NATO - a spent force?

BY LYNN Ockersz

THE North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), which played a crucial role in international politics in the Cold War years, as the armed wing of the US-led Western alliance of states, is reportedly today going the extra mile to establish its continued usefulness and effectiveness on the world scene.

To prove that far from being a spent force, NATO was still "alive and kicking", the organisation's Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer was recently on a tour of New Zealand, Australia and Japan. While in Australia, Scheffer was quoted telling the Australian press that: "NATO is reforming. NATO has a relevant role...

I think that NATO is doing its part in this global coalition against terror, against proliferation, against fragile and failed states. NATO is transforming fundamentally, militarily, politically, building new partnerships, new alliances", In short, NATO wishes to be a perfect appendage of the US in its quest of global control.

Why is NATO at pains to emphasize what would have seemed some time back, as the obvious ? After all, NATO has been seen always as the Western world's mailed fist. Not so long ago, it "proved its worth" in US-led air strikes in the Balkans. What is compelling NATO to currently underscore its non- redundant status?

The answer has to be sought in the stridently unilateralist role the US is playing at present in international politics.

Coalition power projections, though considered essential in the Cold War years when the world's great ideological and political divide was epitomised by the opposing power blocs, NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries, are today being upstaged by US unilateralism.

The US - as could be seen - is projecting its military power worldwide individually as never before and is less reliant on who were considered its main coalition partners in NATO for the furtherance of its strategic and political aims.

This was brought home to us when the US and Britain decided on going ahead with the military incursion into Iraq. States such as Germany and France, despite their differences with the US initially, over the Iraqi invasion, were nevertheless, ineffective in checking and curbing US-led military action.

This is likely to be the case in the future too. NATO, therefore, could carve out a role for itself on the world stage, but one that is unlikely to be markedly at variance with that of the US. At best it would work very cooperatively with the US in furtherance of the latter's agenda.

The US projection of itself as the world's predominant military and political power manifested itself recently in US Secretary of State Condolleeza Rice's tour of Asia, which covered also India and Pakistan.

The tone of her visits served to underscore the unilateralist dimension in US foreign policy and helped establish that Asia is being considered by Washington as a special sphere of interest.

Much would depend on how effectively a state such as India, which is seeking UN Security Council membership would counterbalance US influence in this part of the world.

However, on this score, much hope cannot be entertained because India is proving highly cooperative in the US-led "war on terror". There is no question of the US and India being at Variance on Fundamental security issues.