This issue of Russia in Global Affairs carries an article entitled, Putting NATO’s Riga Summit into Context, by Rad van den Akker and Michael Rühle. The article, written professionally and demonstrating inside knowledge, is thought provoking and invites serious discussion on the matters contained in it.

Van den Akker and Rühle give a true account of areas of accord where the international community can and must advance, including in the realm of NATO-Russian relations. At the same time, the article alludes to, or totally ignores, some essential aspects of NATO’s role. Due to space restrictions, I am not able to comment on all the infelicities of the commentary in question, so I will focus on the one I believe to be most important: portraying NATO as the main guarantor of global and regional security, and practically the only gate to freedom and democracy.

Writing about NATO’s summit in the Latvian capital of Riga, held in late November, the authors place it “in its proper context, which is NATO’s broader evolution from an Alliance initially founded to provide for the territorial defense of Western Europe into an instrument for safeguarding transatlantic security interests wherever they may be at stake” (bold italics mine). Thus, they assign primary importance to the debatable presumption of universality and the supremacy of transatlantic values, which serves as the foundation for NATO’s self-nomination to leadership in international affairs.

At the same time, judging by the article, the Alliance has come to realize that ruling the world on its own is a mission impossible. “One major feature of the current third phase of NATO’s evolution is the organization’s closer interaction with other major institutions,” the article says. However, the range of the Alliance’s major international partners has been rather severely reduced – the authors only mention the UN, the European Union, the G8, the World Bank and nongovernmental organizations.

According to the authors, a more structured relationship between NATO and the United Nations is another near-term aim. “NATO and the UN operate in the same areas, yet daily cooperation in the field contrasts with a glaring lack of political consultation at the strategic level,” write van den Akker and R?hle. It seems that the Alliance, believing in the global dimension of its mission, assumes the formats of the two organizations to be identical and now seeks to build a direct dialog with the UN leadership.

Meanwhile, the reality tells a different story. The memberships and statutory documents of the United Nations and NATO have completely different features; therefore, their functions differ essentially. For the international community, the United Nations has always been – and still is – the only universal center for coordinating international efforts in order to maintain peace and security in the world. This is why any actions taken in circumvention of the UN Charter and Security Council can disrupt these efforts and undermine the fundamental norms of international law.

In the same paragraph, the authors come out with an ambitious statement that NATO is “emerging as a major ‘enabler’ of the UN.” Perhaps the United Nations is in a better position to judge the veracity of such a statement, but we find no such judgments in UN documents and decisions. One could only welcome the Alliance’s readiness, mentioned in the article, to provide “training and mentoring of UN peacekeepers, or advice on planning and interoperability issues,” but for the following phrase: “That kind of assistance would greatly help a currently overstretched UN to perform its role as a custodian of global peace and stability” (bold italics mine). In other words, the authors view NATO-UN relations “from above.” As for NATO’s “mentoring” on issues related to UN peacekeeping activities, NATO’s practice of debarring OSCE charter bodies and member states from controlling field missions of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights does not inspire much confidence that the proposed model of interaction would be efficient.

Of the numerous international regional organizations, the authors of the article mention just one – the European Union. The de-facto transatlantic OSCE is not even mentioned. If the authors avoided this subject because this particular organization is experiencing a real systemic crisis, then the omission is understandable. But the omission of all the other regional structures is symptomatic of something else.

The authors cite Afghanistan as an example of a country where NATO demonstrated that “it was now fully prepared to take a functional approach to security.” However, the effectiveness of the international presence in Afghanistan leaves much to be desired, to put it mildly (which was admitted at the Riga summit). Nevertheless, for political and status considerations the Alliance continues to avoid full-scale cooperation with major regional security organizations, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Collective Security Treaty Organization.

The case with the CSTO is particularly remarkable. In July 2004, its Secretary General sent a letter to his NATO counterpart with a proposal to establish dialog and interaction between the two organizations in combating drug trafficking, including in Afghanistan. In particular, he invited the Alliance to participate in the CSTO’s annual anti-drug exercises, Operations Channel, as well as create anti-drug security belts to the north of Afghanistan. NATO would support these zones from the northern Afghan provinces, and CSTO would support them from beyond.

Incredibly, NATO only replied to the letter a year later, not in essence and only after repeated reminders, including at the highest political levels. In its formal reply, Brussels only expressed its readiness to listen to representatives of those states that chaired the CSTO in 2004-2005 at a session of the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council. The requested reports delineated general information about the CSTO’s activities and the essence of its initiatives for establishing dialog with NATO.

The Alliance has not yet responded to the CSTO’s initiatives. This, of course, leads us to believe that NATO is not ready to establish relations between the two organizations, and that it prefers to use its own channels in bilateral ties. This decision fails to promote broad international cooperation in the post-conflict construction in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Brussels’ declarations about the priority of the Afghan issue, which include efforts to counter terrorist and drug threats, have not become any more convincing.

The CSTO views the Alliance’s approach as a politically motivated mistake, which, sooner or later, will be replaced by Brussels’ realization of the objective need to act in major global affairs in the spirit of real partnership. The spirit of such a partnership presupposes, in particular, respect for the positions, opinions and proposals of one’s partners. It is to be hoped that the Alliance’s hesitation in such mutuality is due to a “re-formatting” rather than overconfidence or “dizziness from success” – all the more so when we consider the present situations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo. These examples provide no grounds for arrogance.

Moreover, the contemporary world is gradually overcoming its temptations for wishful thinking in the form of summits, anniversaries and other events as landmarks of a continuous “history of success.” A handful of people today use the “know-how” of the Soviet Communist Party, which proclaimed itself “the wisdom, the honor, and the conscience of the contemporary epoch.” It described each of its congresses as “historic,” and believed that the number of its members was a major factor of its influence. Therefore, without commenting on the colorful picture of the Alliance’s evolution that is painted in the article, not to mention the process of its enlargement and adaptation to modern challenges and threats, I would rather focus on NATO’s relations with the Russian Federation.

I fully share the authors’ conclusions that “the immediate post-Riga period should be a time to deepen the NATO-Russia partnership,” and that “the potential of the NATO-Russia relationship is far from exhausted” and NATO and Russia have common interests in diverse areas. However, I do not think that NATO’s continuous enlargement – Russia now shares land or sea borders with six NATO member countries – is a factor for stabilizing cooperation between the parties and the situation as a whole, as the authors argue. Against the background of the declared plans for further enlargement by including Russia’s neighbors, statements such as, “Russia has nothing to fear,” echo more like mantras than real arguments. Russia knows only too well the mentality and motives of its ex-allies in the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Russia understands, probably better than any other state, the real causes and goals of the confrontational activities by particular governments, and knows the real worth of assurances of “eternal” allied sentiments.

Western politicians like to repeat (fortunately, the authors of the article under consideration avoid using the clich?) the claim that Russia has no right to veto the entry of new NATO members. Russia, however, has never proclaimed to have such a right. At the same time, it cannot but be concerned that all enlargement-related issues – including the modernization of the Alliance’s infrastructure on the territory of its new members – are considered behind Moscow’s back. These decisions are being made without any consultations from Russia and without joint studies concerning the possible consequences for Russia’s security. The latest example of such unilateral decision-making came from the U.S. administration’s negotiations with Poland and the Czech Republic, which involves the possibility of constructing components of the U.S. missile defense system on these territories, and possibly in the future in the Caucasus and Ukraine. When asked whether the plan needed approval from NATO’s 26 members, Lt. Gen. Henry Obering, chief of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, said: “It’s important that we get the understanding and what I would consider to be as much partnering as we can do with our NATO allies. We are not looking for approval per se.” Statements like these do not improve Russia’s perception of the Alliance.
Moreover, Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski has explained that this missile defense system will be directed “against actions of states that do not want to obey the rules,” while NATO Supreme Allied Commander General Bantz John Craddock described it as a shield that “will provide security from attacks from rogue regimes.” The list of “rogue” players will be drawn up unilaterally by the system’s authors and co-authors – that is, arbitrarily, and reminiscent of the obsolete Brezhnev doctrine of “limited sovereignty.” Against this background, the position of the European Union, which favors broad consultations on the missile defense system, looks much more constructive. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose country is now holding the European presidency, has suggested – not without grounds – that NATO “is the best place for discussing this issue.”

Moscow does not conceal its concern over the increasingly aggressive nature of NATO as the bloc continues to grow. Manifestations of this aggressiveness include territorial claims against Russia, the glorification of SS members, Nazis and their local collaborators, bias against Russian-speaking populations in the post-Soviet states – who are literally branded in their passports as “non-citizens” – including other forms of infringement of their human rights. Finally, the denigration of the Yalta accords and the anti-Hitler coalition in general, etc. These “tricks” – which Brussels prefers to ignore – by the new members and candidates for NATO membership, do serious damage to the Alliance’s reputation and burden Russia-NATO cooperation.

Recently, newcomers to the Alliance proposed forming an “Energy NATO,” a proposal that received enthusiastic support from Washington. In a letter to the German chancellor, U.S. Senator Richard Lugar explained that, should either bloc member be forced to change its policy as a result of an energy cutoff, an Energy NATO would enforce Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, according to which “an armed attack against one or more of [NATO member states] in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.” Citing the termination of Russian energy supplies to Georgia and Ukraine, Lugar designated, under no uncertain terms, a potential “enemy,” against which the bloc must mobilize.

In light of these developments, Russia can no longer rely on the general assurances of the bloc’s good intentions. In the early 1990s, Moscow placed its faith in such promises and got its fingers burnt. Today, it has no intention of repeating those mistakes and is openly insisting on the development of a real partnership with NATO.

The article by Rad van den Akker and Michael Rühle convincingly confirms that today, perhaps as never before, that what is required is not palliative decisions and half-measures, but purposeful efforts to overcome confrontational sentiments, allay or at least reduce Russia’s concerns, and elevate NATO-Russia cooperation to a qualitatively different level. This new partnership would adequately reflect the realities of the variegated modern world. This is in the interests of gradual development much more than confrontation.