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A New Role for NATO
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19229 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1991 |
3,848 Words |
| Author
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Jed C. Snyder
Jed C. Snyder is a senior research fellow at the Washington
office of the National Strategy Information Center, where he
is directing a project on "New Approaches to Transatlantic
Security." He served in the State Department during the first
Reagan administration, and from 1984 to 1987 was deputy
director of national security studies at the Hudson Institute.
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Old alliances never die, they just become anachronisms. It is difficult to imagine NATO Secretary-General Manfred Woerner uttering this MacArthuresque farewell to the NATO generals and bureaucrats in Brussels. Yet it is likely that he and other observers of the great transatlantic security experiment have begun to wonder privately whether the alliance as we have known it for more than four decades is, indeed, in the twilight of its existence.
The events of the last two years suggest that the postwar system of international relations is at least in transition, if not in the midst of an upheaval. The principal (if unwitting) agent of change, Mikhail Gorbachev, has altered the terms of reference for U.S.-Soviet relations, which has functioned as the scaffolding for the contemporary structure of global interstate relationships. In the rigid bipolar security environment dominated by the competing European alliances of the United States and the Soviet Union, the state of superpower relations tended to act as a barometer for European security. Since the first Berlin crisis of 1948, superpower attention has been focused (at times almost exclusively) on the possibility of East-West conflict in Europe, where U.S. and Soviet interests most clearly intersected.
Europe has been the nucleus of both Soviet and American power, from which radiated a series of bilateral and multilateral security commitments and a global network of supporting military installations. For better or worse, judgments about the temperature of the East-West rivalry in Europe affected nearly all of the other military, economic, and diplomatic intercourse that has distinguished the modern state system. For Washington and Moscow, Europe was the center of the universe.
It is assumed by the vast majority of scholars and pundits that the level of superpower competition in Europe and globally can be expected to decline dramatically over the next decade and, therefore, the structure supporting this competition will likely be transformed and reshaped to fit an as yet undefined "new world order." The starting point for this revolution in security affairs will be Europe, where it is expected that the system of alliances created to regulate superpower competition will wither as the raison d'etre for bloc politics disappears.
Europe's Transformation
Europe surely has been transformed as a result of the revolutions of 1989. One can no longer speak credibly of a Europe divided along an
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