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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to be useful, and regional initiatives such as the Mediterranean Dialogue and the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative have proven largely ineffectual. The Alliance’s attempts to rationalize its partnerships’ portfolio, meanwhile, have had only limited success. The overall impression is still one of unchecked institutional proliferation: ‘an accumulation of partly unconnected, partly overlapping formats’ sits alongside ‘antiquated practices’; new formats have failed to displace old ones; and multilateralism competes with special bilateral relationships or minilateral sub-groups.72 Partnership schemes also require coordination across several agencies. The sheer scale of that effort has exacted a significant toll upon NATO’s human and financial resources. Partnerships in the round, one former alliance official has suggested, have become ‘close to unmanageable’.73

       Thin Commitment

       Fragmentation

      NATO also suffers from internal division. Alliance unity or ‘cohesion’, Patricia Weitsman has suggested, is ‘relatively easy to generate and maintain’ where there is ‘a mutual desire to contain a mutual adversary’.82 But NATO no longer has this singular focus. It has taken on more responsibilities and so there are more points of disagreement. The Alliance has also acquired more members, so making the problem worse. Just how bad things have become does need some qualifying. Weitsman points out that NATO has become an alliance that fights. Its missions in Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya and Afghanistan have all occasioned significant internal disagreement: over war aims, variable levels of commitment among the allies and the utility of force. But none of these operations has proven fatal to the Alliance. NATO’s collective resolve has held, and whatever the wisdom of the missions themselves, staying the course ‘suggests’, according to one view, ‘that the Alliance can adapt to difficult circumstances’.83


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