On NATO’s future

Can NATO change its identity? Can a military organisation reinvent itself as a peaceable trading partner? Of course. In Nature, nothing is immutable and change is the rule not the exception. But that is not to say that a thing can metamorphose into its exact opposite.

And yet that is what NATO purports to be doing in the post-Cold War era, a claim that has not been disputed by the Arabs. In fact, we have taken to using the innocuous English acronym NATO, to refer to the organisation instead of its full name, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, which we made a point of using throughout the Cold War to underscore its military nature and to distance ourselves from a military pact with which we were often at odds.

Under the previous bipolar world order, NATO stood as a counter-pole to the military arm of the Eastern bloc, the Warsaw Pact. The collapse of the Soviet Union, which led to the disappearance of the Warsaw Pact and the instauration of a new unipolar world order under the leadership of the United States, deprived NATO of its raison d'être. It also left a sort of vacuum in which important sections of the global community found themselves facing a serious identity problem and wondering how to protect their interests in a world where the traditional frames of reference no longer applied.

As the various players scrambled to find a foothold in the shifting sands of the new political reality one of the main questions that arose was whether the change engendered by the absence of the Soviet Union and what it stood for would affect only the opponents of the United States or whether it would extend to affect the Western world as well.

To answer this question, we must take into consideration the fact that what is more important in the field of politics is not objective reality as it is, but how objective reality is subjectively perceived. Actually, with such perceptions, many factors have to be taken into account, and they are not all objective in character. For example, Yasser Arafat was seen by an important segment of world public opinion as a symbol of the Palestinian liberation movement, while in the eyes of Sharon and Bush he was nothing but a terrorist with whom they refused to deal. Judging by the UN General Assembly votes on Palestine over the years, the late Palestinian leader was seen by most of humanity as the personification of Good, while for Sharon and Bush he was the personification of Evil.

That is not to say, however, that objective reality cannot come to be known because it is always overshadowed by factors of a subjective nature. Otherwise we would have to accept that knowledge is always faulty and incapable of affecting objective reality. In fact, there are frames of reference that cannot be disregarded, such as the rule of law, international legitimacy, acquired rights, human and cultural values, etc. Negotiation -- in other words, dialogue -- is a way of testing how far a disposition conforms to these reference systems, of ensuring that it does not violate them and of examining its relevance.

Until recently, NATO's frame of reference was the situation which arose in the immediate aftermath of WWII, when the United Nations Charter was formulated and the main confrontation which imposed itself at the global level was no longer the one which had pitted the Soviet Union and the West against Fascism throughout the war years, but a new and virulent confrontation between the former allies. This was the time Churchill delivered his famous Fulton speech (1946), in which he spoke of an Iron Curtain separating the Soviet Union from the West. Thus came into being the Cold War, which quickly reached a peak and more than once threatened to expose the world to a third world war.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is no longer any room for this frame of reference. Any talk of confrontation between poles today would have to be about the confrontation between North and South, not between East and West. However, this rearrangement of contradictions, as it were, raises a sensitive issue. Throughout the Cold War years, the Untied States was in conflict with the Arab liberation movements and, with one exception in 1956, championed Israel in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Today the US is trying to build friendly relations with many Arab regimes, notably with Egypt which signed a peace treaty with Israel.

At a recent meeting with the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs, NATO leaders declared that their organisation has gone through fundamental transformations since the end of the Cold War, and that it does not want to impose anything on anybody. All it wants is to respond to any demands that could help consolidate security and peace. NATO, with its state-of-the art technology in various fields of weaponry, has the ability to respond to a wide spectrum of military needs.

Such an offer is neither as over-generous or naïve as it might appear at first glance. Inducing a country into depending on given types of weapons creates not only a technical bond but also a political one, in which the recipient country is linking not only to a specific military doctrine but also to another country or group of countries with their own policies and priorities. By exercising the right to provide or withhold spare parts and other essential requirements, the arms supplier creates a state of dependency that affects the recipient's freedom of manoeuvre.

This puts forward a real dilemma when it comes to the relationship between a country like Egypt and the United States. Egypt is a developing country and the US is the only superpower in the present world order, vastly superior to all others both in its military capability and economic power. How can Egypt remain independent, and immune from any form of pressure in such a context?

If we need to have a special relationship with the United States, it should be based on a solid foundation of parity, evenhandedness and equality. This entails a rethink of NATO's identity and a revision of its frame of reference, in concentrating on Atlanticism while talking about the US identity, we are actually deepening disparity in American-Egyptian relations. We are back to a frame of reference with colonial and/or imperial connotations, something that nobody wants, including Washington. As we have previously mentioned, it is the subjective perception of objective reality that counts, not objective reality as it really is.

So when dealing with Egyptian-American relations, nothing less than dropping America's Atlantist image is required. That is, to build the bilateral relations between the two countries on an infrastructure totally dissociated from neo-colonial connotations. We need to invent a new type of relationship with the American partner, a relationship that binds nations and peoples closer to each other, not the opposite. So too NATO's retention of its Atlantic dimensions carries certain connotations, including an insensitivity towards the defeated parties in WWII which betrays a backward-rather than a future-oriented approach.

NATO's keenness to open up to Egypt as well as to other Arab countries indicates its adoption of a future-oriented approach that will, hopefully, draw useful lessons from past experiences and practices. Otherwise, we will be moving backward, not forward, at a time the recent elections in Iraq and Palestine and the current display of "people power" in Lebanon are being hailed as the first signs of "an Arab spring".