NEW DEFENCES against missile and cyber warfare, terrorism and piracy, and a renewed mandate for global missions were on the agenda yesterday when foreign and defence ministers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) met in Brussels. Crucially they were asked by the organisation’s secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, to help chart a course for the next decade by contributing to a new, as yet notionally secret, Nato “Strategic Concept”, a vision statement to be agreed by leaders at its November summit in Lisbon.
It is to replace a strategy drafted in 1999, a different age, ahead of the 9/11 attacks, with a new raison d’être more attuned and relevant to a post-cold war age in which Russia is no longer seen as a threat by most members and in which the EU is evolving its own parallel defence structures.
The rethinking occurs as the US expresses concerns, reiterated yesterday by defence secretary Robert Gates, at the reluctance of cash-strapped Europeans to step up to financing massive defence commitments – Britain, for one, is set to announce cuts of at least 10 per cent in its defence budget. There is also a changing political climate in some member states, like the push by Germany, with the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium and Luxembourg, for the removal of US nuclear weapons from their soil, and Berlin’s call for a requirement, akin to Ireland’s EU position, that Nato missions be legitimised by UN mandate.
Nato will certainly want to retain its core commitments to territorial defence of member states and its mutual defence guarantees, mainly to placate eastern Europe, but Rasmussen’s document will emphasise the new strategic challenges and the alliance’s need to conduct operations like Afghanistan elsewhere in the world.
It will stress modernisation of armed forces, particularly in missile defence, ostensibly against Iranian and North Korean threats. Encouraged by the US, Rasmussen is proposing a €200 million expansion of current battlefield missile defence systems over 10 years to link existing capabilities and the missile interceptors Washington plans to deploy in Europe. He said after the meeting that allies were moving in that direction, adding that he hoped Russia would join in creating such a shield. Moscow, which says the US system is a deliberate attempt to target it, has yet even to confirm it is willing to attend the November meeting.
Ministers also discussed savings on Nato’s $1 billion budget, including reform of the command structure and the reduction in the number of Nato agencies.