Stardate 20021022.1604

(On Screen): I've got a lot of sympathy for Lord Robertson. He is, I've been told, a career diplomat and tends to be given thankless assignments which he carries out to the best of his ability. Right now he's Secretary General of NATO, and he has the sorry task of being in charge of that organization as it collapses into irrelevance, despite his best efforts to prevent it. He's trying, yet again, to salvage NATO but I'm afraid this attempt will be no more useful than any of the others.

He's facing three crises in the alliance. First, the US spends twice as much on its military as all the other members combined, and has moved beyond them not merely in quantity of capability, but also in quality. It has reached the point where the European military forces are so far behind ours technologically that they can't actually operate on a battlefield beside us and actually make a significant contribution; all they'd do is get in the way.

Second is increasing rancor among the members. Third is the fact that it's becoming increasingly clear that the US doesn't need NATO and is finding it more burden than benefit.

So he's in Washington trying to do what he can to salvage the situation. He wants the US to help Europe to modernize, for one thing:

Robertson said Europeans have complained for years they would like to do more but the United States was unwilling to transfer technology or because it embraced `buy American' policies.

"Today, that simply will not do," Robertson said. "If the United States wants Europeans to share the responsibilities and risks of dealing with today's threats, it must be prepared to transfer the technology needed to modernize European forces."

"We can deal with concerns about onward proliferation and industrial competition," Robertson said. "We cannot deal with soldiers unable to communicate with each other, aircraft unable to use precision weapons, commanders unable to see the battlefield."

He skirts around an important issue: we'd be glad to sell that kind of communications equipment to Europe if they want to buy it. But that's not what they want.

What they want is for us to give them the technology to make it possible for them to create such things themselves. Not to put too fine a point on it, what they want to do is to use this as an excuse for wholesale industrial espionage.

But we could do it. We could either directly sell such equipment, or teach them to make it themselves. That, unfortunately, leaves three unanswered question: European money, European sense of responsibility and European willingness to shoulder risk.

Once we teach them to make this stuff, will they actually then commit the money to do it? Or will they just hijack that knowledge to compete better with us in other markets without actually upgrading? Considering the desperate budget situation and social problems in Europe, it's becoming increasingly difficult to believe that any nation over there will even be able, let alone willing, to actually substantially increase their military spending.

But even if they did, and finally created a force actually capable of fighting by our side, would they actually do so? So far in this war there's been five words of criticism of the US coming from our allies for ever word of criticism directed at our enemies. The reasons why are multiple and complex, but there's no reason to believe any of them will change any time soon, and it's become increasingly clear that they feel not the slightest responsibility for protecting the US, their partner in the NATO mutual defense pact, nor for taking any risk on our behalf.

Which means Robertson is asking us to buy a pig-in-a-poke. We'll give Europe a major technological boost, and then hope that somehow or other the continental Europeans will suddenly decide that they don't hate us after all and will start acting more like, well, the UK. Sadly, the chance of that is too low to take seriously.

Lord Robertson tries to justify all this by making noises about how important international cooperation is, but I'm not sure he actually believes what he is saying. It doesn't sound too convincing, I'm afraid, but as the leader of an organization which depends on cooperation he has to talk on that kind of basis.

His basic message is that international cooperation is essential:

But in a speech at the liberal-oriented Brookings Institution think tank here, Robertson said the United States shouldn't try to solve the problem by itself. International cooperation is indispensable if diplomacy and military efforts are to succeed, he said.

"Not one of the blows struck at terror and insecurity since Sept. 11 could have worked without countless nations working closely and effectively together," Robertson said.

Robertson said the 1990s showed that no nation could conduct diplomacy or military operations on its own, whether it involved the war against terrorism or efforts to eliminate Saddam's program to develop weapons of mass destruction.

Kosovo and Afghanistan, Bosnia and Desert Storm "show one thing clearly, that you cannot conduct either diplomacy or military operations on your own and that you need different options for different circumstances."

Unfortunately, the lesson of the 1990's was that coalition action is nearly always medioc