What's Wrong with NATO and How to Fix it. Mark Webber

What's Wrong with NATO and How to Fix it - Mark Webber


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NATO was paralysed by crisis in the Balkans, ‘Clinton and his advisors decided’, one official noted, ‘that the only way to end the disagreements among the allies was to stop listening to them.’ American officials ‘would settle on a course of action’ and then expect the allies to fall in line.41

      After 9/11, American foreign policy shifted to the self-declared ‘global war on terror’. The so-called ‘Bush Doctrine’ that emerged in response was premised on ‘tak[ing] the fight to the enemy before they can attack us […] confront[ing] threats before they fully materialize [and] advanc[ing] liberty and hope as an alternative to the enemy’s ideology of repression and fear’.42 Such ideas lay behind the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US rendition programme and American counter-terrorist measures in places as far afield as the Philippines, Pakistan, the Horn of Africa and Yemen. Much of this activity was clandestine and unilateral. Where it did involve partners, it was often done ad hoc through coalitions of the willing. Insofar as NATO mattered, it was through the development of capabilities and doctrine that would support American efforts. US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld thus demanded in September 2002 that the allies develop expeditionary and rapid response forces. NATO’s answer was the 2002 Prague Capabilities Commitments, the development of the NATO Response Force, a major command structure reform and the 2002 Military Concept for Defence against Terrorism. ISAF, as we have seen, would be the signature mission that bore NATO’s commitment to this new global agenda, but NATO also mounted a training mission in Iraq and lent its support to the African Union in Somalia and Sudan.

       Liberal Ideas and Liberal Order

      NATO’s task expansion has been made possible by alliance institutions, given shape by allied politics and driven by American ambition. Allied calculations here are best understood as ‘interests’. But interests co-exist with ideas – the beliefs which provide the broader setting of action, a desirable end state in its grandest sense and, linked to that, a roadmap that provides answers to why and how a particular course of action should be taken.47 Measuring the influence of ideas upon policy is a complex business, but in NATO’s case the task is made a little easier because the Alliance has explicitly articulated an ideational rationale for its endeavours.

      However noble its motives, the upshot of this liberal impulse has been a lack of restraint. The abstract quality of values or ideas gives them a universal and expansive application. NATO has attempted to instantiate those ideas through expeditionary nation-building, the management of global security and the spread of liberal market democracy. In consequence, Patrick Porter suggested in 2010, NATO had become unbound, cast loose from its traditional ‘demarcated sphere’ of activities, and facing the world with a sense of unlimited responsibility.56

      There


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