Wednesday, April 23. 2008
Posted by Kyle Atwell in
Transatlantic Relations on Wednesday, April 23. 2008
Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of News Corp., wrote about Alliance enlargement in his own newspaper this week, the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Murdoch argues that a proactive Alliance—one willing to take on new members who share and are willing to fight for Western values—is necessary to address the various threats faced by the West today.
According to Murdoch however, many Allies have not carried their own weight in NATO’s Afghanistan mission. To little surprise, Europe has been identified as the source of weakness in the Alliance:
We must face up to a painful truth: Europe no longer has either the political will or social culture to support military engagements in defense of itself and its allies. However strong NATO may be on paper, this fact makes NATO weak in practice. It also means that reform will not come from within.
In other words, a strong and successful Atlantic alliance will have to ground itself more on shared principles rather than accident of geography. And we need to show we are serious about defending those principles by standing with those who are standing up for them.
To date, NATO has been active and fairly flexible in its recruitment of new member-states. At the NATO Bucharest Summit earlier this month, the Allies granted membership to Albania and Croatia, and promised future membership to Georgia and Ukraine (although some, including Germany, have wavered largely due to protests from Russia). NATO also places heavy emphasis on developing various partnership programs, such as the Partnership for Peace and the Euro-Atlantic Partnership.
However, Mr. Murdoch wants more: full members completely outside the West—at least outside the geographical West. He specifically cites Australia, Japan and Israel as a few of many potential Allies. In his own words:
As a rule, when an organization expands, the expansion dilutes its principles. For today's NATO, it is just the opposite. Around the world, there is no shortage of nations who share our values, and are willing to defend them.
Many have speculated (including extensively on Atlantic Review), that NATO is doomed if it fails in Afghanistan—or that NATO is doomed, period. The concern is that the end of the Cold War has made NATO an anachronism.
However, there are reasons to believe NATO will not simply disappear altogether:
• NATO is an organization with an extensive history, and such organizations tend to find new purpose, rather than vanish.
• Current members on both side of the Atlantic continue to find value in the Alliance, regardless of the Afghanistan outcome.
• Non-member hopefuls continue to undergo extensive military and political reform to qualify for admittance, demonstrating a fresh interest in the organization. Should the status-quo Alliance become untenable, Murdoch’s article suggests an alternative worth considering: rather than vanishing altogether, perhaps NATO will morph into a new organization based on shared values, untethered by geographical coincidence. The Alliance has already begun to take on missions beyond Europe; perhaps the next step is taking on partners outside of Europe and North America as well. Should NATO become a more global Alliance in a more globalized world?
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