On Nick Witney's ''The death of NATO''

Sir,

It is premature of Nick Witney to write off NATO just because the alliance is approaching its 60 birthday. NATO has faced plenty of new challenges since the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet empire. These include the Balkan conflict, humanitarian crises and the global war on terror. It is certainly true that NATO must confront serious problems and redefine its role and mechanisms to suit the modern world. But anyone who wants to bury NATO should first propose a credible alternative which will do an equally good job of maintaining Euro-Atlantic security.

So what are the potential alternatives? We could replace NATO with short-term alliances designed to resolve particular problems. This was the solution adopted for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Participants in such ad hoc coalitions do not however enjoy any great feeling of safety, and they also generate mistrust towards the U.S. in its self-styled role as “the world’s policeman.”

Another possibility is to replace the transatlantic structures of defence with a bilateral system composed of the U.S. and the European Union. This scenario is unrealistic because the EU will never be able to afford to match U.S. spending on its armed forces. In addition, by separating EU and U.S. military structures it would tend to divide the democratic world rather than unite it, and this at a time when the West should be closing ranks against the growing military strength of, say, China, Iran or Russia.

NATO could, of course, be dissolved and replaced by a new security structure. But that would be pretty futile if the replacement were more or less the same as the present alliance. On the other hand, if the new organisation accepted Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s proposal to include Russia, it would soon become paralysed by the fundamental differences of values and interests between Moscow and the NATO allies. Each of these three scenarios thus seems to offer a worse solution than the present one.

One thing that would help the debate about global peace and security is a more honest appraisal of the root cause of our problems. NATO is not, let’s face it, the main issue here. The real challenge is the decline of the United Nations. The UN has become ever-more dominated by small, anti-western and anti-American countries. It is becoming for many the scene of an ideological crusade rather than a forum for resolving the world’s problems. Torn between the contradictory values and interests of the superpowers and their satellites, the UN is less and less able to guarantee stability and security in different parts of the globe. The Balkan wars and the Darfur conflict are two vivid examples of the paralysis of the UN, which can no longer react even to the most drastic cases of genocide. Even a reformed NATO will be ineffective unless the UN is able to fulfil its proper function and act quickly to prevent world conflicts.

Personally, I am not worried about NATO. New times and new challenges require a new strategy. And while there is certainly a lot of work to do to improve the alliance, I see no better way ahead for Euro-Atlantic security – even if NATO continues to be a highly imperfect structure.