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| Updated: 08-Dec-2003 | NATO Speeches |
| At
the RUSI 8 Dec. 2003 |
The Omaha Milkman today Speech by NATO Secretary General, Lord Robertson In 1949, the Washington Treaty on which the Atlantic Alliance is based, was being written. The authors’ aim was for the language to be as clear and concise as possible. Most writers claim this. Few deliver.This time, however, one of the authors had a benchmark. The Treaty should be written so that it could be understood by a milkman from Omaha. That Nebraskan dairyman turned out to be an excellent editor. The Washington Treaty is a model of clarity and brevity. Better still, it has survived half a century of extraordinary change, and the efforts of theologists to deconstruct or reinterpret it, in very good shape. It proved its enduring relevance on September 12, 2001 when Article 5, the collective defence clause designed to save Europe from the Soviets, was invoked to help protect the United States from the new and evil scourge of mass terror. But what about the Omaha milkman? How would the Alliance’s first editor react to the new NATO, 54 years on? What would he understand? Or, indeed, fail completely to comprehend? First of all, our milkman would be surprised to find that the Alliance was still in business. Based on his own experience, he would have expected the Yanks to go home and the Europeans to fall out. Neither happened. More recently, historians told us that alliances between free nations do not survive the disappearance of the threat which first brought them together. NATO disproved that argument. The Warsaw Pact disintegrated. NATO retooled. Retooled first to help spread security and stability Eastwards across Europe. Then to use its unique multinational military capabilities to bring peace to Europe’s bloody and chaotic Balkan backyard. Now to confront the new threats of our post September 11 world. The challenges have changed. So has NATO. Our milkman would understand and approve. He would look at the mathematics. Twelve members in 1949. Nineteen today. Twenty six next year. A clear message of success. He might, however, wonder what had happened to the old adversary, the Soviet Union. Here, however, his perspective would be different than ours. Only four years after the end of the common struggle against fascism, and with the Iron Curtain only beginning to fall across Europe, he might not be that surprised to hear that we were once again partners with Russia. But for us children of the Cold War, the journey from the shadow of mutual extinction to a NATO-Russia Council in which Russia sits as an equal with 19 NATO members to deal with the common threats of the 21st century, is nothing less than epic. Our own young people are only hazily aware of the details. For them, the Cold War is as remote as the Great War. A different world, barely relevant and hard to understand. Yet when you explain to them what was done and why, they are enthralled. Because this journey, from 40 years of ideological hostility and head-to-head global military confrontation, to a working partnership and real cooperation, is one of the main platforms on which their very different world is based. We still have our differences with Russia. But they are the stuff of politics and diplomacy, not mutually assured destruction. Everyone in this room today knows this but we all take it too much for granted. We should do much more to explain to a new generation so that the NATO-Russia Council and other mechanisms for cooperation get the credit and support they deserve. The same applies to NATO’s other partnerships, with Ukraine, and with new democracies and old neutrals from Vancouver to Vladivostock in the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council and Partnership for Peace. Never before have 46 countries, as diverse as the 19 NATO members, Russia, Ireland and Switzerland, the Baltic states, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, made common cause in peacetime. That they do so on the basis of our common values, and that their partnership extends beyond political jaw-jaw to practical military cooperation, against terrorism and on the ground in NATO missions in the Balkans and Afghanistan, is another extraordinary but too little known achievement. As the name says, this really is a partnership for peace. More than that, it is the world’s largest permanent coalition. And it works through and because of NATO. Another clear and concise message that the milkman would understand and endorse. All right, you might say, but the real comparison is not with the NATO of 1949 but with the NATO of 1989, before the Berlin Wall fell, or the NATO of 1999, before Al Qaida struck the twin towers. NATO may have done a decent job then. What added value does the Alliance have today? Are you anything more than a political talking shop? My answer is four fold. To begin with, no-one should disparage talking shops. Remember that jaw-jaw is always better than war-war. And ours is jaw-jaw of the highest quality. Frank and open debate within a close but diverse family. Last week, Defence and Foreign Ministers tackled the most difficult current issues head-on. Iraq. European Defence. Afghanistan. We made progress on each one. Because NATO is the tried and tested forum for debate, decision and then action. More importantly, in the past two years, NATO has had more than a facelift. It has truly transformed. The initial impulse for transformation came from September 11. But the process rapidly became much deeper and much wider. During 2001 and 2002, NATO sent AWACS aircraft across the Atlantic to protect US cities, reversing the expectations on which the Washington Treaty had been based. We ditched sterile in-area or out-of-area theology by agreeing that threats would be met from whenever they might come. We created the NATO-Russia Council. Then the Prague Summit began to pull the Allies towards even more radical change. An enlargement summit became a transformation summit. Prague was such an important watershed because it encompassed transformation across they whole spectrum of Alliance business. Not only new members, and new partnerships with Russia and the European Union, but new capabilities and new missions as well. Together with the most radical reform ever of the Alliance’s internal processes and structures. The decision to admit seven new members, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, was of course highly symbolic. But it was also eminently practical. All of the new Allies will add value to our collective security. If you are sceptical, look at last week’s ceremony to stand up NATO’s first multinational chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defence battalion. An absolutely key capability in today’s military armoury. This new battalion is being led not by the traditional NATO heavyweights. It is being led by the Czech Republic, one of the first wave of new members, admitted only three years ago but now self-confident and capable enough to take the lead in one of our most important projects. Look also at the Poles, leading a multinational stabilisation division in Iraq. The CBRN battalion was just one of the military capability improvements that we were able to generate at Prague. Some, like the cutting edge NATO Response Force and the new command structure, were the fruit of national thinking. Others, especially the Prague Capabilities Commitments, needed additional momentum from my own strong-arm tactics around, behind and under the North Atlantic Council table. The overall result was a major package of military transformations, more far-reaching than past initiatives, and underpinned by the strongest possible commitments by Presidents and Prime Ministers that their governments would deliver. At the heart of these decisions was the new Allied Command Transformation, NATO’s motor for continued change and a vehicle for ensuring the future compatibility of European armed forces with their pace-setting US colleagues. Not on its own, no. But the gap is narrowing significantly. European governments really are transforming their forces. And Allied Command Transformation now provides the carrot of compatibility to add to the stick of marginalisation. Compared to the delivery of new strategic airlift aircraft, air tankers, precision weapons and the like, overhauling the Alliance’s internal processes may seem a little mundane. It is not. It worked with 19 members. Just. Because hard-pressed civilian and military staffs are committed to the organisation, and were able to stretch a paltry Civil Budget to make do. With 26 members and major new responsibilities, but no new money, it was a case of change or collapse. With British support, I persuaded the nations to accept the most radical internal change agenda in NATO’s history. We fundamentally restructured the International Staff to reflect the outputs of 2003, not the Cold War. We streamlined the Committee Structure and the decision-making process. We introduced objective based budgeting and new, fairer and performance related employment conditions for civilian staff. Now we are examining decision-making processes in capitals and in NATO from end to end. Most important of all, we demonstrated to the sceptics that NATO as an institution could change, could change itself, and could change quickly and for the better. All of the Prague improvements in focused military muscle, turning NATO from a sumo wrestler to a fencer, would of course be for nothing if they remained on the training ground rather than in the crisis zone. So the most important of all the Prague transformations was NATO’s adoption of new missions. The Alliance became the focal point for developing military capabilities to deal with terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Our new Czech-led CBRN battalion is just one result. Cooperation with Partners on terrorism and with Russia on theatre missile defence are others. I am told that one of my Brussels nicknames is “relevance Robbo”. So be it. Because if you are not relevant, you are out of business. Since Prague, NATO has proved its relevance in the most difficult circumstances. When the international community and every other multilateral institution were split and paralysed over Iraq, NATO was able both to agree and to act. Yes, it took us 11 difficult days to meet our Washington Treaty commitments and reinforce Turkey. But we did so when others failed. And those of you with long memories may recall that it took NATO longer still to reach a similar decision in politically less difficult circumstances at the time of the first Gulf War. Moreover, in building agreement, we confounded the critics who said that
this crisis would shatter NATO’s cohesion for ever. I have seen very few attempts to analyse how and why we went so quickly from the brink of going out of business to agreement to go out of area instead. In part, I think the reason was that nations peered into the abyss of a world without the transatlantic alliance, and recoiled. But I also sense that too many people underestimated the deep consensus which exists across Europe and the Atlantic on post September 11 threats and how to deal with them. Look at NATO’s Prague Summit statement and the EU’s draft security strategy. These are not the result of divergent world views. Of course there were – and still are – differences inside Europe and across the Atlantic on Iraq. But the differences were about how to handle Saddam Hussein in 2003. They were not on the big picture of the global and continuing threats from apocalyptic mass terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and failed or rogue states. If the differences had been as fundamental as the pessimists believed, NATO would not today be in Kabul and preparing to move out of the Afghan capital. Nor would it be supporting Poland and Spain in Iraq, and discussing calmly among Ministers a potentially larger role in 2004. So Prague was a genuine and profound transformation, one which is already firmly embedded in the Alliance’s culture and being implemented on the ground from Kosovo to Kabul. That is real added value. Our Omaha milkman would, I am certain, understand and approve. But he might still have one or two difficult questions to ask. How, for example, will an Alliance created for the Fulda Gap fare beyond the Hindu Kush? A good question. The answer is that NATO will succeed because it has no other option. All of its members understand and agree that if we do not go to Afghanistan, and succeed in Afghanistan, Afghanistan and its problems will come to us. Worse still, we would have to deal with the terrorists, the refugees and the drug traffickers with a much weaker international security structure. Because NATO would have been severely damaged. And the concept of multinational security cooperation, whether in NATO, the EU, the UN or coalitions, would have been dealt an equally heavy blow. I am, however, optimistic. Firstly, because NATO has an unbroken record of success. Second, because nations have woken up to the need for more usable and more deployable forces for operations of this kind, and are beginning to do something about it. My efforts to provide helicopters and intelligence teams for ISAF were well reported in the newspapers. There were fewer reports of our success last week in meeting the requirement – exceeding it in some respects. The mood has changed. I hope that next year we will be able to change the process as well so that Jaap de Hoop Scheffer can spend less time than I have been obliged to on blackmail, bullying and extortion. My third reason for optimism is NATO’s record in the Balkans. Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia are no longer in the headlines because NATO acted, and because NATO learned lessons and put them into practice. We helped stop civil war in Bosnia. We acted to prevent ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. We intervened to prevent a civil war in Macedonia. In each successive crisis, our involvement came at an earlier stage and was therefore increasingly effective in saving lives and preventing overspill. And we were prepared to stay the course. On Friday, the Foreign Ministers of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia and Montenegro sat side by side to my right at a working lunch of the EAPC countries. They are not Partners yet. But only eight years after Srebrenica, they are well on the way towards Europe’s mainstream. Most extraordinary of all, the strongest voice raised among the existing Partners in favour of their early membership was that of Croatia. If we can succeed like that in the Balkans, the basket case of the 1990s, we can succeed in Afghanistan today. A final question from the milkman might be: what is this row about European Defence all about? Is this really NATO’s death knell? My answer is an emphatic no. I have been as robust as anyone in my opposition to unnecessary duplication between NATO and the EU. We need more capabilities, not paper armies and wiring diagrams connected neither to soldiers nor to reality. But that does not mean I do not welcome a stronger European security and defence role, including the ability to conduct autonomous EU missions where NATO decides to stand aside and the arcane but essential Berlin Plus arrangements prove inappropriate. That has been part of the concept since St Malo. The arguments surrounding the options now under discussion between capitals are complex. Too complex I fear for our Omaha milkman. These discussions are nonetheless very welcome transparency. I am also reassured by the commitments to a strong Atlantic alliance, and to complementarity between NATO and the EU, being made on all sides of the debate. Not least because governments know that genuine institutional duplication and competition would cost much more to produce much less. No government likes that kind of deal. My message is therefore that everyone should take the long view. Put proposals to the acid test of whether they deliver real capabilities, real added value. But do not turn a Euro-drama into an Atlantic crisis. NATO and the EU both have more than enough to do without a new round of theological nitpicking. If, however, those who warn of slippery slopes are proved right, I will be the first to raise my voice in protest. The intricacies of European Defence apart, I suggest that the 1949 milkman from Omaha, and his European equivalents from Oslo to Oporto, Oban to Oberammagau, would come quite easily to understand and applaud the new NATO. Our world is not his. But his NATO is our NATO. Transformed to deal with a new generation of threats yet based firmly on the same shared history, culture, values and interests. It was not then, nor is it now, an alliance marked by homogeneity. Peter Carrington, who will be with us tonight, rightly used to say that NATO sang in harmony, not in unison. He knew that diversity was a strength, not a weakness. We do disagree. We will disagree. But in NATO – and now with Partners and with Russia – we work out our differences and move on, together. Ladies and gentlemen, On 1 January, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer takes over the reins. The face at the top will change but it will be the same NATO. As Secretary General, I have seen the successes of our new NATO in the villages of Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia where the children now have peace and prospects, not death and exile, because of the commitment of half a million or more NATO soldiers who have served in the Balkans since the mid 1990s. I have seen the final divisions and stereotypes of the Cold War smashed around the new NATO Russia Council table in Rome, and by NATO’s largest ever enlargement in Prague. I saw what the terrorists could do in the rubble of the Twin Towers and then how NATO could retool to help defeat them. I saw NATO troops bringing hope to the streets of Kabul, a continent and a half away from the old Iron Curtain. Most of all, I have seen a transformed Alliance doing what it has done best since 1949: delivering safety and security where it matters and when it matters. This is a simple message which everyone should understand and welcome.
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