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| A NEW NATO? | |
 May 5, 1999 
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The leaders of the 19 NATO nations gathered in Washington, DC to mark the alliance's 50th anniversary and discuss the the war in Kosovo. But even as the Alliance celebrated that milestone, some foreign policy experts wonder if NATO will survive to see another 50 years. |
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NATO was originally founded as a pro-democracy Western military alliance; a show of allegiance against the Soviet Union. But since the end of the Cold War, Europe's changing political landscape has forced the Alliance to redefine itself. To meet the challenges of a new Europe, NATO has reworked its strategic concept, including the removal of a passage, that read, in part, "The Alliance is purely defensive in purpose: None of its weapons will ever be used except in self-defense." Such changes reflect NATO's new mission, which has included included military intervention in Bosnia in 1994 and in Yugoslavia this year. President Clinton, speaking at the Washington summit, reiterated NATO's new role: "Today we reaffirmed our readiness in appropriate circumstances to address regional and ethnic conflicts beyond the territory of NATO members. I am pleased that our strategic concept specifically endorses the actions to such as those we are now undertaking in Kosovo." And it is the issue of Kosovo that many political leaders believe will determine the future of the Alliance. "The new NATO that was emerging and would have been codified at the summit now confronts in practice what it was supposed to confront in theory," Ivo Daalder, a former member of the National Security Council, said recently. "Its new mission is to insure security outside its borders. Having defined that mission as fundamental, it is now losing this war and calling into question its own existence." But others view the shift to a more active role as essential for a NATO with no Soviet enemy. "NATO must play the same stabilizing role in central and southeastern Europe that it played in Western Europe, and more recently in Central Europe," National Security Adviser Samuel Berger has said, "by integrating new democracies, giving them an incentive to resolve their tensions peacefully and encouraging them to pool their strength instead of pitting it against their neighbors or their own people." So where does the Alliance stand at its 50th Anniversary? Is it the triumphant victor of the Cold War or a military and diplomatic dinosaur that has outlived its usefulness? Can it adapt to the changing world? Should it be the guiding force of military policy in Europe? Your questions are answered by Ivo Daalder and Doug Bandow. Mr. Daalder is a Former Director for European Affairs on the National Security Council staff and currently a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. Mr. Bandow, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, was Special Assistant to President Reagan. |
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