April 26 : In the fog of war, NATO has reinvented itself as global top cop equipped with a dangerous new interventionist doctrine. The 19-nation summit in Washington ended with pledges to intervene in regional conflicts and to counter militarily the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and their delivery systems. Both, regional conflicts and WMD, are defined as potential threats to the populations, territory and forces of members of the NATO alliance. Thus, in an increasingly integrated world, NATO's sphere of action becomes unlimited. Under the latest definition, ethnic strife in the remotest corner of the globe can be construed as a potential threat to alliance security. As a justification for unlimited and unilateral out-of-territory operations, the new doctrine is a shocking reversal of the essentially defensive principles which governed the western military alliance during the first 50 years of its existence.NATO's raison d'etre disappeared with the collapse of communism in the late 1980s and it was widely thought that the military alliance would begin to disintegrate and eventually fade away. However, as with most military institutions, death is not an easy option. Initially, NATO's existence was sought to be justified on grounds of shoring up trans-Atlantic political unity. Interventionism crept up on it gradually and was eagerly embraced. The Gulf war, Somalia and the Balkans between them produced new sets of justifications for NATO's out-of-territory operations and laid the basis for the doctrine adopted at the 50th anniversary summit. Against Iraq, NATO operated in the name of the international community, authorised by the Security Council, with the objective of vacating Iraqi aggression in Kuwait. In Somalia, the humanitarian consequences of a failed state demanded intervention but the ensuing fiasco closed the option of intervening in the next and much larger human catastrophe in Africa which was inRwanda. NATO went into Bosnia at the invitation of the recognised government of that country. Interventionism became a full-blown doctrine in Kosovo where no underpinning in international law was required, only NATO's willingness and ability to mount military operations against a sovereign nation. The Kosovo engagement dominated the summit and pretty much dictated the terms of NATO's new doctrine. Pre-Kosovo, there was little indication in the preparations for the summit that such a blatantly open-ended agenda could win the support of all 19 members. But a month of bombing Yugoslavia has achieved neither of NATO's original objectives of halting the exodus of refugees and of getting rid of Slobodan Milosevic. Now that the overwhelming objective is to salvage NATO's credibility at any cost, the Washington summit could do no less than construct a policy post-facto to justify operations in Yugoslavia. Unilateral military intervention such as NATO envisages is an assault on the principles of multilateralism and the rights of sovereign states as recognised by the UN charter. Worse than that, it is an invitation to militarism everywhere. As such it only enhances the threat to international peace and stability. Top
