LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Summer 2007

by José Lello

Sir,
As NATO approaches its 60th anniversary, many are asking whether the alliance should produce a new "Strategic Concept" to replace the document adopted at its Washington DC summit in 1999. Secretary General de Hoop Scheffer has himself suggested the need for such a document. Member states, however, appear divided on the desirability or even the feasibility of such an exercise.

Some people support the Secretary General’s view that it is time for the alliance to produce a new blueprint that would represent alliance agreement on what role NATO should play in the new security environment, what contributions it can make, where and in cooperation with whom. Others appear to doubt the value of such an exercise, suggesting that the result would represent a series of compromises that would paper over existing differences rather than resolve them. Better, they argue, for the alliance to continue to define its role in a pragmatic step-by-step fashion that allows practice to precede theory.

As a parliamentarian and President of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly I believe it is indeed time for the alliance to take stock of where it stands and to chart its course for the future. Given the expanding role of NATO in partnerships and in the number of tasks it is asked to fulfil, I believe our publics need reassurance that their governments know where they are going and what they are seeking to achieve.

The contributions to the Spring issue of Europe’s World by Rob de Wijk and Bastian Giegerich support in their different ways the idea of a new strategic concept. Much of what de Wijk recommends for the alliance’s adaptation is already well underway in terms of the gradual acceptance by the alliance of the need to counter risks well away from its members, national territories via missions, new partnerships and additional tasks such as energy security. However, in his more radical recommendations, he goes too far and expects too much of what a strategic concept based on the consensus of 26 can be reasonably expected to achieve. His recommendation that strategic coercion and stabilisation and reconstruction should be treated as separate concepts with two different documents is unlikely to find support. Nor should it, because the proposal creates a separation that is both artificial and unhelpful in real world application. In fact these missions are part of the same range of contingencies that the alliance must plan for, as de Wijk indicates with his own examples drawn from Kosovo and Afghanistan. They are irrevocably linked in terms of planning – and provide further proof of the need for NATO and the EU to talk to each other – and in the way we prepare, deploy and employ our armed forces.