Elizabeth Jones Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by Jane Scherr

Page 5 of 9

NATO

You talked about the virtues of patience and perseverance, and one could say that in the present age we're in, a lot is going on, it's a very interesting time, and our institutions have to adapt. You mentioned NATO. In what sense, for example, is NATO doing that, and are we seeing that happen?

You're definitely seeing that happen. NATO is a good example. For instance, NATO used to be a military defense organization to protect Europe from an attack from the Soviet Union, so there are lots of big tank units in Germany to prevent an invasion. Now, NATO has redefined the threat to be global -- terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, those kinds of things. The NATO membership has to figure out how to protect itself against those threats, and we've done it in a couple of ways. We said, "Okay, we can't just sit in Europe. That's not going to protect us from weapons of mass destruction. We've got to figure out ways that we can work beyond the confines of the territory of Europe." So now we have NATO members working in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan; we are consulting within NATO about how NATO might support international security assistance force in Kabul.

But some of the pillars of NATO, if you can say that Germany is a pillar, are less than cooperative, or apparently so during an election time. So I guess there's a real agenda for the United States in identifying new members, making sure they're ready to be brought in, but on the other hand, still trying to keep the peace with countries like Germany.

Well, I would differentiate it slightly. Germany is absolutely a complete stalwart in NATO. It's very participatory. They, not as part of NATO, but as an ally, are about to take over the lead of the international security assistance force in Kabul with NATO support. They've been very, very active in the Balkans. But the issue with the German elections is related specifically to war in Iraq. What do we do about that? And our answer to that is focused on the Security Council. Let's get a good, tough resolution in the Security Council, one that Saddam Hussein will understand sufficiently, so that he will cooperate with the inspectors and disarm. That's the goal, disarmament of Iraq. War is the last resort. That's the policy of the United States, just as much as it's the policy of, I would argue, just about anybody. And it happened to be something that went right to the top of the charts in the German election.

What you're suggesting or implying is that the media is a real issue as you do your work. I mean, we have to have the media, but its capacity to focus on a particular aspect of what's going on, and make that the agenda, at least for the week -- talk a little about that problem.

It's true that that tends to happen with the media, and, frankly, it's something that we as practitioners of foreign policy, we as spokespeople for the administration, must be able to deal with. We have to find ways to make sure that the media understands the bigger agenda that we have; that yes, it might be more interesting to focus on Iraq, but here are the other issues that are going on. That's our task. And if it's not happening, then we're not doing our job well enough.

Joe Joffe, the editor of Die Zeit, in a recent article in The New York Times, talked about the changing nature of NATO. He argued that it was more like a posse now, and we are the sheriff trying to round up citizen states, so to speak, who would be willing to participate in an operation. There is a capability gap, which our government recognizes: some of our allies in NATO are not able to contribute in the way they might to a particular mission. So is Joffe's metaphor a good way to look at NATO, or is it too extreme a statement?

I think it's too extreme a statement. The capabilities gap, though, is important, and it's something that we are very worried about, Many of our European allies in NATO are very worried about it as well. The French have just announced big increases in their defense budget in order to close the capabilities gap. But something that's really interesting that we've learned from working with the NATO aspirant countries, as we look for their capabilities and how can they contribute to the work that's going on in Afghanistan or the Balkans, [is that] they have what we call niche capabilities. They have smaller units that are expert at one thing or another, either a medical unit, or a chemical-biological weapons decontamination unit. There's no reason that those kinds of capabilities, and the focus on [specific] capabilities, can't be the way that NATO moves forward in order to close its capabilities gap.

We used to think that all NATO members should be able to do everything, and we've changed that now. We've said, "That's not right. Let's have some who have the big airlift capacity, some who have this decontamination capacity, some who might be really good at the lightly armed special operations forces that are used against the new threats." So that's how we're pursuing this.

Does that argument work against the notion that the Europeans aren't spending enough? That after all, rather than spending more, a NATO member can find its inexpensive niche? Is that a problem for us, that the size of our defense budget is greater than the next fifteen countries?

That's true ...

So is the problem for us now their unwillingness to specialize as part of the strategy that we might propose for dealing with terrorists, or with people like Saddam Hussein?

Actually, what we hear from them is that they're much more comfortable specializing, they're much more comfortable focusing on a particular skill, rather than thinking, "Oh, we've got to be able to do everything, and, therefore, we can do nothing." That's what was happening, it was that kind of psychology that was at work.

Every single one of our NATO allies completely accepts that the danger from terrorism is extreme. So the task is how to organize ourselves to combat that threat. We do it through NATO, but we also do it with major cooperation with the European Union members. We're not members, obviously, but through the justice ministries, through law enforcement, through cooperation among the treasury departments -- we get a lot of our counter-terrorism work done with the Europeans and other friends and allies.

So you're saying that NATO is only a piece of this.

Correct. That's right.

Next page: U.S. - Russia Relations after 9/11

See also: Interview with Josef Joffe (Spring, 2000)

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