The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is celebrating its fiftieth birthday with a host of activities throughout 1999. After the celebratory smoke has cleared, three things will have resulted from all the summits and ceremonies. NATO will have expanded, reformed, and published its future vision in a new strategic concept.
NATO expands
On March 12th, 1999 NATO controversially expanded its membership for the fourth time in its history, and for the first time in the post-coldwar era. The ceremony took place at the Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri, where the foreign ministers of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, all former members of the Warsaw Pact alliance, formally signed the protocols of accession and presented them to U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. The three nations join the sixteen other nations already in NATO (the United States, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey). The expansion is still viewed as controversial by many security experts who claim it destabilizes NATO relations with Russia, which views the expansion as every bit as humiliating as the Versailles Treaty was for Germany after World War I. The expansion ceremony was originally scheduled to occur in April 1999 at the alliance's 50th anniversary celebration in Washington D.C., but the date and location were changed at the last minute to avoid embarrassing Russian officials that are attending the Washington summit. President Truman and his Secretary of State Dean Acheson broke with 150 years of US tradition against engaging in entangling alliances with Europe when they signed the North Atlantic Treaty, also known as the Treaty of Washington in April 1949. Secretary of State Albright selected the Truman library, site of both of their historical papers, to honor the former president and his secretary of state.
The Washington Declaration
NATO's biannual summit, attended by it's member nations heads of state and government, will take place in Washington D.C. on April 24-25th, 1999 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of NATO's creation. The Washington summit promises to be one of the most dramatic and far reaching in recent memory. With the celebratory aspects of NATO expansion having already taken place in Independence, Missouri, the focus of the summit will now shift to the more substantive issues of NATO's evolution. NATO members are meeting in Washington to resolve many critical issues which include additional NATO expansion, the reorganization of NATO's command structure, a broadening of NATO's mission, and an outline of NATO's security agenda for the next decade, all to be embedded in a revised Strategic Concept. In essence, NATO will be redefining itself for the next millennium by wrestling with several extremely controversial issues. The results of the summit will be announced in the Washington Declaration.
Although the NATO summit has not yet taken place, one can make educated guesses on what the results will be, based upon recent speeches by numerous NATO members. Unlike the Madrid Declaration of 1997 (which invited Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to join NATO) there will be no invitation for additional countries to join NATO. Instead NATO will reiterate that its doors "remain open" for future membership. This means there will probably be at least a two-year pause to additional NATO expansion in order to digest the three new members to the organization. This will also give Russia time to adjust to the concept of additional expansion. This will be a severe disappointment to Slovenia, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria and the Baltic States, which had hoped to receive invitations to join this year.
The Washington Declaration will announce that NATO will take on broader global security threats from terrorist, chemical, biological and even cyber attacks. It will not dramatically expand NATO missions, despite US pressure for NATO to take on more out-of-the-region operations independent of the UN Security Council, because many European NATO members oppose the expansion of NATO's role in Europe. The Washington Declaration will reinforce the establishment of a European Security and Defense Identity (ESDI), in other words a strengthening of European-only military capabilities, inside NATO.
Finally, NATO's new strategic concept will formally adopt a new military command structure for NATO and address the unlikeliness of NATO's first use of nuclear weapons. The restructuring of the military command structure will entail a reduction from the present 65 headquarters to 20, and will merge Allied Forces North West (AFNW) with Allied Forces Central (AFCENT), resulting in only two regional commands under SACEUR. One will be the new Regional Command North based in Brunnsum, Netherlands and commanded by a European, and the other will be Regional Command South (the current AFSOUTH) based in Naples and commanded by an American. NATO will not renounce the first use of nuclear weapons (a key proposal from Germany's left of center government) but will probably announce the deemphasis of any nuclear weapon use. NATO's current strategic concept of deterrence relies on the first use of nuclear weapons to create uncertainty, which deters adversaries from attacking NATO members. The new strategic concept will radically streamline NATO's command structure, emphasize the use of combine joint task forces (CJTF), retain the first use of nuclear weapons options, and strengthen NATO associate organizations such as the NATO-Russian Permanent Joint Council as well as Partnership for Peace which consists of more than two dozen nations that conduct joint military operations with NATO members.
Conclusion
This year, NATO's fiftieth anniversary will result in the expansion of NATO to 19 members, a streamlining of the North Atlantic Alliance's military command structure and a strategic concept and security agenda for the new millennium in Europe. These dramatic changes will enable the Alliance to perform a host of new missions from peacekeeping to out-of-area engagements, with or without US participation. It will have a dramatic impact on US military personnel assigned to Europe, from the locations they will be stationed at, to the types of missions they will or will not have to perform.
LTC Michael Fallon is a European Foreign Area Officer teaching the NATO course at the US Army Command and General Staff College. He attended the NATO expansion ceremony in Independence, Missouri and will be at the Washington Summit in April 1999.