EU defence deal to face US suspicions at NATO

News, November 2003, www.aljazeerah.info

Khaleej Times, (Reuters)

30 November 2003

BRUSSELS - The European Union’s tentative deal on future defence cooperation faces an acid test this week at big NATO meetings, where Washington will demand assurances that the bloc is not seeking to rival the Atlantic alliance.

Diplomats said it was not yet clear if the United States would force a showdown over the EU’s agreement to establish an independent military planning cell or whether it would accept the word of its closest European ally Britain that NATO is safe.

Still, the breakthrough on defence arrangements for an enlarged EU -- achieved by foreign ministers in Naples while Washington was on a holiday weekend -- may well eclipse debates at NATO in Brussels on military capability and on how to expand the alliance’s Afghanistan peacekeeping mission beyond Kabul.

“I hope for the Americans’ sake that they don’t play it all icy because they would be putting themselves in self-fulfilling prophecy mode,” said Francois Heisbourg, director of the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research.

“If you say you don’t trust the European allies -- particularly Britain, after all it’s done in Iraq -- you will probably end up not being able to trust them,” he said.

After providing the NATO muscle to guard western Europe in the Cold War, Washington is annoyed by Europeans’ reluctance to spend more on NATO forces and suspects notably France of pushing a separate EU defence pact as a way to curb US influence. Paris says it wants to complement NATO, not set up a rival.

Full details of the common defence policy presented by the EU’s big three -- Britain, France and Germany -- during talks in Naples on the bloc’s first constitution have not yet emerged.

But diplomats say it is unlikely to bring a blazing row with US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who meets his alliance counterparts at NATO’s headquarters on Monday and Tuesday, or with Secretary of State Colin Powell, who will join NATO foreign ministers for a two-day meeting at the end of the week.

Ambitious plans diluted

This is because the terms were something of a climbdown for France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg, whose leaders drafted plans for a European Defence Union last April at the height of their face-off with Washington over the US invasion of Iraq.

While a mutual defence clause will go into the bloc’s constitution, it would recognise NATO as the foundation of collective defence for its members, which include 11 EU states. And a protocol to be added to the constitution treaty will make clear that closer defence cooperation among a vanguard group of EU states would focus on developing better military capabilities rather than duplicating NATO structures.

What irked Washington most about April’s summit -- sneered at by the US administration as a meeting of “chocolate makers” -- was its ambition for a full-blown military planning headquarters for EU peacekeeping and crisis management missions.

That has now been diluted to a small cell of planning officers at the existing EU military staff in Brussels, which would only be called upon if NATO chose not to be involved in an operation and if national European headquarters needed support.

But one NATO diplomat said many in Washington would inevitably see the planning cell -- even if only 30 officers -- as a “Trojan horse” that would grow into something much bigger.

“The Europeans are going to tell Rumsfeld and Powell that NATO remains the primary guarantor of security in Europe and they will argue that the Americans had all along asked them to develop their defence capability,” said another diplomat.

“The proof will be in how it all develops, and that is what the United States is going to be watching.”

A spat over EU ambitions will disappoint alliance officials, who had hoped to make the launch of a battalion specialised in combating nuclear, chemical and biological attack the good news story about “NATO transformation” at Monday’s meeting.

But there was always going to be friction over Europe’s failure, despite its 1.4 million men and women under arms, to have sufficient forces and equipment for 21st-century crises.

Outgoing Secretary-General George Robertson has promised to talk sternly to allies whose refusal to offer even a few helicopters for the Kabul force is undermining the credibility of NATO’s plans to take its operation beyond the Afghan capital.

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, like a Python (Alquds, 1/25/03.

Opinions expressed in various sections are the sole responsibility of their authors and they may not represent Al-Jazeerah's.

editor@aljazeerah.info