NATO summit "a fiasco"

[Skybird]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...545491,00.html

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The old common enemy -- a Soviet-dominated Eastern Block -- is gone, having done away with itself. And NATO has so far not been able to agree on a new enemy. Is it to become the world's policeman now, or should it remain a self-defense pact?

The dispute over new members, the wrangling over communiqués and empty formulations cannot hide the true vacuum at the core of the ever-growing alliance. Instead of just talking about expansion, NATO needs a new concept, a justification for its existence, a guiding vision behind which all members can gather. "The Cold War is over," President Bush told his Russian colleagues on Friday. But what should follow on from that bipolar confrontation and the post-9/11 era is yet to be discussed.

There are completely different conceptions of who is protecting whom against whom and by what means. The alliance is militarily bigger and more powerful than ever -- yet politically weaker than it has ever been. There is a deep rift when it comes to all the important questions: On the one side the Americans and their friends in Eastern Europe, on the other the Germans, the French and their neighbors -- "Old Europe," in other words. And in the vain attempt to prevent these differences coming to the fore, the members in Bucharest preferred to postpone all important questions until the next summit.
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I agree. The lack of a clear definition what self-understanding NATO should have after the cold war, I see as the major agent that corrodes NATO from within. i also cannot see that more aggressive new orientation of NATO acting globally, and the more defensive approach of seieng it as a local defense alliance, ever finding together under one label.

In other words: NATO will continue to silently brake apart. Maybe both American and europe need to relaise that America'S fopcus has shifted fromeurope, to the Asian region. In other words: maybe we would be better off and find better policies (while basing on more realistic expectations) when accepting this, and let it happen. Because the rift widening, and the problems growing come from clinging to an identity of NATO that simply is no longer there. Thus, everybody expects unrealistic things from it. Politicians' heads got stuck in the past, it seems.