NATO Ponders New Role as It Nears 50

Deprived of a clear-cut foe since the end of the Cold War and forced to evolve to keep pace with a changing Europe, the United States and the other members of NATO on Tuesday debated what the alliance’s job should be as it turns 50.

The Clinton administration wants the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to tackle what it sees as the main security threats of the future, including proliferation of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in lands far from NATO countries, or in the hands of terrorists. But some Europeans vociferously objected to talk Tuesday of a broadened mandate.

What happens “8,000 kilometers [5,000 miles] from us--in Korea, for example, that is to say in the antipodes--cannot be considered as a threat to our security,” Spanish Foreign Minister Abel Matutes told the meeting of the 16 NATO foreign ministers in Brussels.

“NATO is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and not the North Pacific,” echoed French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine.

The keystone of U.S. defense and foreign policy in the uncertain decades after World War II, NATO was founded in 1949 to extend the umbrella of American nuclear protection to Western Europe and to deter Soviet dictator Josef Stalin from unleashing his armies against the reviving European democracies.

In the late 1980s and early ‘90s, the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, and then of the Soviet Union itself, deprived the alliance of its original reason for being: containment of communism and protection of what came to be called the “Free World.”

By April, when a summit meeting in Washington will mark the 50th anniversary of the treaty that formally gave NATO its birth, the organization plans to come up with a new mission statement--”strategic doctrine,” in alliance jargon--to explain its new responsibilities.

Speaking to reporters here, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright likened the task facing NATO members to the initiative taken by those who created the alliance. “We know if we don’t prepare to counter 21st century threats, no one else will,” Albright said.

The heart of the 1949 treaty is its Article 5: the warning to a would-be aggressor that an attack against one NATO country would be considered an attack against all of them.

“During the Cold War, we had no trouble identifying an Article 5 threat to our territory and security,” Albright said in a speech to her counterparts from other NATO nations. “But the threats we face today and tomorrow could come from a number of different sources, including from beyond NATO’s immediate borders. I often remind people that a ballistic-missile attack using a weapon of mass destruction from a rogue state is every bit as much an Article 5 threat to our borders as a Warsaw Pact tank was two decades ago.”

The Kremlin-dominated Warsaw Pact is no more; in fact, three former members--Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic--are expected to join the Western alliance by the April summit. The Clinton administration wants NATO to be able to take a more active role in managing regional crises, extinguishing the brush fires of ethnic conflicts and, especially, preventing the use of weapons of mass destruction, whether by pariah nations or individuals.

One U.S. proposal made public is for NATO to open a center at its Brussels headquarters to collect and share information about the proliferation of chemical, biological and nuclear arms.

“We are not trying to get NATO to go global,” Albright insisted to reporters. “That is not our intent.”

Some Europeans, however, worry that the Americans ultimately want to make what had been a regional agreement for mutual defense into a planetary super-cop.

In its curtain raiser for the Brussels meeting, Britain’s liberal Guardian newspaper asserted that NATO is now “planning to write itself a blank check by refusing to limit or define its future areas of operations.”

But the alliance has already acted outside its home territory, intervening in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a former Yugoslav republic, to halt ethnic aggression and threatening to use airstrikes in Kosovo, another troubled area of the Balkans.

“NATO is already acting out of area, so let’s not dramatize that,” Javier Solana, the Spaniard who serves as the alliance’s secretary-general, told a news conference in Brussels.

Some NATO states want the alliance to be legally bound to undertake military action only in cases sanctioned by the U.N. Security Council. Russia and China hold permanent seats on the council, and each would have effective veto power if NATO sought its blessing.

France and Germany insist that the alliance may only use force if there is a clear U.N. mandate. On Tuesday, Albright came down in favor of a “case-by-case” approach.

“The discussion is open on the question of knowing how to combine the authority of the Security Council and the actions of the NATO allies in certain cases,” France’s Vedrine told reporters. Saying that he senses a great deal of willingness to compromise on the part of NATO member states, he predicted that solutions to this and other issues could be found before the Washington summit.

Recent European events, however, have been a wake-up call that some certainties from the Cold War days are vanishing. Last week, for example, Britain--traditionally America’s closest ally among European NATO members--agreed with France that the European Union, the 15-nation trade bloc to which both belong, should have an “autonomous” and “credible” military capability.

Albright expressed support for the idea but also raised the possibility that it could lead to discrimination against some NATO members, such as Norway or Turkey, that are not part of the EU.

Germany’s new left-of-center government, meanwhile, has called for NATO to amend its nuclear doctrine, which permits the alliance to resort to “first-strike” use of nuclear weapons.

“We should ask ourselves on the threshold of the 21st century whether our instruments still fit a changed security environment,” German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said at the start of the Brussels session.

The Germans may press the issue further but appeared to win little support at the meeting here. NATO’s trio of nuclear powers--Britain, France and the U.S.--all rejected Fischer’s suggestion.

“We do not believe a review is necessary,” Albright said.

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Times staff writer Tyler Marshall in Washington contributed to this report.