Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 21. maj 2012
/ Time Line May 21, 2012
Version 3.0
20. Maj 2012, 22. Maj 2012
05/21/2012
Should NATO Be Handling World Security?
By Lawrence S.
Wittner
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (better known
as NATO) is in the news once again thanks to a NATO summit meeting
in Chicago over the weekend of May 19-20 and to large public
demonstrations in Chicago against this military pact.
NATO’s website defines the alliance’s mission as
“Peace and Security,” and shows two children lying in
the grass, accompanied by a bird, a flower and the happy twittering
of birds. There is no mention of the fact that NATO is the
world’s most powerful military pact, or that NATO nations
account for 70 percent of the world’s annual $1.74 trillion
in military spending.
The organizers of the demonstrations, put together by peace and
social justice groups, assailed NATO for bogging the world down in
endless war and for diverting vast resources to militarism.
According to a spokesperson for one of the protest groups, Peace
Action: “It’s time to retire NATO and form a new
alliance to address unemployment, hunger, and climate
change.”
NATO was launched in April 1949, at a time when Western leaders
feared that the Soviet Union, if left unchecked, would invade
Western Europe. The U.S. government played a key role in organizing
the alliance, which brought in not only West European nations, but
the United States and Canada. Dominated by the United States, NATO
had a purely defensive mission -- to safeguard its members from
military attack, presumably by the Soviet Union.
That attack never occurred, either because it was deterred by
NATO’s existence or because the Soviet government had no
intention of attacking in the first place. We shall probably never
know.
In any case, with the end of the Cold War and the disappearance of
the Soviet Union, it seemed that NATO had outlived its
usefulness.
But vast military establishments, like other bureaucracies, rarely
just fade away. If the original mission no longer exists, new
missions can be found. And so NATO’s military might was
subsequently employed to bomb Yugoslavia, to conduct
counter-insurgency warfare in Afghanistan, and to bomb Libya.
Meanwhile, NATO expanded its membership and military facilities to
East European nations right along Russia’s border, thus
creating renewed tension with that major military power and
providing it with an incentive to organize a countervailing
military pact, perhaps with China.
None of this seems likely to end soon. In the days preceding the
Chicago meeting, NATO’s new, sweeping role was highlighted by
Oana Longescu, a NATO spokesperson, who announced that the summit
would discuss “the Alliance’s overall posture in
deterring and defending against the full range of threats in the
twenty-first century, and take stock of NATO’s mix of
conventional, nuclear, and missile defense forces.”
In fairness to NATO planners, it should be noted that, when it
comes to global matters, they are operating in a relative vacuum.
There are real international security problems, and some entity
should certainly be addressing them.
But is NATO the proper entity? After all, NATO is a military pact,
dominated by the United States and composed of a relatively small
group of self-selecting European and North American nations. The
vast majority of the world’s countries do not belong to NATO
and have no influence upon it. Who appointed NATO as the
representative of the world’s people? Why should the public
in India, in Brazil, in China, in South Africa, in Argentina, or
most other nations identify with the decisions of NATO’s
military commanders?
The organization that does represent the nations and people of the
world is the United Nations. Designed to save the planet from
“the scourge of war,” the United Nations has a Security
Council (on which the United States has permanent membership) that
is supposed to handle world security issues. Unlike NATO, whose
decisions are often controversial and sometimes questionable, the
United Nations almost invariably comes forward with decisions that
have broad international support and, furthermore, show
considerable wisdom and military restraint.
The problem with UN decisions is not that they are bad ones, but
that they are difficult to enforce. And the major reason for the
difficulty in enforcement is that the Security Council is hamstrung
by a veto that can be exercised by any one nation. Thus, much like
the filibuster in the U.S. Senate, which is making the United
States less and less governable, the Security Council veto has
seriously limited what the world organization is able to do in
addressing global security issues.
Thus, if the leaders of NATO nations were really serious about
providing children with a world in which they could play in peace
among the birds and flowers, they would work to strengthen the
United Nations and stop devoting vast resources to dubious
wars.
Lawrence S. Wittner is Professor of History emeritus at
SUNY/Albany. His latest book is "Working for Peace and Justice:
Memoirs of an Activist Intellectual” (University of Tennessee
Press).
05/21/2012
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