A reality check for Nato

The alliance's 'new strategic concept', already in trouble, has been dealt a death blow by recent events in Georgia
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Robert Fox guardian.co.uk,
Wednesday August 13 2008 21:00 BST

David Miliband demonstrated a touching taste for modern diplomatic alphabet soup when he headed off this morning to discuss the Georgia crisis with fellow European foreign ministers. He declared to the BBC that Nato, the EU, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and UN were the means for delivering a just and stable solution to the latest gunfight in the Caucasus.

This is worrying. All four organisations have a strong record on delivery falling far short of their rhetoric – most particularly so in the case of Nato and the OSCE. It was feared that when Nato expanded into eastern Europe after the end of the cold war, it was offering a promissory note it stood no chance of redeeming, particularly in the case of the Baltic states which were the most eager applicants to join the alliance.

Like it or not, the alliance always hinged on article five of its founding treaty, and it still does. This is the clause that could have been written by Dumas' Three Musketeers. It says, essentially: "All for one and one for all". This is the bit that clearly attracts leaders like Mikheil Saakashvili, the Georgian president, to the club. France for one, and the UK not far behind, believe that both Georgia and Ukraine should be admitted to full membership. If they really mean it, we can expect a lot more stormy weather in the east. A spokesman for the French foreign ministry said, in the past 48 hours, that "the door for Georgian membership of Nato remains firmly ajar."

Article five has been invoked fully only once in the history of the alliance, and in all nearly twice. It was invoked in the aftermath of 9/11 as a response to an attack by a "foreign power" on US domestic sovereign territory. There was also serious debate about whether the article should have been invoked if Saddam's forces crossed into Turkey during the Kuwait invasion crisis of 1990-1991.

Imagine Georgia had been a member of Nato when the present crisis began, or even a serious candidate member. If article five's request for immediate military support had been invoked, less than half a dozen of the existing membership could have done anything at all. The US is so badly overcommitted in Iraq and Afghanistan that it could only move minimal forces at short notice. Of the European allies, only the UK and France have the vestiges of an expeditionary capability, and most of that is used up already in Iraq and Afghanistan in the case of Britain, and Afghanistan, Lebanon and Africa in the case of France.

The Georgia crisis should be a much needed reality check for Nato, and not an occasion for militaristic bluster. It is time for its member governments to reflect on what the alliance is for, and what it can really do. It should not be a diplomatic bulldozer for corralling Russia along the eastern marches of Europe. For this reason, among others, Ukraine and Georgia should not be given Nato membership, but some other security guarantee in which Nato and Russia are equal signatories.

Georgia is a symptom of a broader Nato malfunction. Since the 1999 Washington summit, Nato has taken on a global expeditionary role under what was then described as the alliance's "new strategic concept". That strategic concept has been undermined since the American-British intervention in Iraq. Its first major operation beyond its original defence area ("from the Atlantic to the Urals" in the original treaty) in Afghanistan is now at serious risk of losing focus. One wonders if Nato is the right organisation for running an assistance operation like Isaf – particularly as well under a third of the alliance nations are prepared to employ arms to any effective purpose in the mission.

The same genetic disorder haunts the EU foreign and security policy arm, and the UN – high on rhetoric, low on the means to achieve practical results. President Sarkozy, and his foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, according to the voices from Tbilisi and the Elysée, are talking about sending an EU peacekeeping force to South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Somebody should restrain them from such an ill-considered gesture – at best they would be keeping the peace where there is little to keep, and at worst Sarkozy and Kouchner would be delivering a handful of hostages and kidnap candidates.

The OSCE is a different matter. Its founding document (pdf), the Helsinki Final Act, strikes at the heart of the crisis in Georgia, and almost anyone else where minority rights and self-determination are under threat. The organisation came into being in the depths of the cold war – surprisingly so. It was supported by the US and western European nations as well as the Soviet Union.

The articles of the Final Act uphold the right of religious and ethnic minorities to self-determination, while at the same time maintain that recognised borders of sovereign territories should not be altered by violence and aggression. These propositions lie at the heart of the contest between Moscow and Tbilisi – as they do in the question of Kosovo, the wars of Yugoslavia's dissolution and dozens of other disputes that continue to spark brushfire wars across the world.

One of the striking aspects of the Georgia crisis is the absence of ideology. There has been no invocation of great heroes or great theorists – the biggest Georgian of them all, Josef Stalin, has been put under a shroud by both principal parties. The presiding shades have been those of the Sun Tzu and Machiavelli – who advocated that above all a successful commander must exploit opportunity presented suddenly on the battlefield – fortuna, as the Machiavelli put it in the The Prince.

When Georgian forces advanced on the South Ossetian capital last Thursday, they presented the Russians with their moment of fortuna. It allowed them to re-assert their military might and claim the "security space of their regional neighbourhood". This sounds an extraordinarily cynical piece of contemporary geopolitics-speak – but after all it is only a variant of the notion of "vital interests" of imperial powers through the centuries.

This morning, the BBC's diplomatic correspondent suggested that "Russia may find itself the diplomatic loser" in the present crisis. This may indeed be the comforting chatter in the chanceries of Europe and America right now, but as the sacked secretary of the Florentine republic, one Nicolò Machiavelli, would say – it is beside the point.

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