Stardate 20020201.0611

(On Screen): Lord Robertson has a thankless task. He is the Secretary-General of NATO, and he is gradually watching the organization he heads become more and more irrelevant. Only one of the members of NATO actually has a credible military, and that member is busy acting unilaterally. Most of the other major members are cutting their defense spending and preparing to make their militaries even smaller. He actually threatened to resign if they carried out those plans.

But his biggest problem is to try to convince everyone (perhaps including himself) that NATO actually matters now. It was originally created to oppose the Soviet Union, a nation which ceased to exist 10 years ago. Its original opposition was the Warsaw Pact, which also no longer exists, and at three of the Warsaw Pact's members are now actually part of NATO. So just what is NATO's mission now? No-one seems to know, and it may well be that it doesn't have one.

NATO did not participate directly in the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan, but Robertson said the United States could not have succeeded without coalition support.

"I don't believe there's any country, however big the superpower, that can actually do things on its own," he said.

The United States used all of Italy's air bases and airspace over Russia and Greece, despite strong opposition to the Afghan war in the latter country, he said.

Unfortunately, I think it's clear that the US didn't need NATO's military help at all. It is true that the European nations provided a lot of intelligence, and cooperation in that realm was quite useful. But that's not really a NATO function, and it probably would have happened even without NATO. And the use of European air bases was convenient, but not actually vital.

In September, it was apparent that this war was make-or-break for NATO. It would either renew the bonds and demonstrate the importance of NATO, or it would demonstrate that NATO was obsolete. The actual conduct of the war has actually done the latter. I don't think that NATO will be formally shut down; rather, it will become marginalized and ignored. And I think that Lord Robertson knows it, too. Unfortunately, he can't come out and say it in public. So he says other things:

Robertson also raised the prospect of reviving the World War II alliance of the United States, Britain and Russia.

"I think the experience of Sept. 11 has encouraged a lot of people to think that the cooperation that there was during World War II is something that might well be recreated again to our mutual advantage," he said.

Actually, the experience so far has demonstrated that the US neither wants nor needs any such cooperation, because such a tight coalition would impede American operational flexibility while offering little in the way of tangible benefits.