Despite often being seen as one of the relics of the Cold War, the Atlantic Alliance is still the keystone of European security. Nonetheless, preserving the world’s greatest military alliance has happened to the detriment of some of its greatest assets: the cohesion of its members, the coherence of its objectives and awareness of its limitations. After the Bucharest summit and a few months from the Atlantic organization’s 60th anniversary, it is useful to take stock of its perspectives and the challenges on the horizon.
NATO: the Challenges of Cohesion
The Bucharest summit confirmed a long-standing trend in the transformation process of the Atlantic Alliance: the transatlantic relationship now covers a much wider area than the ‘historical’ European region and exceeds the strictly defined physical limits of its politico-military objectives. Contrary to a widely held belief, this latest summit will not go down as a key moment in the Organisation’s history. The Declaration produced at its conclusion has certainly generated more questions than answers.
Global Ambitions
A prime question concerns the composition of the Alliance and, as a consequence, the very identity of the Organisation. The incorporation of the Central European countries, followed by those of Eastern Europe and the Black Sea, and now the Mediterranean (Croatia and Albania) has increased the influence, geostrategic depth and power projection capabilities of the United States as much as Europe. At the beginning of the 1990s, the objective of the former Soviet bloc countries was obvious: to create a ‘democratic cordon’ linking the Baltic with the Black Sea in order to limit the influence of Russia. This was described in 1993 by Anthony Lake, National Security Adviser to President Clinton, as the strategy of enlargement towards the East of the zone of influence, security and prosperity controlled by the Americans. For them, the achievement of a united Europe would allow American and European forces to concentrate on new threats, which it was thought at the time would arise elsewhere.
Today, the extension of the Alliance is essentially part of a competition for geopolitical, economic, strategic and cultural influence between Americans, Europeans, Chinese and Russians for the region extending from the Maghreb to Pakistan. The ‘arc of crises’ of the Cold War has new followers; the pursuit of influence no longer involves just Central and Eastern Europe or the Caucasus but the ‘Greater Middle East’ constantly referred to by President Bush. It is from this perspective that the project, fiercely defended by some allies, to integrate Ukraine and Georgia into the Membership Action Plan must be understood. They constitute the geopolitical keys to the control of the vast regions which border them to the north and south.
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