NATO’s New Role in Crisis Management

CIAO DATE: 1/00

NATO’s New Role in Crisis Management

1998

This year is, of course, in many ways a continuous birthday party for NATO, when we are celebrating the remarkable achievements of its first half century and looking ahead to its potential to develop as a unique instrument for multinational military cooperation in the very changed circumstances of the twenty-first century. Our discussions should not though be purely laudatory, however deserved praise is but should examine critically the particular contribution NATO can bring to the network of international institutions that must be mutually reinforcing if they are to cooperate in working effectively to help their member states achieve peace and security, both in Europe and perhaps in a wider environment.

A critical examination of NATO’s new role in crisis management may therefore shock some as being somewhat irreverent and inappropriate at a birthday party, but although I wish to raise a number of difficult questions from an independent position outside the institutions of the Alliance, I hope I will not be seen as playing a role similar to Hans Christian Andersen’s small boy who revealed the non existent character of the Emperor’s new clothes. Perhaps to reassure I should begin with my conclusion; I believe that NATO, as an extremely effective instrument for military cooperation, can usefully contribute to crisis management in integrating the efforts of its member states, sometimes in cooperation with other partners, but that in order to prevent misunderstandings and false expectations it should define its capabilities with care, and accept that it is only going to be as successful as its member states permit it to be.

NATO’s functional dynamism

NATO has, in the decade since the fall of the Berlin Wall, demonstrated that while, unlike the European Union, it is not institutionally dynamic and does not see any deepening of the pattern of cooperation between its members, it is functionally dynamic and can transfer the professional and technical skills and competences of military cooperation which have been developed among its members in the area of collective defence into a wide range of other functions of armed forces. It has therefore been recognised by its members, as well as by both those who will join in the course of 1999 and those who would like to be considered for membership, as the primary instrument of multinational military cooperation. All its members recognise that it provides military ‘value added’ military forces working together within NATO can be significantly more effective than they would be on their own.

NATO and its member states have also recognised that in this range of military activities which go beyond collective defence the instrument of military cooperation has to be used much more flexibly. The Cold War model of collective defence was based on the assumption that all the members of NATO would provide the maximum contribution from their armed forces to this task, ₁ and that NATO would provide the framework of military cooperation and command structure in which they would operate. The range of operations involving our armed forces which we are now contemplating may still involve all of the members of NATO as in IFOR/SFOR, or it may involve a much more limited number of members as in the extraction force deployed into Macedonia at present. The provision for Combined Joint Task Forces (CJTFs) presents an institutional arrangement for such flexibility whereby a subset of NATO members may be involved in a particular operation and they or, as in IFOR/SFOR the whole membership, can be joined by other countries. There is even provision whereby such an operation can be under the political control not of the North Atlantic Council but, if the countries involved were exclusively European, by the WEU Council. It would still however make use of the NATO Command Structure and where appropriate other NATO assets.

NATO and crisis management in the Cold War

Before turning to a discussion of NATO’s new role in crisis management, it is worth recalling that crisis management as such is not new to NATO as during the Cold War it already had two roles in crisis management. ‘Crisis management’ for NATO during the Cold War was one dimension of its relationship with the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union. It referred to the measures to be taken to prevent any conflict from becoming violent and the plans to bring it to a conclusion if it were to occur. In the Cold War NATO, as the focus for all its member states in dealing with the dominant problem of foreign and security policy facing them, had therefore a centrality both in the development of the political measures of conflict prevention as well as the planning for the military measures for concluding a crisis as quickly and satisfactorily as possible if it were to become violent. At a time when crises were primarily seen as involving the two blocs. NATO, was seen as having an effective monopoly in Cold War crisis management, apart from possible bilateral super-power communications.

The second way in which NATO has played an effective, but much less public part, in crisis management, both during the Cold War and subsequently, has been in attempting to reconcile differences between its member states. The case to which most attention has been given over the years has been that of Greco-Turkish relations, but reference can also be made to discussions in the margins of ministerial meetings of the North Atlantic Council which helped to end the “Cod Wars” between the United Kingdom and Iceland in the 1970s. A great deal of time has been spent within various Alliance bodies on trying to deal with Greco-Turkish disputes, both insofar as they affected efficient Alliance military arrangements in the Eastern Mediterranean and more directly to prevent conflicts between two members of the Alliance. Successive Secretaries General and Chairmen of the Military Committee have spent a great deal of time on this problem. Although they have been successful in preventing a deterioration of the relationship, almost certainly this still remains a problem of internal crisis management for the Alliance. NATO’s relatively unpublicised work in this field is a good illustration of the general principle that organisations rarely get credit for successful conflict prevention, it is only when conflict prevention fails that people notice.

Contemporary crisis management

Since the end of the Cold War ‘crisis management’ has been used rather loosely in discussions in NATO, sometimes to mean Alliance intervention in conflicts beyond the territory of NATO allies and sometimes more widely to refer to any action other than the traditional Alliance role of territorial defence. These usages may be both too narrow and too wide. They are probably too narrow as they concentrate too heavily on the military component of crisis management, which, while important, is certainly not the only component or necessarily the central one. They are too wide in that they go beyond NATO’s own terminological definition of crisis management. This is “The coordinated actions taken to defuse crises, prevent their escalation into an armed conflict, and contain hostilities if they should result.” ₂

As a definition this seems perhaps a shade austere, it lacks, in particular, any reference to post-conflict crisis management which has certainly come within the practical range of NATO’s crisis management activities in Bosnia.

More importantly it refers to “the coordinated actions” which indicates that in practice crisis management is a complicated combination of political, military and possibly economic operations in which, unlike the situation in the Cold War, NATO is not likely to be the only operator nor in many cases the explicit coordinator. This contrast to the Cold War situation, where NATO would have been the crisis manager to one in which it is contributing to the military component of crisis management, is demonstrated by the frustrations of the situation in Yugoslavia from 1992-95 in terms of relations between UNPROFOR and NATO3 or in the more straightforward but still complex relations between IFOR and the High Representative in Bosnia after 19954

It might be useful to obtain indicators of the intensity of crises - a crisis-Richter scale -which might give some indication of the relevant importance of crises. During the Cold War NATO developed very sophisticated “warning indicators” to alert its members to the risks of conflict. It is not known whether something similar is now being undertaken with respect to potential crisis situations. There is possibly a case, if this were to be undertaken, for at least some of the outputs to be put into the public domain. During the Cold War there was effectively no question but that member states would respond to aggression against the territory of any member state, in the present situation there is a much greater need to inform not only governments but also the “political class” or more widely public opinion of the costs and benefits of the alternative responses to a developing crisis. Such a direct publication of information will seem revolutionary to the classified culture of those who deal with matters of security, but there is a parallel with the debate going forward as to how far the international financial institutions (IMF and World Bank) should give early warning of potential economic and financial crises.

The reference to financial and economic crises indicates that there are obviously some crises in which there is normally no military component required in the response. Within the total range of crises there may be others where the response is almost exclusively military, counter-proliferation cases would seem on some occasions to come into this category. The majority of cases however, sometimes referred to as complex emergencies, could very well have politico-diplomatic, humanitarian aid, post conflict social and economic reconstruction, and state-building dimensions as well at the military and paramilitary dimensions.

There are significant problems of the integration of these various dimensions of the response to a crisis, with the management of crisis management becoming particularly complicated when the different organisations and agencies involved have different organisational cultures. The particular mix of organisations is likely to vary from crisis to crisis and while the military structure of NATO give it considerable advantages in terms of efficiency, flexibility and deployability, some aspects of its military culture may not be immediately appreciated by those contributing the civilian components of crisis management.

The most complicated problems will arise with the politico-diplomatic dimension of crisis management. This in fact has three parts:

the political direction of the crisis management operation,
the negotiations with the parties directly involved locally in the crisis, and
the negotiations at the United Nations, or OSCE, for international legitimation of
the action.

It is perhaps useful to make a distinction between two broad types of crises in examining patterns of management. There are some crises that can be characterised as acute, while others can be described as chronic crises, with the former showing considerable risk of an early conflict or actual hostilities, and the latter including post-conflict crisis management situations requiring long term attention. The more acute the crisis the less likely that heads of government and ministers in major NATO allies will be to allow responsibility to be transferred to others, at the most we are likely to see this being dealt with the type of Contact Group directoire with which we have become familiar in former Yugoslavia. In the case of chronic crises, when the risk of hostilities is much reduced, major countries may still wish to take initiatives but these will require to be approved in wider multilateral bodies, either the governing bodies of organisations such as the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), the OSCE Council or multilateral ad hoc bodies such as the Peace Implementation Conference (PIC) established by the Dayton Agreement.

As far as political negotiations with the parties locally are concerned ₅ there will again be a variation between acute and chronic crises and a diversity of negotiators. The more serious the crisis the more likely that a US negotiator will be required, both to guarantee the support of the United States for whatever is negotiated and because of the political power of the United States to frighten the parties into coming to an agreement. In less acute crises the Contact Group or its equivalent may appoint a negotiator who may also be endorsed by the OSCE or the European Union. In a chronic crisis or in post conflict crisis management this function may be left to a long term resident representative of the “international community” such as the High Representative of the PIC in Bosnia Hercegovina or Special Representatives of the UN Secretary General as in Macedonia or Cyprus. In other circumstances of long-term crises the High Commissioner for National Minorities and Long Term Missions of the OSCE can play an important part.

The third part of the politico-diplomatic dimension of crisis management is to achieve international authority for the crisis management operations from the United Nations Security Council, or possibly the OSCE Council. This will be primarily the responsibility of the members of the organisations involved sitting on the Security Council. Although the Permanent Members have a particular role in this, the support and involvement of the elected members is also important.

This discussion of the politico-diplomatic dimension will have illustrated that while, as we shall see, the North Atlantic Council, or in some circumstances the Western European Union Council, have an important political function in their responsibility for the control of the military dimension of crisis management if it is provided using the NATO framework, there are a number of others involved in different structures dealing with other aspects of the politico-diplomatic element of crisis management.

The spectrum of crisis management actors in complex emergencies

As the discussion of the politico-diplomatic dimension of crisis management has demonstrated there are a multitude of actors in crisis management. Managing the crisis managers may often be as difficult as managing the crisis. As well as the various international and regional organisations who may be involved, individual states may have their own diplomatic missions and humanitarian activities. A variety of non governmental organisations are likely to be involved and the role of the press in affecting international attitudes to a particular crisis cannot be ignored.

While, as has been said, NATO is seen by its members as their preferred instrument for multinational military cooperation, there are other organisations which have played a role in the military and paramilitary ₆ element of crisis management in Europe in recent years. These have included forces directly responsible to the United Nations (UN) such as the UN Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP), UN Preventive Deployment in Macedonia (UNPREDEP), and United Nations Military Observers (UNMOs) as well as ad hoc multinational forces sanctioned by the United Nations such as the Italian led “Operation Alba” in Albania in 1997. While the European Union’s monitors in various parts of former Yugoslavia since 1991 (ECMM) have worn white coats the vast majority of them have had military backgrounds as have a significant number of the OSCE’s ‘verifiers’ deployed into Kosovo from November 1998. In both cases their tasks involve local negotiations with the armed forces as well as reporting on military developments. Finally the OSCE has since 1995 deployed officers in Bosnia to ensure the implementation of the arms control sections of the Dayton agreement.

Humanitarian agencies have a growing role in crisis management. in particular, because recent crises both in Europe and its immediate neighbourhood have generated significant numbers of refugees and internally displaced persons. Therefore one of the factors driving Western European concern about crises is the risk that unsolved crises will lead to an influx of refugees. Here the United Nations, with its High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the European Union, with its ECHO operations, have provided much of the resources, they have worked both directly and in cooperation with non governmental organisations (NGOs) to implement their programmes. NATO has itself developed within the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC) an Euro-Atlantic Disaster Response Coordination Centre

(EADRCC) which exists to extend long standing NATO activities in the field of Civil Emergency Planning to the wider area of the 44 members of EAPC and coordinate their response capabilities to ensure prompt and effective offers of disaster assistance to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Activities (UN OCHA). How far this will be able to contribute to the humanitarian dimension of crisis management is to be seen, but its existence within the NATO structure might ensure a better interface between the military and humanitarian elements of crisis management.

Post conflict crisis management is central to NATO’s IFOR/SFOR experience in Bosnia, and must be seen as also incorporating elements of crisis prevention as it is intended to break the cycle of social tension which could otherwise lead to further hostilities. It will involve measures of economic and social reconstruction as well as the development of a functioning political system which can ensure that social disputes can be resolved within the democratic process rather than leading to renewed violence. This will bring in a wide range of organisations, in Bosnia-Hercegovina it has involved on the economic side the World Bank, the European Union,and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development as well as the bilateral programmes of individual countries. On the social side the development of effective and respected local civil policing is crucial, here the UN sponsored International Police Task Force has had the central role in Bosnia, the UN and now OSCE have taken responsibility in Eastern Slavonia and WEU has done so in Albania. As far as the development of political and judicial institutions are concerned, the experience of Bosnia sine 1995 has shown how difficult this is, but various organisations, including the OSCE in election monitoring and the development of Ombudspersons, and successive High Representatives, Carl Bildt and Carlos Westendorp, and their staffs have contributed. This overview of the range of organisations playing a part in contemporary crisis management has been to indicate that NATO’s role in crisis management is going to be one among a number of actors and not necessarily even primus inter pares.

NATO’s comparative advantages in crisis management

There is a clear case for NATO playing a major role in contemporary crisis management, certainly in the military element and possibly in the coordinating function, although this will depend on the nature and the scale of the operation.

NATO’s main comparative advantages are that it brings together virtually all the Western countries who collectively possess an overwhelming preponderance of military, economic and political power. In particular, it builds on the traditional patterns of military cooperation between the United States, Canada and Western European countries. This unequalled military capacity has a formidable deterrent capability as was seen in October 1998 when President Milosevic agreed to negotiate over Kosovo when faced with the decision by NATO to undertake air strikes.

The experience of working together for decades in NATO has given political leaders of Allied countries a confidence in NATO’s command systems and structures. There is in all Allied countries a growing reluctance to put the lives of the young people of our armed forces at risk, particularly in the management of crises that do not immediately effect a country’s vital interests. If force has to be used and the young people of our armed forces have to be placed in harm’s way, countries want to know that the risks to them will be minimised because the command and control systems are tried and trusted. This NATO, with its half century of experience of cooperation, provides in a way which no other international military structure does. The recognition of this fact in every Alliance country is.an extremely important asset for NATO.

NATO has the further advantage in that it is a standing “coalition of the potentially willing” including the single most powerful military power, the United States. This gives it very considerable power projection capabilities and is a massive force multiplier for the contribution of the European Allies. The United States has very considerable political hesitation about military intervention on its own and the presence of Alliance Partners at its side provides political reassurance, even if it sometimes complicates the military management. NATO is the American instrument of choice for coalition warfare.

The development of CJTFs as discussed earlier provides NATO with a growing flexibility in the arrangements of its operations in crisis management. The evolution of planning for operations in the last decade has seen a significant move from the traditional large forces of the Cold War period to tailor-made units for specific functions as for example in the extraction force currently deployed Macedonia which has been described as a “reinforced battalion”.

The recognition of NATO’s comparative advantage has been confirmed by the decision of the European members of NATO to develop the European Security and Defence Identity (ESDI) within NATO rather than create parallel structures outside NATO. Although the fact that any use by Europeans of NATO structures and assets in CJTF responsible to WEU would require agreement by all members of the Alliance gives the United States (as well as Canada, Iceland, Norway and Turkey) a right of veto over such European action, the use of such a veto would cause such a major crisis within the Alliance that it seems unimaginable.

While there is no doubt therefore of NATO’s considerable comparative advantages in terms of the military element of crisis management, there may still be questions about whether a relatively large, and growing, multinational organisation can take the responsibility for the political aspects of acute crisis management. Political leaders in major NATO countries will want to take the lead themselves in these cases. While there is an acceptance of multinational military command there is not yet a readiness to delegate policy determination and political negotiation to a multinational organisation.

New role, new problems

NATO’s potential to act in crisis management will bring with it new problems and new areas for tension among its members. In this as in much else “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”. Three areas where there are likely to be arguments are about where NATO should act as a crisis manager, about what is the requirement for international authority for crisis management, and variations in national styles of crisis management and peacekeeping arising from different levels of equipment and different military culture.

While some public discussion would suggest that NATO and its member states are desperate to acquire the role of world policeman, any closer examination of reality would show that the reverse is closer to the truth, there are political as well as capacity constraints on any such development. At the time of the 1991 Gulf War the then US Secretary of Defence, Dick Cheney, is reported to have said, “I think caution is in order . . . This happens to be one of those times when it is justified to . . . send American forces into combat to achieve important national objectives. But they are very rare. Just because we do it successfully this once, it doesn’t mean we should therefore assume that it’s something we ought to fall back on automatically as the easy answer to international problems in the future. We have to remember that we don’t have a dog in every fight, that we don’t want to get involved in every single conflict . . .” ₇

More recently a German scholar has written, “NATO is still a long way from defining itself as a coalition of those willing to export stability to regional theatres outside Europe” ₈ How far it has moved in that direction will perhaps be seen by the decisions of this spring’s Alliance Summit in Washington. However, in terms of crisis management, it is only necessary to mention some possible regions to see how restricted is the area under serious consideration. Latin America, East Asia and the Pacific, and Africa south of the Sahara since the Somalia intervention of 1992, are all in the “very unlikely”,category as is, for most people, the territory of the former Soviet Union. This seems in practice to exclude everything except South Eastern Europe and the countries bordering the Mediterranean, with the possible extension to the Gulf. Even in South Eastern Europe there are considerable restrictions. The example of “Operation Alba” in 1997 suggested that even among the European members of NATO there was no agreement on multilateral military activity in Albania, and recent developments in Kosovo have shown that further problems arise from NATO’s acceptability in all situations. Many external commentators would feel that it would be preferable to have a NATO ground force in Kosovo verifying compliance with such agreements as have been reached, and if necessary having the capacity to enforce them, than to rely on the more dubious option of unarmed OSCE “verifiers”. But if this is not acceptable to the Serbian authorities, then, irrespective of whether or not NATO member states would have been prepared to provide such forces, it would have been impossible to deploy them in the absence of a UNSC resolution

The issue of UN Security Council authorisation is both a legal and a political problem. NATO in its Brussels Summit Declaration of January 1994 offered “to support, on a case by case basis, in accordance with our own procedures peacekeeping and other operations under the authority of the UN Security Council or the responsibility of the OSCE.” While this does not explicitly exclude undertaking crisis management actions in the absence of such authority, and indeed it can be argued that NATO has under Article 51 of the UN Charter no requirement of a mandate to come to the assistance of a member or non member who is the victim of aggression, there is great reluctance to act in the internal affairs of another state without UN authority. As the decision on “Act Ords” for air strikes against Serbia in October 1998 has shown this is not a total bar but an issue remains on which we are far from consensus within the Alliance. The implications of acting without UNSC authority for the future of the Russia-NATO relationship add a further dimension to the complication of this question.

A third group of problems in the military dimensions of crisis management can arise from differences in military capability and operational culture among NATO member states. Problems of interoperability are nothing new for NATO, but in a period of once again growing US defence budgets and shrinking European resources we may find new problems arising here. The evaluation that “(D)espite spending two thirds of what the United States does on defense, European NATO countries have less than 10 percent of the transportable defense capability for prompt long range action.” ₁₀ is frequently quoted but has not yet lead to many policy changes, Experience in Bosnia since 1995 has shown very different styles in peacekeeping in IFOR/SFOR, in part a function of equipment differences but also to national priorities on force protection. Bosnia has been, in fact a relatively benign environment, these differences in styles of operation and quality of equipment might have presented more problems if the situation had been more hostile.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that there will be important tasks in the future for which NATO is particularly well equipped. As we have seen given the complexity of the tasks of conflict management and the range of actors it is not clear that NATO will always be the crisis manager itself. Indeed to revert to the NATO definition of crisis management given at the outset it is not clear who will be the coordinator of actions in various crisis management situations, NATO has professionally and technically considerable advantages which can enable it to make major contributions to the military component of crisis management in the future. Whether or not it will do this will depend on particular political situations and the willingness of its members to make use of their primary instrument for military cooperation.

Endnotes

Note 1: Subject to the qualification that the extra-European members might in a global conflict have other extra-European commitments. Back.

Note 2: NATO’s Military Agency for Standardisation November 1998. Back.

Note 3: cf Michael Rose, “Fighting for Peace”, London 1998 Back.

Note 4: cf Carl Bildt, “Peace Journey: the struggle for Peace in Bosnia”, London 1998. Back.

Note 5: There may well be other local negotiations undertaken by other crisis managers, including those by the military force commander and his staff with the local military, humanitarian agencies with local authorities etc. Back.

Note 6: In paramilitary I am including the function of military and civilian observers and verifiers as well as the functions of gendarmerie andcarabinieri type units which go beyond the civil police function. Back.

Note 7: Dick Cheney quoted by David Broder in the Washington Post, February 27 1991. I am grateful to David Yost for this quotation. Back.

Note 8: Joachim Krause, “Proliferation risks and their strategic relevance: what role for NATO?” Survival, vol 37 (Summer 1995), p.147 Back.

Note 9: It seems that irrespective of the willingness of the North Atlantic Council to provide ‘Act Ords’ for specific and time restricted bombing strikes without explicit UNSC authority, it would be more difficult to do this in the case of a substantial ground presence for a period of time. Back.

Note 10: Michael O’Hanlon, How to be a Cheap Hawk, Washington DC, The Brookings Institution 1998, p.76 Back.