KEY POINTS:
It is the lack of definition of what Nato is for that is producing all the strains.
A British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, once observed that the only way to hold a successful summit was to have the communique already written before you arrived. On that reading, the recent Nato summit in Bucharest had all the elements of a truly miserable failure.
The participants were at odds over expansion to the East, with the US, backed by the new entrants, urging Georgian and Ukrainian membership against the doubts of Germany and the opposition of Russia.
The core members were at odds over their individual contributions to the war in Afghanistan. Even on what should be the relatively orderly issue of bringing Macedonia into the organisation, the Greeks are threatening to veto the move unless the new member changes its name.
Of course such meetings are never allowed to end in a climax of slammed doors. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation is regarded as far too important, and prestigious, for that.
Indeed no Nato meeting is complete without a chorus of pronouncements by premiers, politicians and pundits stressing just how important the alliance is to the West and how, despite the end of the Cold War that was its raison d'etre, it is needed more than ever in the post 9/11 world.
All true, no doubt - or at least in part.
Nato has been an extraordinarily effective organisation in locking the US into Europe militarily and containing the Soviet Union. But past pre-eminence is no guide to future purpose. It is the lack of definition of what Nato is for that is producing all the strains.
With the Cold War, the organisation had a defined enemy and a clear function - to defend Western Europe against conventional or nuclear assault. Without the Cold War, it has no clear enemy or function, only the persistence of a well-honed military structure.
The "War on Terror" proponents like President George W. Bush see that honed structure as a ready-made means of combating the new enemies in a world of Muslim extremism and nuclear proliferation. If Europe was its theatre of operations in the Cold War, Nato's role after 9/11 is, according to this doctrine, to go "out of theatre" to engage in operations in Afghanistan, the Middle East, Africa or wherever else a threat is perceived. At the same time, Bush, in pursuit of his vision of "democracy" around the world and in search of a legacy for his failing presidency, wants to use Nato membership to secure the new democracies of the Orange and Rose revolutions. Hence his enthusiasm to start the process of entry for Ukraine and Georgia.
Add to that a new President of France who wants re-entry to full military participation in Nato as a means to take France back to the heart of international decision-making and you have more energy for movement in Nato than in a generation.
Only it is an energy without consensus or agreed direction. The reluctance of member states to send more troops to Afghanistan or other hot spots is not, as Washington would brief, a matter of cowardice or parsimony.
It is because, for a number of European countries, there is no public support after Iraq for an operation which makes Nato troops into a white, Western occupying force charged with rooting out drugs, confronting local warlords and instituting civil reconstruction.
In the same way, Bush and the Ukrainian and Georgian leaders would make eastward expansion into a matter of facing down Russia. But fear of Russia is not the main reason for German (and French, Belgian and Dutch) doubts.
The problem is that expansion this far east would take Nato right into the middle of the conflict between Russian and Ukrainian-speaking halves of Ukraine, never mind the problem of the breakaway parts of Georgia, disputes that could easily escalate into confrontation with Moscow.
For the very reason that the two countries want membership, the organisation should be wary of it. For, as Moscow not unfairly argues, if Russia is no longer "the enemy", why are we doing it and in such haste?
This isn't a case of: if Europe didn't have Nato it would have to be invented. The opposite is true. If Europe did not have Nato it would invent something quite different now.
It would be involved in a different way, if at all, in Afghanistan. And it would be using EU membership to enable the democracies of the former Soviet republics. And developing an independent European defence capability.
The fearful prospect at Bucharest is that, by allowing Nato to be driven in new directions without confronting the hard questions on its future, there is a danger of breaking the whole alliance on which it is founded.
- INDEPENDENT
