A New NATO-Based Alliance

Reform NATO — and then the U.N.

Conrad Black
Thursday, May 20, 2010

It is becoming urgent that international organizations be reevaluated and reformed. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank have tried to adapt to post–Cold War conditions, but the United Nations is as mockingly perverse as ever, and the increasing ambiguity of NATO requires attention.

The most successful alliance in history, NATO established the principle that “an attack upon one is an attack upon all,” though the following clause in the treaty allowed member states to interpret that clause individually. The only time these clauses were invoked was following the terrorist attacks on the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001.

America’s allies unanimously determined that they had all been attacked, and asked Washington what it expected of them. The campaign in Afghanistan resulted and, though the barbarous Taliban regime was sent packing in quick time, and NATO forces have remained in-country ever since, the U.S. quickly demoted that effort to a secondary status and plunged into Iraq, an enterprise that many of its principal allies, including Canada, France, and Germany, did not support.

George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld suspected, probably with some reason, that their allies were as interested in restraining the ferocity and breadth of America’s response and collegializing the decision-making process as they were in helping out. Yet the brusque manner in which the United States effectively declared that any country that was not actively supporting it in its conduct of what it called a war on terror was indistinguishable from an enemy, was not the sort of mature and sensible leadership of NATO previous American leaders from President Truman on had generally provided.

That takes nothing from the impudence of the French and German leaders, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder, in forming a virtual anti-American alliance with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Even less does it excuse France’s sleazy financial dealings with Saddam Hussein, its championship of “smart sanctions” (“smart” meaning selectively and sufficiently porous to ensure great profit for France), or its padding around the temporary members of the U.N. Security Council obstructing American policy. The French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, was infamously unable to answer when asked, at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies as the Iraq War got underway, which side France favored.

NATO today is essentially an arrangement between formerly Soviet-occupied countries in desperate need, for obvious historic reasons, of a U.S. military guarantee against Russia, and a cordial alliance that includes a democratic Germany; and the countries that joined the U.S.-led NATO originally to resist Soviet expansionism, and that now retain the American guarantee as a cost-free insurance policy. They believe in the “alliance of the willing,” meaning that they graciously accept the U.S. guarantee, but that, as each crisis arises, they will decide whether it pleases them to assist the Americans in doing anything about it. This does not fit the normal definition of an alliance.

NATO should become the foundation of a new alliance system, in which all passable democracies (a criterion the original NATO waived in several cases) agree on the defense of their own borders, including a carefully crafted policy of preemptive assault against plausibly apprehended terrorism, including defined failed states. NATO could also make parallel agreements with important non-democratic states such as Russia and China.

In 1941, President Roosevelt foreswore appeasement (in January) and eleven months later promised that “treachery” on the scale of Pearl Harbor “will never again endanger us.” The terrorists believe they have found a way around that double defense that deterred attacks on the U.S. for 60 years from Pearl Harbor to 9/11, by operating without nationality from anarchic or wilderness areas of ineffective states, and by exploiting those willing to sacrifice their own lives in what Osama bin Laden called a “massacre of the innocents.”


There is no alternative for any serious government — even one, such as Russia or China, not in transports of good will toward the West — to opposing terrorists and terrorism-supporting regimes. Russia has a much greater domestic-terrorism problem than any advanced Western country, and this should form the basis for reasonable cooperation, especially in south central Asia, including the Islamic countries formerly in the USSR.

It is nonsense for Russia and China to feign indifference to nuclear arms in the hands of Iran and North Korea. With Kim Jong-il it was always a game of chicken. He is not really independent of China; and the U.S., Russia, Japan, and South Korea had to wait for China to stop play-acting and lean determinedly on Pyongyang, which seems finally to be happening, a process that may have been assisted by renewed U.S. military assistance to Taiwan.

Russia and China were finally making purposeful noises about sanctions on Iran, having done much to enable that uncivilized government to threaten Eurasia with a nuclear military capability. The Russians and Chinese seemed finally to be warming to the virtues of a non-nuclear Iran. And the attempt of that country’s ragamuffin president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to stir up international support for his nuclear program had, predictably, been one of recent diplomacy’s more ludicrous fiascoes, until the presidents of Turkey and Brazil came forth from the shadows and seized an opportunity to masquerade as world powers, by giving Iran a softer deal even than had been arranged with France and Russia last year for the moderated enrichment of Iranian uranium. One of the phenomena of a world in which the principal countries are not divided in hostile camps as they were in the Cold War is that secondary powers stray from former allegiances, and not always mischievously.

Brazil, having been the great unfulfilled hope of Latin America for almost two centuries, since the retirement of the Portuguese in 1822, is finally emerging as a stable and growing power with one of the world’s ten greatest economies. It is no longer essentially a ward of the U.S. hobnobbing only with its tediously proverbial “sister republics.” Former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso and outgoing president Lula da Silva are a refreshing contrast from the previous presidential sequence of light-fingered and neurotic demagogues, punctuated by Ruritanian juntas of portly generals and admirals so heavy-laden with non-combat medals and ribbons they could barely button up their tunics. Turkish and Brazilian good offices could be useful, but in this case, they seem to have decided to make President Obama look like a naïf, and it is hard to see this as anything but a shattering revelation of the plunge in U.S. credibility as a superpower in the last 16 months.

Unless Russia and China really have come to their senses and join in jamming through what Secretary Clinton has called “crippling sanctions,” the moment of truth has finally arrived. This administration must make the point that it will not be upstaged by overreaching amateurs in Great Power matters, and will not tolerate such mortally dangerous insolences from the outlaw regime in Tehran, or it must concede America’s abdication and decline and leave it to Israel to teach Iran a painful lesson. It is almost, but not quite, too late to salvage something from the debacle of the Obama administration’s foreign policy. This should be to this president the startling eye-opener that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was to Jimmy Carter. As long as they do not take it as a license to usurp Washington’s place in the world, the strengthening of Turkey and Brazil, and their desire to act autonomously, need not be negative developments.

An enlarged and repurposed (and appropriately renamed) NATO could concert with China and Russia and other important non-democratic states on a massive clean-up of the United Nations, so that it becomes a serious forum, with reasonably honest agencies, and not just a playpen and slush fund for the world’s most retrograde and perverse governments. In particular, the U.N.’s peacekeeping efforts must cease to be, as they are now, largely the rental by backward despotisms of undisciplined mercenaries to contending factions in war-torn countries, in exchange for hard currency from the U.N.’s richer members.

Roosevelt intended the United Nations to be an enforcer of peace by the Great Powers, while disguising American dominance in the world and reassuring American isolationists that the world was not such a frightening and distasteful place as they had feared. It gradually evolved into a piggy bank and substitute for psychiatry for economically and politically underdeveloped countries. It needs a new mission.