UPI, BRUSSELS, Oct. 17 (UPI) — Is NATO, a 54-year old military alliance that saw off the Soviet threat, routed Serb forces in Kosovo and kept the fragile peace in the Balkans, about to be destroyed by the enemy within? Listening to the dire warnings from some of Washington's most senior officials in recent days, one could be forgiven for thinking so.
At a meeting of the alliance's North Atlantic Council Wednesday, U.S Ambassador to NATO Nicholas Burns said EU plans to set up an independent military headquarters represented “one of the greatest dangers to the transatlantic relationship.”
To drive home his message, the former U.S. State Department spokesman called for an extraordinary meeting of NATO ambassadors Monday to discuss the EU's increasingly bold attempt to wrestle control of defense policy away from national capitals.
Gen. James L. Jones, NATO's supreme allied commander for Europe and commander of U.S. forces in Europe, also issued a stark warning to EU leaders meeting in Brussels for a quarterly summit.
“At the very time when NATO is busy transforming itself to become more relevant for the 21st century, it would at the very least be a distraction and at the very most a diminution for parallel structures to exist,” the four-star general told United Press International and a handful of other journalists Thursday.
Jones said the so-called Berlin-plus agreement — in which NATO provides the EU with logistical support for its own military ventures — “should at least be tried and tested before we abandon the concept.”
Acknowledging that Europeans sometimes had different security concerns from their American allies, the Vietnam veteran added: “From a military standpoint I would like to suggest NATO can address those issues.”
Washington is incensed at plans drawn up by France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg — all countries that fiercely opposed the Iraq war — that would see the creation of an autonomous EU military command in the leafy Brussels suburb of Tervuren. However, it was Britain's decision to give its belated blessing to the proposals that has caused the most consternation within the Bush administration.
“It certainly put the cat among the pigeons,” noted one NATO official.
At a meeting with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and French President Jacques Chirac in Berlin last month, British Prime Minister Tony Blair appeared to back a statement calling for the EU to have the capacity to “plan and conduct operations without recourse to NATO capabilities.”
According to the Financial Times newspaper White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice telephoned Blair's chief foreign policy aide, Nigel Scheinwald, to express her concern at the EU proposal.
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is also reported to have raised the issue with his British counterpart, Geoff Hoon, at an informal gathering of NATO defense ministers last week in Colorado.
Downing Street has since been backpedaling furiously, insisting that it favors a stronger European defense capability but not an EU equivalent of the alliance's military headquarters in Mons, Belgium.
“Let me make one thing very clear to you: I will never put at risk NATO,” Blair told reporters on the sidelines of an EU summit in Brussels Friday.
However, Blair, who has traditionally been Bush's staunchest supporter in the EU, said there was no contradiction between believing in a strong NATO and a strong Europe.
“There are going to be circumstances, we have them now in Macedonia, where America for one reason or another doesn't want to be involved. In those circumstances it is important that Europe has the capability to act independently.”
In addition to the tiny former Yugoslav republic, EU soldiers have already been dispatched to the Congo and are expected to take over peacekeeping duties from NATO in Bosnia next year.
But NATO officials believe that without a helping hand from the alliance, the Union will remain a paper tiger for the foreseeable future. “EU leaders can make all the statements they want, but for the next 30 years I don't see how they will be able to act on their own,” said one.
The EU is unlikely to become a military superpower to rival the United States any time in the near future — arms spending is too low and national sovereignty too jealously guarded for that to happen — but the soon-to-be 25-nation bloc is busy carving out its own distinct defense identity.
The EU's draft constitution, which leaders haggled over in Brussels Thursday and Friday, talks of creating a European arms procurement agency, allowing groups of states to go faster than others in pooling armed forces and inserting a mutual defense clause in the club's rulebook that would consider an attack on one member an attack on all.
Britain has vowed to fight the latter proposal tooth and nail but is likely to sign up to the two other defense-related treaty changes.
This newfound enthusiasm for boosted EU defense capabilities serves both Britain and its European partners well.
For Blair, who was tipped as a future EU president before the Iraq war tore the bloc down the middle, it is a chance for London to regain influence in an EU increasingly dominated by Paris and Berlin.
For Chirac and Schroeder, having Blair on side means having Europe's strongest military power at the service of the EU. As French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin told the BBC Wednesday: “There is no Europe without European defense. And there is no European defense without Britain.”
The only potential loser is NATO, which could find itself squeezed between a more unilateralist United States and a more assertive EU each pulling in different directions.
