HOOPLA:

(DIS)UNITED EUROPE: Ever changing alliances (Pepe Escobar, 2/07/04, Asia Times)

Dutchman Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the new NATO secretary general post-Lord Robertson, is eager to assure suspicious Europeans - for whom NATO, since the end of the Cold War, has become just a political club charged of promoting the American geostrategic vision - that the new NATO "is not an instrument to serve our American friends". The Atlantic alliance's new role, according to him, is "to export security and stability, wholesale".

So what does that mean in practice, supposing a crisis happens somewhere in Eurasia. Scheffer says that there are three possible scenarios. 1) NATO intervenes. 2) If NATO "does not want to intervene", for unspecified reasons, the European Union (EU) can use NATO's means. 3) The EU may intervene by itself. Scheffer insists that the link between SHAPE (NATO's HQ)and NATO's liaison officers with the EU (in the EU's HQ) "is a good thing, and we will see in practice how it works out. I place great importance in good relations between NATO and the EU."

Sounds confusing? Well, that's because it is. The secretary general maintains that "it's in the interest of the Americans that the EU develops
its own foreign and defense policy". Tell that to a neo-conservative in the Bush administration and Scheffer would be dispatched to Mars. But in the next minute, Scheffer himself lays down the law, as it stands: "The Atlantic alliance has an integrated military structure that is unique, while the European Union has limited military capabilities."

That's quite an understatement. In 2000, the EU created a Rapid Action Force (now with 60,000 men) and a satellite center in Torrejon, Spain. And that's it. The EU depends on American technology and weapons - like the war in the Balkans demonstrated in full. In the Middle East, the EU can only deploy money and ideas - not force, the language that really makes a difference locally. At the same time, most European diplomats are very much aware that whatever the spin, the values upheld by Brussels are extremely different from Washington's, at least the Washington of the Bush administration, with its contempt for international law and love affair with the death penalty - unanimously abolished by the European Union.

And that's the whole point, post-preventive war in Iraq. The Americans want an all-enveloping NATO with as many as three dozen members, capable of intervening anywhere. The Franco-German core of the European Union, plus Britain, favors an EU militarily independent from the US. Anybody in Brussels knows that there can be no Europe without an integrated defense policy.

They can't get their economies together and people still think they'll co-ordinate their national security?

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 10, 2004 8:24 AM