Kindgo
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Joseph Fitchett/IHT International Herald Tribune
Wednesday, February 12, 2003
PARIS Before a shot has been fired, the political tensions ahead of a looming Iraq war are inflicting grievous wounds on the triad of institutions that embody aspirations for multilateral security cooperation among Western democracies: the European Union, NATO and the UN Security Council.
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This combination of interlocking security arrangements, which has enabled the West to ride out trans-Atlantic tempests for decades, faces a simultaneous challenge from within that could spell change or even irrelevance for all parts of the system.
Less than two months ago, both NATO and the EU used a pair of summit meetings of member states, the first in Prague and the second in Copenhagen, to announce major expansions to incorporate countries in Central and Eastern Europe and proclaim their new ambitions as key organizations in an emerging pattern of Western stability and prosperity.
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Today, both organizations are in open crisis because of political disunity over Iraq between France and Germany, on the one hand, and most other NATO allies and EU member states on the other.
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"EU diplomatic unity has been shot out of the sky, NATO is facing a crisis of credibility and even the Security Council could find itself marginalized," a British diplomat said.
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He was talking about the damaging fallout and potentially more divisive results to come from the confrontation between the French-German stance on Iraq and the growing coalition, mostly political but sometimes military, too, of countries that back the Bush administration's tough line on Iraq.
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The crisis is so hard to manage, experts said, because it calls into question, simultaneously, all three load-bearing pillars of cooperation: European unity, the U.S.-led alliance and relations among the United States and other veto-empowered Security Council members, including France and Russia.
The crisis is so hard to manage, experts said, because it calls into question, simultaneously, all three load-bearing pillars of cooperation: European unity, the U.S.-led alliance and relations among the United States and other veto-empowered Security Council members, including France and Russia.
"Is the world moving into an era where all major geopolitical campaigns are going to be carried out by coalitions of the willing and no longer worked through alliances?" Angela Merkel, leader of German's opposition conservative party, demanded last weekend amid the heated exchanges that roiled an informal conference in Munich of political and defense officials from the United States and Europe.
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Her question captured the thrust of the main debate in the two-day meeting, an annual symposium called the Munich Conference on Security Policy, where some 200 specialists sought to take stock of a crisis in trans-Atlantic relations.
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Most of these specialists are hostile to the pacifist and anti-war views of public opinion that prevail in Germany and France. They focused instead on alliance politics, arguing that the U.S. commitment was so advanced and so widely supported that France and Germany could only isolate themselves by trying to put obstacles in the way now.
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Even U.S. critics of the Bush administration, including Senator Joseph Lieberman, a Democratic presidential candidate, said anti-American sentiments voiced by some factions in Europe had reinforced hardline sentiments in the United States.
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"This confrontation suits the neoconservatives, who want to see the United States have an occasion to say that multilateralism doesn't work and diminish the substance of trans-Atlantic cooperation," a member of the administration of former President Bill Clinton said.
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Indeed, Richard Perle, an influential Pentagon hawk, said, "The United States should come up with an anti-French strategy. Paris is no longer operating within the bounds of an alliance." No longer needing NATO bases and forces to resist Moscow, he said, the United States could get the support it needed in Europe on a bilateral basis from allies.
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Czech and Polish officials at the Munich meeting said that their countries saw the United States as a guarantee of their stability and position, even against larger European friends. They complained in identical language of "arrogance" on the part of French and German policymakers, who upbraided Prague and Warsaw for publicly supporting Washington and challenging the line adopted by France and Germany.
Copyright © 2003 the International Herald Tribune All Rights Reserved
http://www.iht.com/articles/86413.html
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God bless,
Kindgo
Inside the will of God there is no failure. Outside the will of God there is no success.
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