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COMMENTARY
May 23, 2012
What's NATO for?
What use is NATO? This was the unexamined background question in Chicago, where the 28 member states and a couple dozen with "observer" status gathered for the summit ritual. Our own prime minister was observed to be yawning while the chief foreground question - What do we do about Afghanistan? - was discussed. In this he accurately represented current Canadian opinion.Nothing was achieved. In particular, new supply routes into Afghanistan are needed, to compensate for Pakistan's increasing nonco-operation; but none was found. The hard truth is that the political cost of being visibly allied with NATO now exceeds the material rewards, in all surrounding countries; and this is increasingly the case in Afghanistan itself. Next on the agenda was: How do we get out of Afghanistan without anyone noticing? This was not, of course, how the question was phrased. But there is an unofficial consensus that the allied presence in Afghanistan enjoys diminishing returns and may be approaching a dead loss in which the only thing we can still accomplish is to put our impotence on broader display. Allied blood and money is being spent to no purpose, beyond transient local humanitarianism, that could not be better served by the occasional well-targeted special op or airstrike. Canada and France have already effectively checked out, leaving the U.S. and (arguably) Britain holding the bag. Public support for the mission has largely evaporated in both of those countries. The allies prop up a Karzai regime that nobody loves, even in Kabul; and which wilfully bites all hands that feed it. I have already uttered a mea culpa in this space, for my own failure to argue plainly that the Bush strategy of "democratization" in Iraq, Afghanistan, and throughout the Middle East, could only backfire. We now have either the reality or the prospect of Islamist regimes right across the region, often freely elected. So why are we fighting Islamism only in remote Afghanistan? And in a defensive way, to assure our worst enemies that NATO is a paper tiger? This takes us back to the grand question, of what NATO has been doing as the institutional face of western intervention, both realpolitik and humanitarian, in trouble spots far away from the North Atlantic. The U.S. has needed NATO as diplomatic cover for what otherwise might look like "American imperialism." They'd use the UN if it wasn't so full of vetoes; and "coalitions of the willing" are passé. By increments, NATO has been transformed from a hard and necessary Eurocentric alliance against a pointed Soviet threat into a prism for political and diplomatic "optics." By diffusing the anti-American focus of the international Left, it has mildly diminished their credibility. The protests in Chicago were a pathetic joke that actually helped the assembled statesmen. The organizers, in their eagerness to be "inclusive," accommodated every conceivable left wing whiner. We had radical nurses demanding a "Robin Hood" tax on financial transactions. We had protests against cutbacks to municipal mental health services. We had union rights and many other talking points that had nothing to do with NATO whatever. Only on Sunday did the protests coalesce into one big, miscellaneous march, ostensibly against NATO. For the rest, we glimpsed only the usual juvenile delinquents of all ages, running about, pointlessly taunting the police. To be fair to these idiots, Barack Obama had cleverly moved the preceding G8 summit from Chicago to Camp David, leaving all the anti-G8 agitprop stuck in Windy City. I have argued before that if we must have summits - and I have yet to see why - they should be held on cruise ships. (And may I recommend Costa Cruises.) That way world leaders may strut for the cameras without the host country being put to the additional expense of massive robot cop operations. A couple of naval outriders could see off the inevitable Greenpeace stunt. The protests do not go near the central problem: NATO does not know what it is for. Its member governments are unable to formulate a common purpose. Its use as a flag of convenience, for exotic foreign adventures that may be popular for a brief time, subverts its function as a military alliance. It has lost the luxury of a common, public enemy. Which is not to say the West has no enemies. But they cannot be named. One thinks of Islamism at large, of Iran in particular, of Putinesque Russia for that matter, certainly of China, and its North Korean client. None of these powers means us well. Yet unless we can name them, and dispose allied forces in a rational way to contain them, we are operating in a pseudo-humanitarian fog. We have allies who may or may not come running, when one of our members bumps up against a real enemy in the fog. We have a pretend alliance - another international bureaucracy whose purpose has expired. And it fools only us. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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