NO ONE SHOULD underestimate the importance of the agreement signed this week in Rome bringing together NATO and Russia. It creates a new force whose influence, for better or worse, will be felt throughout the world, including the Middle East.
The new NATO-Russia Council has set as its remit issues such as counterterrorism, peacekeeping and arms control, and to these will soon be added crisis management and conflict resolution (even as its 20 political masters met in the Italian capital they started discussing ways of solving the India-Pakistan crisis).
Most of us, however, had thought that there already was a international body with responsibility for such weighty matters — the UN — even though it has one major drawback in lacking a standing army to police the world’s trouble spots.
What the new NATO is now saying is that it going to be the world’s policeman. But that begs the question: Who is going to be at the driving seat? No one would particularly mind if the new alliance planned to be the UN’s unquestioning servant. In the decade since the end of the Cold War, NATO found a new role as free-lance policeman to the UN — in the Gulf, in Kosovo, in Macedonia, in Afghanistan. It intervened with the UN’s approval although with each intervention there has been growing concern that it was NATO’s political bosses who increasingly set the agenda, not the UN.
The likelihood that the new Axis between Washington, Moscow and Europe will increasingly in future use the UN as a rubber stamp to pursue common political aims is very real. By bringing in Russia, new NATO is going to be the most powerful and most influential club in the world. It has military muscle greater than the rest of the world combined, and four of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. That gives it awesome international leverage both within the UN and in any dealings with other states.
No other grouping or alliance can even begin to match it. The NATO that was founded in 1949 to defend its members against conventional attack will live on, but in retirement. The new NATO-Russia Council is effectively its successor, with a new role, not as a defensive organization against regular armies but as proactive, possibly even increasingly offensive one, against those it defines as terrorists and as rogue developers of weapons of mass destruction.
Enlarged, reforged and rebranded, it will be on hand to give its political masters the might to intervene, cajole, threaten and generally perform their will wherever they want. That is likely to include the Middle East if Washington and Moscow have their way. No one should forget that Washington has already declared five Middle Eastern states to be promoters of terrorism and that the new organization has terrorism specifically in mind. Furthermore, although there are 18 other states in the alliance, no one can be in any doubt that the expanded organization is first and foremost an American, Russian-led body. The former enemies are firm friends because both regard themselves as bound together in a joint war against terrorism. George Robertson, NATO’s secretary-general, said as much with his comment that the “catalyst of Sept. 11” had “driven East and West together”.
It is Washington and Moscow who will be in the new organization’s driving seat. The new pact bring Russia back into superpower status, but this time on the same side as the Americans. That is going to make an uncomfortable ride for the rest us. The one overriding benefit of past superpower rivalry was that it enabled the rest of humanity to use it to our advantage. But now the UN will be increasingly sidelined. That means less of an international voices for all of us.
