A friend of mine used to joke that his non-university friends would groan and smirk when he inadvertently introduced the word ‘concept’ into any conversation. Right they were too. But ‘concepts’ don’t have to involve vague and abstract  language designed to avoid really saying something. Will this apply to the impending new NATO Strategic Concept?

Last week the group of experts appointed to give advice on the upcoming NATO document delivered their report, ‘NATO 2020: Assured Security, Dynamic Engagement’. The group of twelve, which included former UK Defence Minister Geoff Hoon, was chaired by Madeleine Albright, and vice-chair was Jeroen van der Veer, the former CEO of Shell. On 21 May van der Veer spoke at a public meeting of the Atlantic Association in The Hague on the report’s conclusions. Considering his input into this vital NATO process, and his previous influence as Shell boss, van der Veer’s opinion carries quite some weight in the Netherlands, and the auditorium was packed.  

Van der Veer is an accomplished speaker, aware of the added value of a short bullet-point type speech that leaves the audience all the time and space in the world to develop questions. He also has a great sense of humour. But on to the content. He began by sketching the main challenge – how to craft a new Strategic Concept in a world quite different from that in 1999 when the last Concept was put together. New threats have appeared (piracy, cyber attacks, climate change), new regions have become significant (the ‘high north’), new demands are being made (energy security). And there are many new members – NATO has increased from 16 to 28 nations in the last decade. In this changing scenario public support for NATO across Europe has remained high (between 60-80%), but it is slowly declining. The role of the organisation is not as clear as during the Cold War, and the major Afghan mission is not adding any clarity to this situation.

The request from the NATO summit in Kiel last year was this – gather advice on a NATO strategy for another ten years. Look beyond Afghanistan. The group held conferences across the NATO region and even beyond it in Sweden and Israel. It toured all member and many neighbouring capitols, beginning with Moscow in February 2010 (a moment of van der Veer humour – February was probably the ideal month in which to go to Moscow to talk NATO). Now the report is out, Secretary General Rasmussen will use it to develop the Strategic Concept itself for presentation at the Lisbon summit in November.

So what does the report say? Van der Veer emphasised that the biggest challenge for NATO is to clarify what it is there for, and what it is not there for. The organisation cannot and must not portray itself as a “jack of all threats” or some kind of security “Swiss army knife”. Abandon the pretense of being a global security provider in favour of returning to its origins - a regional security organisation that can, should the circumstances demand, act globally. To operate ‘out of area’ in the future, a clear set of criteria must be satsified: there must be a genuine threat to NATO members, there must be political support, it must correspond with international law, it must be a collective effort, and it must be in alliance with other partners. The message above all was that NATO must not act too quickly and should do so only if other options have failed. It kind of undermines the idea of a Rapid Reaction Force, but it also indicates no apparent urge to place the organisation at the forefront of global security.

Cohesion is going to be the biggest problem in the future – how to hold this edifice together in times of disparate transatlantic interests. The report literally states that “the new Strategic Concept must serve as an invocation of political will or – to put it another way – a renewal of vows, on the part of each member” (p.6). Interesting language. The US-Europe marriage is somewhat rocky and the notion of staying together for the (post Cold War) kids doesn’t hold any more. Each member has to want to stay in, and has to demonstrate this wish in word and deed.

Two issues here on the transatlantic drift that the new Concept must overcome.

One concerns Russia. Not surprisingly it looms large in this report, with emphasis on reviving the means for real cooperation (NATO-Russia Council, arms control, missile defence). Businessman van der Veer’s presence as vice-chair makes perfect sense in terms of his inside knowledge of dealing with the Russians [see 'From Gazprom to Gasunie' below]. But the joker in this particular pack is energy security. Page 13 states that “competition for petroleum and other strategic resources” is a crucial part of the increasing uncertainty of 21st century global politics. Fair enough, but this always begs the question of what NATO should do about it, other than perhaps patrol sea lanes. The explication on pages 44-45 doesn’t really clear this up. Energy policy is seen more as an issue for the EU and the International Energy Agency. And then a sentence difficult to decypher: “NATO has an obligation to protect its own energy reserves in order to ensure the capability of its forces.” So, Norway as NATO’s gas tank? But the problem here is that while everyone knows energy security is essential, it doesn’t look like NATO’s role in ensuring it can be clarified.

The other concerns capabilities. All very well that each member needs to state what NATO means for them. But then on page 38 the sober facts:

“The primary limiting factor hindering military transformation has been the lack of EUropean defence spending and investment. Today, only six of twenty six European Allies spend 2 percent or more of GDP on these purposes; only about a dozen have met goals for makiing military forces deployable and sustainable….The gap is especially large between US capabilities and the rest of NATO, an imbalance that if left unchecked could undermine Alliance cohesion.”

Strong words, and totally to the point. I took the opportunity to ask van der Veer what this meant for transatlantic relations in a period of impending public spending cuts in Europe and no real expectation that the capabilities gap could be bridged. He responded that its not just a question of 2%, its a question of what you do with it. Most defence budgets are still burdened with oversized personnel and operational costs, preventing investment in lean-and-mean units and cutting edge hardware. The Netherlands only spends around 1.4% of GDP but its military professionalised and transformed itself in the 1990s away from a Cold War alternative to the dole. Hence the strive for the JSF [see below] and other top-quality items. Van der Veer has a point here, but it triggered other curious thoughts along the way. Maybe European military establishments are the last hold-out for Cold War welfare state capitalism. Maybe they need a dose of neoliberalism to cut out the inefficiency and improve productivity. Whatever the responses may be, this was the number one issue in the report that strongly suggested serious US-European divisions could emerge in the near future.

The new Strategic Concept will be, as one insider told me, a “holding operation”. Few surprises, revive cohesion, straighten out the purpose. And we’ll have another hard look in ten years.

With Obama and Medvedev signing a major bilateral deal on reducing nuclear weapons, the wind seems to be once again getting back behind the non-proliferation ideal. Iran and North Korea continue to shoot holes in the Non-Proliferation Treaty’s (NPT) effectiveness, and the Treaty is further stressed almost beyond use by the non-signatories such as Israel, Pakistan, and India. But Obama put the issue back on the agenda in his ‘nuclear-free world’ speech in Prague last year, and now 12 months later he produced the first fruits. If the momentum can be maintained - by pulling in the Russians and Chinese to visibly turn the screws on Iran with sanctions at the current Nuclear Security Summit, then upgrade the credibility of the NPT at the Review conference coming in May – we could be witnessing a remarkable rebirth of a Treaty that not so long ago was considered defunct.

Where does this leave nuclear strategic planning? Well, it starts to raise the issue of what to do with all those US nuclear weapons still stationed in Europe. They are located, as best we know, at bases in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Turkey (not the UK, interestingly enough, since they have already been withdrawn), and come to between 150-240 in total.

What are they? Pretty much old-style free-fall tactical weapons to be used by adapted fighter-bomber aircraft. Their military significance is therefore pretty limited, and since 1991 around 90% of these weapons have already been withdrawn from their European sites. So why bother? Former Dutch minister president Ruud Lubbers , the man who faced down the anti-nuclear movements during the Cruise missile debate in the 1980s, has been calling for the removal of these weapons (between 10 and 20) from the Volkel Air Force Base in the southern part of the Netherlands. So are their days numbered?

Juurd Eijsvoogel, international affairs editor with the NRC, came with the response last weekend. The value of these weapons is symbolic not military, that is true. They stand for the Cold War era protection of Europe by the US military, and this last vestige of nuclear-ness takes on a greater meaning for that reason. Would removing them not signify the yet further drifting apart of the two continents in the 21st century, each disregarding the other when it comes to security concerns?

In some ways, yes. But times are changing in positive ways as well, and Obama’s move to reduce nuclear weapons comes in the exact period when NATO’s Strategic Concept is being revised. The Concept will almost certainly look to bind the Organisation more around common concerns and turn away from the Afghanistan-or-bust position that was the norm under Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. For Eijsvoogel this means it is not the time to start acting unilaterally to disrupt the process of NATO rejuvenation (for that is really at stake with this new Concept, now that Bush is gone, Iraq is ‘over’, and the French are back in). Lets not be too hasty – our Eastern European colleagues have every reason to want to believe in a stable European home, and NATO – read the US – provides this.

Fair enough. But would it not be a perfect moment in that case to reflect on what the Russians have been calling for over the past decade? A re-assessment of the European security infrastructure, that isn’t locked in to a Cold War mentality dominated by NATO? I grant that Moscow is not always the most reliable of partners. But Eijsvoogels’ call for the status of US weapons in Europe to be judged by a NATO discussion decided by consensus somehow seems to miss the boat. The Russians are increasingly involved in European security, namely via energy supply. Now is the time to bring that into the equation as well.