NATO faces the known unknowns
As NATO’s summit approaches, administration officials have fanned out to discuss U.S. priorities. In a briefing yesterday, deputy assistant secretary of Defense James Townsend tackled questions about the difference in priorities between alliance members, with a number of European countries encouraging the alliance to come home and return to its core regional defense mission. In ...
As NATO's summit approaches, administration officials have fanned out to discuss U.S. priorities. In a briefing yesterday, deputy assistant secretary of Defense James Townsend tackled questions about the difference in priorities between alliance members, with a number of European countries encouraging the alliance to come home and return to its core regional defense mission. In response, Towsend stressed the unknown challenges that the organization might face in the future:
As NATO’s summit approaches, administration officials have fanned out to discuss U.S. priorities. In a briefing yesterday, deputy assistant secretary of Defense James Townsend tackled questions about the difference in priorities between alliance members, with a number of European countries encouraging the alliance to come home and return to its core regional defense mission. In response, Towsend stressed the unknown challenges that the organization might face in the future:
There’s no way to know what you think you might need. When I was doing this in 1999, 2000, 2001, I didn’t foresee us being in Afghanistan. To nations who feel they know where the real threat is, or they know what they think they’re going to need in the next ten years, my experience has been that you have to be ready for many contingencies, you have to have what we call a full range of capabilities or a full range of ability to take care of things that you have no idea today will actually be on your plate five to ten years out.
It’s a smart tack for the United States to take as it meets its tired and skeptical alliance partners. We don’t want a permanent global role for NATO, the United States can say quite innocently, we just want the alliance to be prepared for whatever contingencies the world throws at us. It seems clear that the new NATO strategic concept — which Townsend suggested is in near-final form — will include language artful enough to bridge the gap between members.
Other key issues for the United States include getting NATO to sign on to its regional missile defence plan and pressing NATO allies to keep their military budgets at or above 2 percent of GDP (which will be a struggle in many cases — even the UK may fall below that level). NATO defence and foreign ministers meet Thursday in Brussels to work through some of these issues.
David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist
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