Building a Transatlantic Consensus

Last week was undeniably a bad week for NATO. We were in the international spotlight and seen to be in disarray.

But this week has been a good one. On Sunday evening, NATO decided to begin planning to help defend Turkey. Yesterday, we agreed that deployments should go ahead: AWACS early warning aircraft from the NATO fleet which helped protect American cities after 9/11; Patriot anti-missile systems; and chemical and biological defence units. The first aircraft will soon be on their way.

In accentuating the positive, I am not closing my eyes to the media barrage back and forth across the Atlantic, nor to the mood of public opinion. I am not denying very real policy differences between some NATO capitals about how to disarm Iraq. Nor am I downplaying the difficulty we experienced in NATO in reaching consensus. Far from it.

All of this has been damaging to the Alliance, both here and in Europe. I read the US press and I know when we are taking hits.

But this is damage above, not below, the waterline. Because the Alliance, now coming through a crisis which could have been profoundly damaging, is in much better shape than the pundits would allow.

This is a transatlantic forum. Let me share with you how the transatlantic forum, the Atlantic Alliance, worked its way through its most recent challenge.

In NATO we have been discussing since December how the Alliance should respond to the growing risk of Iraqi military action against Turkey. The past has shown us how dangerous and unpredictable Saddam Hussein can be.

These discussions have neither prejudiced, nor been prejudiced by, parallel negotiations in the United Nations Security Council. Both organisations have their own separate responsibilities. But we have of course followed closely the debate on United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441 and its implementation.

In early February, NATO for the first time began substantive negotiations on proposals to begin planning for how it might provide military support to Turkey to deter and defend against Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. The North Atlantic Council met inconclusively on Thursday 6 February, after which I decided to give capitals a chance to consider the proposals calmly over the weekend.

Some Allies could not agree to the package as it then stood, so they “broke silence”. That is what countries do in NATO when they want to discuss difficult issues.

In parallel, Turkey decided that the potential Iraqi threat was sufficient to warrant consultation under Article 4 of the Washington Treaty, which activates mandatory consultations when a NATO member believes it is threatened.

So during the course of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday last week, we held intensive discussions around the Council table in Brussels and between capitals to see if we could reach agreement among all 19 Allies on how best to proceed. This was hard-nosed multilateral diplomacy, with little quarter asked or given.

Unfortunately, we could not agree. Everyone was clear that Turkey would be defended if attacked. Everyone accepted that consultations under Article 4 were justified. But we could not reach consensus on the timetable for military planning. There was a disagreement. Not about whether to plan but when to plan.

Sixteen nations said go ahead. Three said that would give the wrong signal on the eve of the Blix Report.

Discussions continued among nations throughout Thursday and Friday. Overall, I talked to seven Prime Ministers, five Foreign Ministers and six Defence Ministers – some several times – to try to bridge the gap.

Finally, we had to accept that consensus among all 19 NATO members was impossible, not for capricious reasons but because of substantive differences of policy.

That is not unusual in NATO or any other international forum. Nonetheless, I did not disguise my concern about the implications if the deadlock continued, or if the disagreement proved to be more than a question of timing – not about when but about whether.

Indeed, I wrote to the Alliance’s Presidents and Prime Ministers to make sure they knew that the cohesion and credibility of NATO would be at risk if we failed to meet our Treaty obligations.

In the end, nations refused to allow this to happen. They displayed the will to work together to bridge the gaps between them. And we were fortunate that the Alliance has long established machinery which allows us to take another route to consensus, at 18, through Ambassadors sitting in NATO’s Defence Planning Committee.

This is the body which, without self-excluded France, runs NATO’s Integrated Military Structure, the military mechanism through which support to Turkey would in practice be provided.

Despite pressure from some – European – nations, I delayed putting the issue to the Defence Planning Committee until I was sure that wider agreement, including France, was impossible. That point was reached, late last Saturday evening. I am delighted to say that final consensus on planning was then achieved within little more than 24 hours.

It was not a pleasant 24 hours, with NATO Ambassadors in session for at least half that time and telephones burning red hot. But only 24 hours nonetheless.

So the fact is that NATO reached agreement on one of the most contentious decisions in its history within 11 days and after six meetings.

That should be the story. Not that we had to meet frequently and sometimes for long sessions. This happens all the time. It happened over Bosnia, Kosovo and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Multilateral diplomacy is essential, and it is rewarding but it is tough. That is why diplomats and Secretaries General lose their good looks.

No, the story is that although there are deep and honest disagreements over the means of disarming Saddam – not the aim but the means – at the United Nations and in the European Union, NATO was able to fulfil its obligations to an ally, and to do so in less time than in similar circumstances in 1991. We are, once again, acting while others are still talking.

You will recall that during the Gulf War, Turkey also felt threatened by Saddam. Then too it asked NATO for help, from the Alliance’s quick reaction fighter squadrons. That proved to be NATO’s first ever operational deployment. And despite the difficult political context, NATO took the decision to act in 16 days, in time to deploy Belgian and German fighters to help deter an Iraqi attack.

Today the political context is if anything more complex and difficult. And we are told that NATO cohesion has lessened as the Cold War recedes. Yet we were still able to reach consensus even more quickly, in time to provide Turkey with the support and reassurance all Allies recognise that it needs.

Perhaps we could and should have done even better. Historians will decide. They should, however, ask themselves whether decisions on military operations are taken more quickly in individual capitals. As a former Defence Minister, I don’t think so. As a veteran observer of the American system, I still don’t think so.

That is why I say this is a better result for NATO than it might appear. Despite differences about Iraq, within Europe and across the Atlantic, despite mass protests and impending elections, the Alliance is united politically and the United States, Germany, Belgium and 15 other countries have all signed up to meet their military obligations.

I am paid to be an optimist and an advocate for NATO. The past two weeks have not therefore been easy. But as a devout Atlanticist and a convinced European, I believe that the decision reached late last Sunday evening was what NATO is all about.

We are not the Warsaw Pact. My illustrious predecessor, Lord Carrington, was fond of saying that unlike the Soviet bloc, NATO sang in harmony, not in unison. No one country, or group of countries, on either side of the Atlantic, has the right or the ability to ride roughshod over the transatlantic family.

It is because of this democratic diversity, the same democratic diversity that makes the United States such a powerful force for good, that NATO works, in good times and bad.

What, then, are the implications of NATO’s bad week in February?

First, I am not convinced that we are living through one of the Alliance’s make or break crises. Does the story I have described really equate to Suez, Vietnam, the INF deployments or the early days of Bosnia?

Again, I don’t think so. All Allies, including France, strongly support the need to defend Turkey. The Integrated Military Structure has worked as it was designed to do. All Allies agree on the aim of disarming Saddam and said so at NATO’s Prague Summit in November in a robust and unambiguous statement.

There was a danger that an issue of timing would become an issue of substance. We – Europeans and Americans alike – avoided it.

There was a risk that disagreement could have escalated into the use of a permanent veto. We refused to let that happen.

There was a possibility that NATO’s reputation might have been permanently damaged. But we succeeded, and it is our success which will be remembered. Nothing succeeds like success.

In the end, this was not, and is not, remotely the kind of issue to break an alliance as strong and enduring as NATO.

Second, I am certain that what we have gone through was not, and should not be portrayed as, a transatlantic crisis. This was not America versus Europe. There is a wide spectrum of positions in Europe, as there is in North America. And the pressure I came under in the past two weeks to take one position or another, and to call or cancel meetings, cannot be defined by artificial lines drawn down the Atlantic Ocean.

There is much more to the transatlantic relationship. Much more binding Europe and America than dividing them. We have too much in common for our partnership to fall victim to a problem of timing.

Third, nothing I have seen or heard in the past few weeks has undermined my conviction that the transatlantic consensus forged at the Prague Summit in November has reinforced NATO’s role at the heart of its members’ 21st century security and defence needs.

The current round of “whither NATO” speculation is not the first in NATO’s history. It is not even the first round of the new century. Only a year ago, critics were arguing that September 11 portended the Alliance’s decline or even demise.

Once again, these gloomy predictions did not come true.

At Reykjavik in May 2002, we put an end to a decade’s wrangling over the theology of out of area operations and agreed that NATO must confront threats to our security from wherever they may come. In the same month, near Rome, we created the truly historic NATO-Russia Council to bring down the final curtain on the Cold War.

Six months later, at the Prague Summit, NATO set course on a fundamental process of modernisation and transformation.

We launched the biggest round of enlargement in the Alliance’s history. We set NATO at the centre of collective military planning and preparation to meet future terrorist attacks. We committed nations to rapidly transform their armed forces and narrow the damaging transatlantic capabilities gap. We made radical, deep reforms to NATO’s political structures.

Shortly after Prague, we set the seal on an extraordinary year when NATO and the EU resolved the last political obstacles to a European Security and Defence Policy that reinforces rather than competes with the Alliance. In addition, we began to provide support to Germany and the Netherlands enabling them last Monday to take over command of the International Stability and Assistance Force in Afghanistan.

The result was that in place of marginalisation, NATO was confirmed as a uniquely flexible vehicle for transatlantic consultation and multinational cooperation, the world’s largest permanent coalition and the world’s most effective military organisation.

I do not pretend that what we achieved at Prague has not taken a knock in the past few weeks. It will take more than a few speeches like this to rebuild completely the confidence and cohesion we saw at the Summit.

But the fundamentals are unchanged. Even in the midst of profound political differences about a subject as important as how to deal with Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, NATO worked.

Washington Treaty obligations will be respected. Turkey will be defended. All Allies are pledged to that. And now the decision to move from planning to implementation has been taken, without great fuss or publicity, yesterday in the hours before I left Brussels.

This was not a success by, for or against any NATO country. It was a success for NATO and for the transatlantic partnership.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is easy to wax lyrical about what binds the transatlantic family together. Shared values, traditions, democracy, interests. That is what this Institute is all about.

Ultimately, however, the practical manifestations of these bonds are what really matter. When it comes to the crunch, everything else is just rhetoric.

NATO is the embodiment of practical transatlantic friendship and cooperation. It puts into action the political statements and declarations of intent.

Not, of course, in every case. But the coalitions of the willing on which some would have us rely only work militarily when they are based firmly on NATO’s cooperative foundations.

Without the Alliance, with all its irritations and idiosyncrasies, coalitions would be difficult to build, harder to sustain and much less effective on the ground. That is one reason why I am so pleased that this has been a better week for the Alliance.

Working with Allies is never easy. Churchill’s heart-felt conclusion that the only thing worse than working with allies is working without them has, I am sure, resonated strongly here in past weeks.

I wish I could make the process of alliance work smoothly all the time. It usually does. But the measure of success for any organisation is not how well it does when things are going well but how it responds when things get rough.

Despite what we share, there will always be differences within Europe and across the Atlantic. This is one of our enduring strengths. We can disagree while remaining firm friends and interlocked Allies.

So the bad news for Atlanticists is that NATO has been confronted with real and difficult problems in the last few weeks. The good news is that it was strong enough, and flexible enough, to solve these problems before they reached crisis point.

My job, and our collective duty, is to learn the lessons and make sure that they reinforce our common transatlantic culture of trust, cooperation and mutual support, and redouble the Alliance’s ability to meet its responsibilities in today’s difficult and dangerous world.

Seventeen months ago, on September 12, 2001, NATO stood shoulder to shoulder with the United States when it was under attack. This week, we stand by another Ally under threat. That is what this great transatlantic Alliance is all about.

Questions and answers

Lord Robertson: Thanks. Well, you've got my speech. Some of you may have had the answers to the Questions that I've given, so I think it would be a punishment for you to get another statement or speech, so I'll simply take Questions.

Question: How real is the threat to Turkey from Iraq, because reports from the region say that Saddam's troops are poorly equipped, poorly disciplined, hungry?

Lord Robertson: The military commanders who report to the NATO Council, the chairman of the military committee, General Kujat, and the supreme allied commander-Europe, General Jones, have both reported in some detail to the NATO Council on what they believe the threat to be.

Surface-to-surface missiles were deployed by Iraq to the border with Kuwait in the last two weeks. I don't think they exist anymore, but it clearly has displayed an intent by Iraq to perhaps get involved in preemptive strikes.

But although I can't disclose classified information in terms of the threat to the north, it is believed by our military advisers to be real and to be imminent, and therefore Turkey made its request in that context.

Question: Can you flesh out a little bit your vision of NATO's peacekeeping role in Afghanistan in terms of troops? Will they patrol the whole nation or only the Kabul region? Time lines? And could this be possibly replicated in a post-conflict Iraq?

Lord Robertson: NATO is not involved in Afghanistan as NATO, though the countries that are presently making up the International Security and Assistance Force, ISAF, are from NATO countries.

Since last week, though, Germany and the Netherlands, who are using a NATO headquarters, the Netherlands/Germany division, are in Kabul with the assistance of NATO help and logistics. And what is being proposed is that NATO would do more for the next deployment involving Canada, which has volunteered to take over from the Netherlands, along with Germany. And we'll be examining that over the next few weeks to see whether there is a consensus on it, whether it makes sense and how best the job could be done. But it is premature to talk about post-conflict Iraq. We are already engaged in the Balkans. We are looking at Afghanistan. The other issue is, at the moment, hypothetical.

Question: Lord Robertson, there have been announcement by the U.S. administration to possibly reduce the number of troops and military installations in Germany. Could you comment on how that would affect the trans-Atlantic relationship?

Lord Robertson: Well, I think there's been some discussion generally about the deployment of American troops worldwide and how best they can be configured in a world that has changed dramatically from the days when they were initially deployed. But that is in a very, very early stage of thinking, and some of the things that have come out recently in the press represent only a series of ideas that certainly haven't been enmeshed into any formal process. American troops in Europe have been part of the architecture of security since the end of the Second World War. They provide forward bases for the United States and they also provide reassurance for America's European allies.But nothing is static.

Nothing remains unchanged in the world where the threats have changed. But I'm assured that the thinking process about deployments, especially in the NATO area, will all be a subject of consultation in the North Atlantic Council, which the preeminent forum for consultations between the United States and Canada and the European allies.

Question: Mr. Secretary, there was a lot of talks in the past about extending NATO into the Middle East, you know, as operation. And after, you know, the Iraqi - the first Gulf War, you know, the NATO participate in it. Do you think now it's high time to change the NATO into the - you know, putting that Middle East or the Arab world under its theater of operation?

Lord Robertson: Well, we haven't got to thinking about that yet, I have to say. That seems to me a bridge too far. There's certainly speculation and discussion by some pundits, but it's never been formally raised within NATO by any of the NATO countries.

We've made our contribution to stability in the Balkans, and that was out with the NATO area. We're helping to contribute to support those countries doing the International Security and Assistance Force in Afghanistan, but we haven't any other ambitions at the present moment for any other geographic areas.

Question: Secretary General, in your speech you put a positive spin on the final decision to send aid to Turkey, but it still came down to the fact that you could not get unanimous agreement on what should be a fundamental issue of defense of an alliance nation. Is this really good news for the alliance?

Lord Robertson: Well, the good news is that we solved the problem and we got the consensus and the help is on its way. That's the main point I'm saying. That's not spin, it's a fact.

Of course it's spin - positive spin to say that that is good news for the future, but I strongly believe that it is; that the fact of the matter was that it took 11 days to achieve consensus despite the volatility of European public opinion, despite the connections that some people have made with the U.N. process and the progress of the inspectors, despite all of that and elections taking place in some of the allied countries, we still got agreement in 11 highly publicized days, but 11 days nonetheless. So, nobody can write off this alliance on the basis of this one argument. We've been through arguments in the past, we'll undoubtedly have arguments in the future.

But NATO is not the Warsaw Pact. People come with propositions to NATO, and they are argued out among democratic countries: 19 at the moment, 26 next year.

That sometimes takes a little bit of time, a little bit of effort, a lot of lost sleep. But ultimately, we make the decision, and the AWACS planes will be on their way in the next few days.

Question: Mr. Secretary, is there a new (inaudible) coming up on the Balkans, where the U.S. might withdraw some troops and NATO or the EU states might take over. Your thoughts about it?

Lord Robertson: Well, Europe is NATO, the United States is NATO, and you can't draw distinctions between European NATO and American NATO. We have operations in Bosnia and Kosovo and in Macedonia. They're all multinational operations, and they all involve the United States to a greater or lesser extent.

The European Union has the ambition of taking over our operation in Macedonia, and to do it within the next few weeks. So there is a strong support for that proposition by the NATO Council. And we will continue to work over these next few weeks to put in place the practical arrangements that will allow that to happen. It's good common sense to do that.

It may or may not involve some American troops, and possibly won't. But it will still be done by the European Union in close cooperation with NATO, and using the deputy supreme allied commander as the operational commander for that particular operation.

So, this is not the United States withdrawing from Europe. It's NATO making sure that it focuses its attention and its resources where they need to be focused.

Question: How would you characterize the state of the alliance now, and to what extent does the difference between the United States and European capitals on how to disarm Iraq, how will that continue to affect the relationship?

Lord Robertson: Well, there are differences on views on how to disarm Iraq in the United States and Canada, and in many of the European countries. The division of opinion about how that is to be achieved is as marked in the European Union as it is within NATO. And it is not a trans-Atlantic divide. Nobody can characterize last week's debate, or the future debates that will take place, as being one side of the Atlantic versus the other. There is a diversity of opinion.

During last week, the division in NATO for much of that time was 16-3. And the 16 included the United States of America and Canada, but it also included 14 European countries as well.

So there is a big debate - a big discussion going on at the present moment, most of it in the United Nations, but spilling into other fora about how best to disarm Saddam. There is no disagreement, no disagreement about the necessity for disarming Saddam, nor about the importance and the urgency of getting compliance with Resolution 1441.

There is unanimity on that.

Question: In the middle of the debate in Brussels, the Germans announced that they were going to bilaterally send the Turks a lot of equipment that they wanted. I just wondered, how did that affect the debate? Why do you think the Germans decided to do that? And did that tend to make the debate in Brussels academic?

Lord Robertson: No, it didn't, and I'll tell you why in just a second. But why did they do it? Because they wanted, I believe, to make the point that they had no disagreement on the substance of the proposition; in other words, the necessity to defend Turkey. But what they objected to was the timing of the decision and the message that it might have given about possible military action against Iraq. So they wanted to make it clear that they were accepting the treaty obligations, their friendship with Turkey, but at the same time not interfere with their belief that the timing was wrong.

Did that make the discussion academic? No, it didn't, because although the Germans are sending the Patriot missiles to Turkey which will then be married with the fire systems from the Netherlands, neither of them can function and operate correctly without the NATO AWACS aircraft and the integrated air defense system of NATO.

They are critical component parts of the integrated air defense system. And therefore, simply sending them down on their own would not have been an answer to the issue that was before us.

And Turkey, in any event, wanted that cover that NATO brings, and the integration of command that a NATO deployment would have produced.

Question: (OFF-MIKE) of retaliation against recalcitrant nations like Germany and especially France?

Lord Robertson: No, I detect nothing of the sort. I think that there is an appreciation of the reasons why people were involved in it, and I think a feeling of relief that we eventually found consensus. And I don't detect any indication of retribution at all, and nor would there be in an alliance that is long-standing and as united as the Atlantic alliance has been. I don't know whether you have the answer to the last Question I gave through there. And maybe I should repeat it just for this wider audience. I was asked whether this over-excitement in the debate with allegations of the anti-Americanism coming from Europe and of anti-Europeanism in the States was damaging.

And my answer to that Question is, yes, it will be, and it's not fair and it's not right. I constantly criticize people in the European part of NATO for allowing public opinion to go in an anti-American way, which is a betrayal of the steadfast links that the Americans have had with Europe and indeed the role played in liberating Europe by the United States. So that anti-Americanism is, I think, profoundly damaging and corrosive and needs to be condemned by all decent people.

I similarly condemn some of the approaches that are being taken here in relation to some European countries, and indeed, on occasion, against all European countries. You know, the jokes are good, you know, the humor is high, but underneath it is a, sort of, sense of discrimination or sometimes occasionally of racialism, which I think is deeply unfair, horribly corrosive. And I think on both sides of the Atlantic people need to cool down, get things into perspective, recognize that the values that unite this alliance in this island of stability in a very dangerous and volatile world are worth protecting. And that that means that tempers and emotions must be kept under control at this time. And we've got to recognize that there are nastier and more brutal enemies out there who are going to attack us if we get divided in the future. Thank you.

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