dinsdag 11 maart 2014

NATO’s Article 5: selling dangerous illusions.

Tuesday 11th of March 2014


When 12 countries signed the Washington Treaty back in 1949, article 5 was the cornerstone of the newborn alliance. Article 5 stated:

“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”

Although Article 5 made very clear that the American Congress did not agree to an unconditional declaration of war in case of an attack in Europe, the European allies got what they wanted from the treaty, which was article 5 in combination with a large deployment of American soldiers in Europe. This large presence of GI’s in combination with the type of war we expected in Europe in those days (massive attacks with thousands of tanks, guns and planes), made it absolutely clear that any military attack on European soil, would bring the United States of America into the war. The credibility of article 5 was high and it prevented the Soviet Union for 50 years from taking military actions against Western Europe. In the so-called “Cold War”, we saw as a result of this limitation, that military confrontation between the two global ideologies, communism and capitalism, took place elsewhere in the world, but not in Europe.

Change
Article 5 as the cornerstone of the treaty kept well in place until the 1990’s, when the Iron Curtain came down and the Soviet Union collapsed. The Warsaw pact divisions never marched in our direction… they just faded away. Although in every NATO summit since, the importance of article 5 was reconfirmed, the fact that the American troops left Europe (especially Germany) made article 5 go back to what is actually was in the first place: a rather vague political promise on paper.

Something else happened simultaneously. Former Warsaw Pact counties left the pact and joined the free world. The border of the Russian sphere of influence moved 1000 kilometres east, along the borders of countries like: Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Hungary and Rumania, and far away from countries like the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, France, Germany and Denmark. The result of this was that the perception of the level of external threat in a lot of NATO countries reduced to close to zero. And very fast not only the Americans but also: British, Dutch, Belgian, Italian and French troops – once deployed shoulder to shoulder along the Alliances eastern border – were withdrawn to their home countries and often shortly thereafter disbanded.

Old and New
NATO reached out to the new democracies in Central and Eastern Europe and offered them membership of NATO under certain conditions. Most of the new countries grabbed the opportunity with both hands, for some at great cost. Becoming a member of NATO, they believed, was the insurance that the freedom in central and eastern Europe - which came to many as a surprise - would not be a temporary softening of the Russian sphere of influence, like the temporary changes in the political climate in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. To those new NATO members, article 5 still was the cornerstone of the alliance and to them this article looked hard and reliable. After all: it had prevented the Russians 50 years from the use military of force against Western Europe.

But reliability is always the multiplication of the “will” and the “capability” to fight. The new NATO countries did not notice, that article 5 without the massive deployment of troops along the alliances border (capabilities) results in article 5 being an empty shell. The texts of article 5 offered every opportunity to the countries to limit their reaction to a military attack on a new member to “other than military means”, with could be close to nothing. And also the will was decreasing. During the cold war economic ties between NATO and Warsaw Pact countries were very limited because of the travel and trade restrictions between the blocs. Western European countries at that time were free to take a firm stand. It is a fact that meanwhile most Western European countries have strong economic ties with Russia.

This resulted in Europe in two sorts of NATO countries: Old Nations (relatively rich and safe) and the New Nations (relatively poor and unsafe). This brought about a situation where almost all countries in Europe reduced their defence spending rapidly. The old nations felt no threat; the new nations (busy to transform their battered economies from the communist to the capitalist system) could not afford to invest lots of money in military hardware. The attempts of NATO to transform the armed forces of old and new countries alike were therefore in most European countries excuses for major reductions in military capabilities.

The result of all these developments: almost all European NATO countries strongly reduced their defence spending, almost none keeping up with the promised 2 % of GDP. Furthermore, soldiers from USA and other old NATO countries were not longer deployed along the new border of the alliance. On top of that, most old NATO nations are nowadays heavily dependant on Russian gas and oil and their politicians showed very little appetite for sending soldiers into violent conflicts far away from their borders. All these developments reduced the deterrence of article 5 against possible - especially Russian - aggression to close to zero.

Sleep
The geo-political developments of the 1990-ies lulled the new (and the old) NATO countries into a deep sleep, in which “threat to territorial integrity” seemed something of a past era. A confused and weakened Russia seemed willing to cooperate with its former opponents and nobody noticed the fact that the meaning of article 5 to the new members diverged more and more from the psychological state of mind and shrinking military capabilities of the old NATO members. The fact that NATO got more and more involved in out-of-area conflicts (Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan) and after 2001 the Global War on Terror, strengthened this false sense of security within the Alliance of territorial safety.
So until very recently the situation was very clear: whereas the new NATO countries felt safe and secure within their borders as a member of NATO protected by article 5, all conditions necessary for the execution of military action in the case of an article 5 violation of the territorial integrity on European soil (of the new members) had disappeared.

Awakening
After the Georgian crisis of august 2008 the new NATO countries got their first wake up call. Russia showed that under Putin it had taken a new security course with the aim to recover its lost “sphere of influence”. And Putin showed that he did not hesitate to use force and was even willing to ignore the principles of international law to achieve this goal. Slowly new NATO members that are part of this sphere of influence start to realize that a military reaction from NATO to some kind of limited Russian aggression on European soil is nowadays highly unlikely. Article 5 in combination with the absence of deployed troops from old states along their borders and strengthened by an economical dependency of old states on Russian gas and oil, would make a decision within NATO to stand their ground with military force during an attack unthinkable. What happens at the moment in Ukraine is the next step in the restoration of the Russian sphere of influence. And more will follow. Some people argue that being a member of NATO would help countries like Georgia and Ukraine to keep the Russian Bear out. I strongly doubt this!

Let’s face the facts. Article 5 gives the old states – being far away from the endangered areas - more than enough room to do next to nothing in case of such an attack, especially if this would be a limited one. I strongly doubt that something different would happen if a similar small military operation would take place in NATO member states like Estonia or Latvia. Therefore my conclusion is that in the present situation article 5 to the new NATO partners is not a very credible security of their borders. Old NATO states are very unlikely to spill blood for new members.  Sometimes it takes a few crises like Georgia and Ukraine to realize this to the full. So it might be time to rethink article 5. Without deployed troops from the old Nations in the new border nations, article 5 is worth next to nothing. And getting more and more new nations to join NATO is selling them a very dangerous illusion.



Fr@ns M@tser

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