10

Summation

The perceptive Dutch scholar Dick Leurdijk observed in 1994 that, “in the good old days of the Cold War,” the UN and NATO co-existed but “lived apart,” linked merely by mutual references in official texts. He judged that the “two organizations represented rather different worlds, political cultures and schools of thought.”1 Only after the end of the Cold War did problems of crisis management, notably in the former Yugoslavia, force the two organizations into a new and close relationship.

There is no disputing that the UN Security Council’s intervention in the Balkans changed the connections after 1991. The UN needed NATO and European regional arrangements in order to implement the flurry of resolutions on the Balkan crises. But the mutual dependence in subsequent crises in Afghanistan and Iraq in the next dozen years revived and deepened rifts between NATO and the UN that went back to the origins of the Atlantic alliance. These rifts centered on the question of authority. Would NATO replace the United Nations as the guarantor of international peace and security in Europe? This question in turn devolved on the ambiguous role NATO was playing as a regional organization under the aegis of the UN.

This issue has plagued the alliance from its beginnings. How to bring NATO into harmony with the charter of the UN, its professed objective in Article 7 of the treaty, without subjecting it to the jurisdiction of the UN Security Council was a difficult task for the framers of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949. The treaty’s very purpose was to further the aims of the UN Charter without allowing the Soviet Union to have access to activities designed to deter communist aggression against the allies. Propelled by such supporters of the UN as Senator Vandenberg, NATO was required to conform to the UN’s principles without compromising the defense of its members from one of the permanent members of the UN Security Council.

The elliptical language of Article 5 of the treaty illustrated the alliance’s dilemma. It claimed the right of collective self-defense, based on Article 51 of the UN Charter, without mentioning Chapter 8, which placed the activities of regional agencies under the scrutiny of the Security Council. But a little-noticed second paragraph of the treaty’s Article 5 pays homage to the Security Council’s authority, by agreeing that “any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council.” The article also noted that NATO’s “measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.” While these sentences reflect deference to the Security Council, they also invite a broad construction of just how effective Security Council measures would have to be before a report was issued. Very likely the treaty’s framers expected that the final paragraph would be set aside as an afterthought. Certainly, the allies customarily behaved as if reporting to the Security Council was unnecessary, on the assumption that it would be unlikely to take the “necessary measures.”

By contrast, the European Union had none of these obstacles to collaboration with the United Nations. It was clearly a regional organization, and it accepted the supremacy of the UN without the reservations, hesitations, and resentments projected by NATO. The EU enjoyed a status in the UN General Assembly that NATO never had—or wanted—in the past. Although NATO has sought links with the UN since the 1990s in non-Article 5 areas, it encountered suspicion from those members who have identified the alliance as a creature of the United States, whose military objectives were not aligned with those of the UN’s Third World majority.²

Concern about the risk of excessive submission to the UN dictated caution in dealing with the world organization. Its military collaboration in the Bosnian crisis was a case in point. NATO would use its military assets on behalf of UN objectives on a case-by-case basis. Connections on the staff level encouraged NATO in the summer of 2005 to propose a memo of understanding that would create a framework for dialogue and cooperation. The proposal still had not won approval from the General Assembly by the time Kofi Annan left office. But his successor as secretary-general, the Korean diplomat Ban Ki-moon, signed a joint declaration on UN/NATO secretariat cooperation on September 23, 2008. Although he requested that the agreement be “kept low key,” it opens the way for a new relationship between the two organizations.³

The two organizations complement each other in many ways. Basically, NATO has capabilities that the UN lacks, not only in its military capacities but also in its extensive experience with multilateral military operations. When the UN Charter was framed in 1944, it had included a military dimension in Article 47 that was intended to enforce collective security. But the nationalist propensities of the superpowers, arguably more than the outbreak of the Cold War, prevented implementation of this article. Yet the need for a military arm in the UN was demonstrated repeatedly as its resolutions failed to influence actions of aggressors.

For NATO the UN provides the legitimacy it had always felt it needed even as it evaded or opposed UN policies. This hunger for legitimacy is clearly reflected in many of the articles of the North Atlantic Treaty that tried to embed the pact in the body of the charter. While the two organizations seemed to have had separate existences, as Leurdijk noted, NATO was always aware of the UN’s importance. Whenever possible NATO tried to use the UN—as it did, unsuccessfully, in the Soviet actions against Hungary in 1956 and, more successfully, in opposing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979—as a vehicle for condemning the Soviets for violating the terms of the charter. In the post—Cold War 1990s the alliance was grateful for the UN’s tacit approval of military action against Serbia over Kosovo. Although the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 won no blessing from a divided UN, the world organization quickly made its presence felt in the reconstruction of Iraq—in fact, more quickly and in better spirit than was shown by many in the NATO alliance. The smooth transition of ISAF in Afghanistan in 2003 from a UN entity to a NATO operation was in marked contrast to the UN’s grudging yielding of control of UNPROFOR to IFOR in Bosnia in 1995.

The NATO allies also valued the UN as an arena in which to thrash out internal problems. There was high drama in the UN when two leading NATO allies, Britain and France, were on the dock, condemned by both the United States and the Soviet Union for their failed campaign to reoccupy the Suez Canal in 1956. Four years later Belgium was the object of reprobation by the UN, prodded by the Soviets, for its interference in the affairs of the newly freed Congo. On this occasion, as over Suez, the allies were divided although the United States did its best to appease both the UN and its Belgian ally. In that same decade, it was the United States that was isolated both in the UN and in NATO as the Vietnam War expanded after 1965. The UN was no more able to offer successful mediation than were America’s allies in NATO. In all these cases the UN was a factor in NATO councils even when it was not the final arbiter of the outcome of the conflicts.

While Kurt Waldheim and Kofi Annan were more submissive to U.S. and NATO assertiveness, Dag Hammarskjöld and Boutros Boutros-Ghali were less resigned to their limited powers over NATO. But even as the two organizations lived apart during the Cold War, the peacekeeping mechanisms that grew out of the Suez crisis were not only a measure of UN influence over NATO but also a service to the allies. Hammarskjöld’s deft handling of the Suez crisis set a precedent that was useful in subsequent confrontations between the organizations, ranging from the Congo to Afghanistan. The United States and the Soviet Union were both beneficiaries of UN involvement in Cold War conflicts. Just as the United States was pleased to have the imprimatur of the UN bestowed on U.S.— North Vietnamese peace negotiations in 1973, Mikhail Gorbachev welcomed the introduction of UN observers in 1989 to help end the ill-fated Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.

The post-Cold War world of the past two decades reveals the mutual dependency of NATO and the UN without resolving the critical question of authority. In fact, the issue of supremacy flared more dramatically after the Cold War. Resentment of the advantages NATO’s superior military strength had over the limited muscle of the UN was never more evident than in Boutros-Ghali’s surrender of power to NATO in Bosnia in 1995. His animus was directed against the United States whose overbearing weight in NATO marginalized the UN’s role in the Dayton agreements. To a lesser extent, in keeping with a very different temperament, Kofi Annan deplored NATO’s behavior in the Kosovo campaign in 1999, even as he understood its motives.

There was a marked contrast between the roles that the NATO secretary general played during and after the Cold War. While the UN secretary-general could speak forcefully and often effectively for his organization, the NATO secretary general emerged simply as a chairman of an often divided North Atlantic Council dominated by the United States. He was not the equivalent of the UN secretarygeneral. Nor could the NATO secretary general, often a European civilian leader of a smaller member, compete on equal terms with the American supreme allied commander or with such dominating figures from the United States and France as Robert McNamara or Charles de Gaulle. When the Soviet empire collapsed and new challenges threatened the world’s peace and security, NATO’s leaders became more visible and more significant figures. The forceful interventions of Manfred Woerner and Willy Claes in the Bosnian conflicts of the mid-1990s and of Javier Solana in the Kosovo War in 1999 reflected their new status vis-a-vis the UN secretaries-general Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan as well as the enhanced power of NATO itself.4

The question as to how much deference NATO owes to the UN’s supremacy as the primary guarantor of global peace and security remains open to debate today. Conceivably, the European Union, with its organic ties to the UN, might be a bridge between the two organizations. The numerous professions of solidarity with the EU that are present in abundance in NATO communiques suggest the potential for successful mediation, whereby NATO could be an arm of the UN without sacrificing its own autonomy. Informally, NATO is serving in this capacity in Africa in 2009.

The EU may also be an obstacle to further curbing the UN’s authority by virtue of the presence of NATO’s leading European partners’ possessing veto power in the UN Security Council. There has always been a strain of resentment against the dominant voice of the superpower on the North Atlantic Council. If NATO should be wholly free from the UN’s supervision, France and Britain would continue to occupy an inferior place in the alliance. By supporting the Security Council’s prerogatives, they would be able to elevate their own status as genuine equals of the United States, and even be able to challenge it on the world stage in company with the other permanent members, Russia and China.

The UN General Assembly imposed its own barrier to NATO integration. As David Yost has observed, the establishment of a Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPO) in 2007 opened the possibility of freeing the UN from the military sustenance NATO had provided over the past decade.5 The DPO, with ninety thousand troops, quickly developed into the largest UN agency. France could claim credit for proposing an operational level of commanding peacekeeping, modeled on the UN Interim Force that was adopted in the summer of 2006 in Lebanon. This new department could lessen UN dependence on NATO’s military capabilities.

The torrent of negative commentary on the alliance, as NATO was riven with dissent over Iraq and bogged down in Afghanistan since 2004, has raised the prospect of a marginalized organization, dissolving through irrelevance if not through disintegration. One well-informed critic felt that NATO deserved the derision inspired by Lord Salisbury’s judgment of Britain’s policy on the Eastern question in 1877: “The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies.” Anticipation of NATO’s imminent demise has a long history, exemplified by Ronald Steel’s End of the Alliance, published in 1964. Yet the current French and German rapprochement with the United States as well as the East European members’ continuing allegiance to the alliance attest to its continuing relevance.⁶

For service to the UN, NATO remains the one international organization that has experience in managing military forces. Notwithstanding the built-in conflict over NATO’s autonomy within the UN, both sides recognize a space for what Alan Henrikson has called a “nonallergic” relationship. He saw positive connections after the Cold War: “Though not exactly Siamese twins, they have come to depend on each other symbiotically.” While it is unlikely that NATO will morph comfortably into the subordinate regional role of the EU, a symbiotic relationship with the UN remains relevant, if not permanent, in the twenty-first century.⁷