NATO No Longer Fits The Bill by Theo Sommer

Author:Theo Sommer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-3-89684-378-4
Publisher: Körber-Stiftung, Hamburg 2012

VI. Are America and Europe still Partners?

Before turning to the question of whether the current state of affairs makes it essential to continue with the transatlantic military alliance, another question needs to be asked. Is there still a viable reason for such a course of action? First, does the much-vaunted “community of values” still provide us with a solid foundation, or has it simply become a rhetorical cliché? Second, are the interests of the allies still sufficiently similar in order to serve as a kind of gluey substance that can be used to cement the alliance, or have they now drifted so far apart that in the majority of cases and conceivable crises and even in the event of war joint planning and joint action can no longer be expected?

In general terms the answer to this is that there is not going to be a rupture between the United States of America and the United Europe of States, the predecessor, one hopes, of the United States of Europe, which in the decades that lie ahead must come into being if the Old World does not want to be relegated to the sidelines and international insignificance. But it is inevitable that the transatlantic relationship will change. It will become looser, and there are several reasons for this.

This is not, as is so often asserted, because the glue of shared values is becoming dry and brittle. In reality this was never the crucial element which kept us together. It is of course true that the notion of shared values was not simply hypocrisy. However, the fact that they were invoked was often no more than a thin layer of varnish which was supposed to impart some glossy PR buzz to the alliance. Otherwise Kemalist Turkey would not have been allowed to become a member of NATO, a country in which from 1960 onwards the armed forces staged a coup d’état every ten years or so, and occasionally hanged a democratically elected Prime Minister. Nor the Greece of the colonels, nor Salazar’s fascist Portugal. Realpolitik sometimes forces one to employ double standards. Furthermore, history teaches us that it is not always right to conclude that the rejection of an opposing system of values means that there is unanimity with regard to ideas of value in one’s own camp. One merely has to think of the Anti-Hitler Pact between the Western Allies and Stalin’s Soviet Union, or again, and this is not as far back in time, to America’s close military and defence partnership with autocratic Saudi Arabia and the truncheon-wielding Kingdom of Bahrain. Here interests are just as important as values, and when there is an emergency they are more important.

Even among impeccably and undeniably democratic member states common values do not go beyond what is taken for granted in free countries, i.e. beyond an abstract commitment to “the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law” which are invoked in the Preamble of the North Atlantic Treaty. There has never

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