to the Middle East was even less well defined.⁴⁶

       Liberal Ideas and Liberal Order

      NATO’s task expansion has been made possible by alliance institutions, given shape by allied politics and driven by American ambition. Allied calculations here are best understood as ‘interests’. But interests co-exist with ideas – the beliefs which provide the broader setting of action, a desirable end state in its grandest sense and, linked to that, a roadmap that provides answers to why and how a particular course of action should be taken.⁴⁷ Measuring the influence of ideas upon policy is a complex business, but in NATO’s case the task is made a little easier because the Alliance has explicitly articulated an ideational rationale for its endeavours.

The relevant ideas have been described by commentators as ‘Atlanticist’ or ‘multilateral’, but ‘liberal’ is the term which has stuck. In the Cold War, NATO’s liberal identity was, in part, a projection of the allies’ domestic democratic systems. But it was also defined in juxtaposition to NATO’s communist ‘other’, the Soviet bloc. The end of the Cold War’s ideological divide meant the liberal appellation became fuzzier. In its political (as opposed to economic) formulation, it has revolved around a belief in the sanctity of rights and the related position that such rights are universal and should be both protected and promoted – a view that goes back to the formation of the UN in 1945 and the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. During the Cold War, NATO’s defence of liberal values was very much symbolic (hence the toleration of some distinctly non-democratic members among NATO’s ranks). But the seeming victory of ‘freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law’ at the Cold War’s end opened up new historic possibilities.⁴⁸ The Clinton administration took the view that NATO, through enlargement and partnerships, should assume a new liberal mission of democracy promotion. This, moreover, would have geopolitical benefits. Democracies were viewed as essentially peaceable in their relations with each other. As NATO membership spread, therefore, so, too, would inter-state peace.⁴⁹ Subsequent enlargements stuck to this narrative. The ‘big bang’ enlargement of 2004 sat explicitly with President George W. Bush’s ‘Freedom Agenda’. Obama commended Albania and Croatia’s entry in 2009 as contributing to domestic reform and regional stability.⁵⁰ The Trump administration, not known for its support of democracy abroad, welcomed the entry of North Macedonia (NATO’s most recent member) in similar terms.⁵¹

NATO’s promotion of liberal values has also occurred through more direct intervention. Operation Allied Force of 1999 provided the template in this regard. As UK Prime Minister Tony Blair argued at the time, the mission was necessary to reverse Serbia’s ethnic cleansing of Albanian Kosovans – it was ‘a just war based not on any territorial ambitions but on values’.⁵² David Cameron and Barack Obama provided similar justifications a decade later for the NATO intervention in Libya to stop attacks by the Qaddafi regime on its civilian population.⁵³ In between sat the long NATO mission in Afghanistan. Here, the connection to liberal values was more obscure. But alongside its counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency rationale, ISAF was also justified as improving ‘governance, and economic and social development’.⁵⁴ In that sense, it was of a piece with NATO’s earlier efforts in the Balkans – in Sten Rynning’s phrase, at ‘the heart of a wider liberal order’ of nation-building, humanitarian standards and stabilization.⁵⁵

      However noble its motives, the upshot of this liberal impulse has been a lack of restraint. The abstract quality of values or ideas gives them a universal and expansive application. NATO has attempted to instantiate those ideas through expeditionary nation-building, the management of global security and the spread of liberal market democracy. In consequence, Patrick Porter suggested in 2010, NATO had become unbound, cast loose from its traditional ‘demarcated sphere’ of activities, and facing the world with a sense of unlimited responsibility.⁵⁶

NATO’s Treadmill of Problems

      There

Скачать книгу