Partnership or membership? Australia and NATO in the Global War on Terror
Abstract
As the Australian Defence Force overseas deployments grow in size and tempo, Australian strategists and planners must consider the growing number of organisations our troops will work alongside, and in concert with. This article explores the relationship between Australia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an issue that is particularly pertinent considering current commitments in Afghanistan.
The end of the Cold War came quickly, and unexpectedly. Talk of ‘peace dividends’ on a massive scale proved premature, at best, as the victory of Western interests over those of the former Soviet bloc gave way instead to a ‘new world disorder’ exemplified by the vicious implosion of the former Yugoslavia. The succession of small wars and ethnic and religious violence in the Balkans during the 1990s raised fundamental questions about the capacity, and willingness, of the United Nations, the United States and the European Union to enforce and maintain peace and security in a continent where such conflict was widely believed, till then, to be a thing of the past. Many, including some of the organisation’s leading members, cast NATO’s capability, indeed its future viability, in doubt.
Such gloomy forecasts proved premature, but NATO was forced to undergo a wide-ranging examination of its purpose and the circumstances in which it might act in future, given that the contingencies for which it was originally fashioned had evaporated. Perhaps unexpectedly, it also became an important part of the process of progressively incorporating newly independent former Soviet bloc states in central and eastern Europe into the mainstream of European and Western affairs through the Partnership for Peace (PfP) program. While many European member states were unwilling to follow the United States into its war on Iraq, a clear NATO presence was established in Afghanistan following the initial overthrow of the Taliban regime in late 2001, suggesting new future directions for an alliance originally focused entirely on European affairs.
At the NATO summit in Riga, Latvia, in November 2006, the Partnership for Peace program was extended to include Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia, while continuing operations in Afghanistan received considerable attention, especially over the issue of national ‘caveats’ limiting the type and range of deployments that can be assigned to various national forces working within the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Less prominent because less immediate, but with significant medium- and long-term implications, was consideration of a vastly expanded and altered NATO, encapsulated in the phrase ‘global partnership’.1 The changes wrought by the end of the Cold War and the new global disorder reflected in the ‘War on Terror’ will continue to shape traditional security arrangements among democratic nations, but older patterns of thought and behavior will undergo revision, and the security architecture that has served Western interests from the early Cold War will face challenges that its architects did not envisage and did not plan for. This is the context in which NATO is examining suggestions for the most fundamental refashioning of the Alliance since its inception in 1949.
In the half-century during which the Cold War was fought and won by the West, Australian interests and commitments diverged from those of Western Europe in all but the most general of senses. Australia is a middle power with a European heritage, Western and liberal-democratic in its orientation, but with an increasingly diverse multicultural population and with key determinants of its security policies governed by geography and its location at the foot of South-East Asia. The foundation of its security and foreign policies has been, and remains, the alliance with the United States underpinned by the provisions of the Australia-New Zealand-United States (ANZUS) Treaty of 1951. The decolonisation of Europe’s Asian empires resulted in a loosening of security ties between Australia and the major European states in the post-1945 world, including Britain, as a result of the latter’s withdrawal from ‘East of Suez’ and its concentration on European affairs through membership in NATO and, ultimately, the European Community.
More important than the legacy of direct military interaction between Australia and Europe for the consideration of any increased NATO-Australian relations are the twin characteristics of alliance behavior and defence of the national interest beyond immediate territorial bounds. Throughout its history, Australia has always acted within an alliance framework, Imperial with the British and quasi-imperial with the Americans. The Global War on Terror has re-emphasised the strategic alliance with the United States, to the extent that following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington DC, the Prime Minister, John Howard, invoked Article IV of ANZUS that declares that an attack on either party may be regarded as an attack on both2, in the same manner as the European partners invoked the North Atlantic Treaty. He stated that ‘Australia stands ready to cooperate within the limits of its capability concerning any response that the United States may regard as necessary in consultation with her allies’.3
A theme laced continually through Australian security debates in the course of the twentieth century pitches those who espouse the direct defence of Australian territory against those who believe that Australian national interests should be defended regardless of where they are threatened. For most of its history this has meant that Australia has either fought, or undertaken to fight, in defence of common interests with alliance partners in often-distant parts. In the Cold War this was characterised as ‘forward defence’ and, although the defeat in Vietnam in the early 1970s saw a renewed emphasis on ‘continental defence’ of the Australian mainland, this posture eroded rapidly in the latter half of the 1990s. Even before the attacks of 11 September 2001, the Australian Government showed its willingness to reflect these two traditions in security policy, notably through creating and leading the coalition of regional and other partners that participated in the International Force for East Timor (INTERFET) in East Timor in 1999 to 2000.
The shift in the security environment since 2001 further underlines the point that ‘homeland defence’ and a capacity and willingness to fight ‘anywhere and everywhere’ if needed are no longer, if they ever were, ‘either/or’ propositions. Equally, the security arrangements that worked so well during the Cold War may no longer be appropriate or sufficient for dealing with a new and very different enemy and a range of threats on a global scale. The Bush Administration’s initial apparent preference for short-term ‘Coalitions of the Willing’ over larger, more ponderous multilateral alliance partnerships has not been sustained into the President’s second term, and it seems reasonable to think that the United States will continue to use traditional alliance structures as vehicles for the promotion and defence of broader US and Western interests.
The nature, composition and purpose of those alliances will change, however, and fundamentally. The US Ambassador to NATO, Victoria Nuland, stated explicitly, in January 2006, that NATO is to become ‘first and foremost a political alliance devoted to strengthening and defending our democratic values at home and around the world. This will involve the creation of a ‘globally deployable military force, a ‘common collective deployment at strategic distances’, and the Alliance is to be broadened to include other democratic allies of the United States such as Japan and Australia in some form of ‘advanced partnerships’.4 Nuland’s was merely the most recent contribution along these lines to a debate that has been in train for at least a decade.5 Others have advocated the abandonment of NATO’s traditional transatlantic character and the opening of its ranks to ‘any democratic state in the world that is willing and able to contribute to the fulfillment of NATO’s new responsibilities’.6
Concern that NATO had no further useful purpose after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and would wither and die of its own accord, has been overtaken by the fear that NATO is stretched meeting the variety of tasks presented to it since the mid-1990s and the intervention in the former Yugoslavia. As NATO forces have deployed, of necessity, further afield on what were formally ‘out of area’ tasks, such as in Afghanistan or in Darfur, they find themselves operating alongside or in support of forces from non-NATO partners, such as Japan, Australia and South Korea. Indeed, the new security agenda has already placed Australian forces in some new and unexpected situations, such as providing force protection for the six hundred-strong engineering unit from the Japanese Self-Defence Force in southern Iraq.
The new direction in relations between Australia and NATO was flagged in May 2004 when the Minister for Foreign Affairs Alexander Downer delivered the first address by an Australian foreign minister to the North Atlantic Council, followed by a joint press conference with the Secretary General, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer.7 Downer argued that international security ‘is indivisible’ in a world of failed and failing states, international terrorism and weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Having noted NATO’s development and widening membership since the end of the Cold War, he then listed in some detail the trends and existing and emerging threats confronting Australia in the Asia-Pacific region, most of which in fact had little application outside that region except in a generic sense and was careful to speak of a ‘partnership’ between the two sides rather than anything more specific or formal. In the view of the Australian Government, strengthened cooperation with NATO was something it was ‘keen to pursue’ through heightened consultations on a range of issues, a proposed information security agreement (successfully negotiated and signed in 2005, this allows easier transfer of classified material), and through what Downer described as ‘more structured frameworks for cooperation’ in the fullness of time.
Australia has enjoyed membership of technical committees and has worked at a relatively low level with NATO for some time, but as Downer observed in the press conference afterwards, ‘the relationship between Australia and NATO didn’t amount to much’ during the Cold War. Equipment compatibility and the general interoperability of forces have been the key issues for Australia, with the emphasis very much on the forces of the United States and the United Kingdom. Downer’s visit to the Council and de Hoop Scheffer’s reciprocal visit to Australia in April 2005, the first visit by the organisation’s Secretary General, clearly signaled interest in raising the level of cooperation and activity on both sides. Accordingly, during the visit the Australian Minister for Defence, Senator Robert Hill, announced that under a new agreement Australia would post a defence attaché to NATO Headquarters in Brussels to help ‘improve communications in the war on terrorism’.8 A further sign of developing cooperation came in July 2006 with the deployment of an Australian Reconstruction Task Force (RTF) to Afghanistan, as a contribution to the Netherlands-led Provisional Reconstruction Team (PRT) that would in turn provide force protection. Australian special forces have been operating in Afghanistan under NATO command in ISAF, but in discrete units.
Increasingly, ‘NATO is everywhere’, as Jean-Yves Hine of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London has noted with pardonable exaggeration.9 What does this mean in practical terms and what are the benefits and the implications of greater cooperation with the transatlantic organisation for non-NATO parties like Australia?
The type and level of cooperation that Australia currently undertakes, over which everyone is in broad agreement, often extends from pre-existing agreements with individual NATO members, chiefly the United States and the United Kingdom. Broadening these to cover common efforts against terrorism, illegal immigration and the spread of pandemic diseases such as avian flu, involving greater cooperation and interaction between law enforcement agencies and embodying a ‘whole-of-government’ approach, is generally uncontroversial. Some of this involves Australia and NATO members in non-NATO instrumentalities such as INTERPOL. It is much less clear that heightened security cooperation of the kind envisioned by senior figures in the Bush Administration, such as Ambassador Nuland, involving a potential expansion of NATO membership through the abolition or substantial modification of Article 10 of the North Atlantic Treaty, is either politically possible or desirable.10
Greater security cooperation with NATO would clearly carry some positive benefits for the Australian Government, allowing it to be seen legitimately as more of a global player and enabling greater access to intelligence-sharing arrangements, though here again there are pre-existing mechanisms such as the United Kingdom-United States-Australia (UKUSA) agreement. In Afghanistan currently, the existing agreements, command and control and chain of command issues seem to work well in coordinating the activities of the Australians deployed there as part of ISAF, which has involved heavy and sustained combat through the middle months of 2007, and before. The current campaigning season that began with the spring thaw in March and April 2007 saw further protracted, high-intensity conventional combat, especially in the southern provinces, and it may be that more formal and more extensive arrangements are needed under such circumstances. Australian special forces were withdrawn in late 2006 and then redeployed in an increasingly high-tempo role on 15 May 2007. The recent, current and projected likely commitments for the Australian Defence Force within ISAF do not suggest any significant shortcomings in the way in which the ‘in the field’ relationship with NATO is currently handled.
There are potential downsides to more formalised Australian involvement in NATO. Australia has spent decades building bridges within its region (broadly defined), from the Colombo Plan beginning in the 1950s through the Whitlam Government’s recognition of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the abolition of restrictions on immigration based on race or ethnicity (the notorious ‘White Australia’ policy adopted by the first Federal parliament in 1901, which was dismantled in the late 1960s). In more recent decades, and especially during the Hawke-Keating Labor Governments between 1983 and 1996, there has been a concerted push to integrate Australia more securely within its region, especially within South-East Asia. This has been attended by considerable success in some areas, but there remains deep underlying suspicion and ignorance of Australian intentions, both at the official and popular levels within various South-East Asian countries. While the more extreme critique and outright insults proffered by the former Malaysian prime minister, Dr Mahathir bin Mohamad, are not representative, they nonetheless give an indication of the tensions and hostilities that bedevil Australia’s relationship with at least some member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). High-profile engagement with NATO would simply confirm what the more extreme critics of Australia’s position in Asia already profess to believe, and would certainly be utilised by Islamist jihadist organizations in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and elsewhere in their propaganda attacks on Australia specifically, and Western interests more generally. This is not insignificant in terms of recruiting for terrorist organisations like Jemaah Islamiah, the perpetrators of the Bali bombings in 2002.
Opinion in Australia is divided over the potential impact of closer integration in NATO on perceptions in Beijing, and the relationship with the PRC is another of the crucial issues facing Canberra for the coming twenty-five years.11 Australia and the United States already differ on some aspects of the relationship, especially since President Bush took office. Future Chinese intentions towards Taiwan remain the major area of divergence and Canberra tends to emphasise the opportunities presented by the ‘rise’ of China rather than seeing this solely in terms of strategic-level challenges or threats. Beijing has issued various veiled warnings about the closeness of Australian-American policy under ANZUS in the event of a crisis in the Taiwan Strait and it is reasonable to conclude that the leadership in Beijing would view an increasing closeness with NATO in a similar light, especially if it seemed to imply a greater European or Western involvement in Asian affairs.
In any case, it is difficult to see a role for NATO in Asia in any foreseeable future. The legacy of colonialism and the anti-colonial struggle is still strong culturally and symbolically in domestic politics. Governments in China, South Korea and throughout South-East Asia react negatively to talk of an enhanced role for the Japanese military in the region post-11 September 2001, reflecting popular memory of the brutality of Japanese occupation. Suggestions of a closer engagement between NATO and Japan, which has sparked debate in that country between those who see Japan’s strategic policy as best focused on the United States and those who want to see a lessening of that relationship, might prompt similarly negative reactions in the region, although it would have fewer implications for Japan’s relationship with Australia. Following the appointment of Shinzo Abe as prime minister, and reflecting the sorts of considerations behind the push for a ‘global NATO’, the Japanese Government has acceded to US wishes to declare NATO, Australia and New Zealand as possessing ‘common values’ as part of a far-reaching revision to Japan’s defence forces and strategic posture more generally.12
While it has not been put to the test in recent decades, there seems little reason to imagine that the re-appearance of European military power in the Asia-Pacific region would be any more welcome than a resurgent Japanese presence and would provide further opportunities for successful Islamist jihadist proselytising among the dispossessed and disadvantaged in those societies. In addition, a change of government in Australia would see greater emphasis on the primacy of regional concerns from a newly-elected Labor government. This would not rule out further collaboration with NATO in Afghanistan, for example, where Labor has said it is committed to remaining, but would almost certainly see a withdrawal of Australian forces from Iraq in favor of securing Australian interests closer to Australia’s shores.
While some have advocated the abandonment or rewriting of Article 10 of the North Atlantic Treaty to enable the membership of like-minded liberal-democracies outside the mid-Atlantic/European territory, such a move poses as many problems as it does opportunities, if history is any guide. The Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) provides a cautionary tale for those who would seek to combine geographically disparate states around an allegedly common purpose. Formed in 1955 through the Treaty of Manila in response to the failure of the Geneva talks and concerns about communist threats in South-East Asia, it brought together the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand, Thailand and the Philippines, and (somewhat bizarrely) France and Pakistan. Ostensibly united over the communist Cold War threat, in fact the concerns and interests of member states diverged considerably over time, with both the French and Pakistanis destabilising SEATO’s processes and capacity to react when it became clear that their needs were not reflected in the organisation’s own, and that other member states would not bend in their direction. When the circumstances for which SEATO had been formed actually arose (successive Laotian crises and the growing war in Indochina), it was hamstrung by differences between its members. The organisation was disbanded as an irrelevance in 1973.
SEATO is a warning, not a blueprint. Events may suggest that rather than a single, unwieldy and perhaps unworkable strategic alliance of ‘Western’ interests, a better model may be several, regionally-focused alliances or coalitions acting in concert as opportunity arises and necessity dictates. The Cold War provides an imperfect example of what this might look like, since NATO was the only truly successful Cold War alliance structure to emerge and face the communist threat while, for a variety of reasons, SEATO and the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) proved unequal to the task. At the end of the 1990s, the Clinton Administration began to advocate the INTERFET ‘model’ of a regional power at the centre of largely regional coalitions for specific, urgent tasks (such as the intervention in East Timor or peace enforcement and nation-building missions for collapsed states in sub-Saharan Africa). The Bush Administration moved US policy in different directions, as we have seen, but the idea of aligning regional security coalitions may yet have merit. It could prove more responsive to regional issues and regional sensitivities and minimise the potential for enemy exploitation of Western military involvement in Third World or Islamic contexts. While Downer has observed that security in our times is indivisible, this underplays the different ways in which the global terrorist threat is perceived in a variety of Western states and those other states that are aligned with them (Pakistan is an obvious example). Put simply, for some the threat of jihadist terror is derived from within, while for those such as the United States it is (thus far) an external phenomenon.
Nor is there universal agreement on the nature of the threat and the best response to it within Western countries, as the Spanish election of 2004 illustrates and the continuing differences in Australia over policy on the war in Iraq should remind us. The more-or-less complete breakdown of relations between the Bush Administration and European opinion will need careful rehabilitation and realignment of views and interests between Washington and Europe under the next US Administration before any realistic measures can be taken to expand NATO’s areas of activity, much less introduce a non-transatlantic membership.13
The Australian Government has offered low-key encouragement to suggestions for greater cooperation with, or within, a redefined NATO, an idea that, nonetheless, seems to have occasioned greater enthusiasm in some quarters of NATO and the Bush Administration than it has in Australia. Despite Downer’s address to the North Atlantic Council and de Hoop Scheffer’s visit to Australia, there has been little public exposure of the proposed closer ties or debate about them. In more than two years since Downer’s address, not one of the principal strategic policy think tanks in Australia (a limited number in any case, but including the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University, the privately-endowed Lowy Institute in Sydney and the government-funded, stand-alone, Australian Strategic Policy Institute) has provided a major analysis of the proposals or their implications for Australian security policy. All continue to produce regular and sustained comment on the strategic relationship with the United States, the region, the Global War on Terror, the concomitant expansion in the Australian Defence Force and the costs and consequences of ‘homeland security’ initiatives (an additional AUD$2 billion in the two years after the 11 September 2001 attacks alone).
Enhanced ties with NATO apparently have yet to resonate with those outside government circles. This is true of the opposition as well. The then-Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs, Trade and International Security, Kevin Rudd, a former diplomat and a highly visible and well-informed spokesperson on the issues encompassed by his portfolio responsibilities, spoke regularly and at length on issues confronting Australian security and foreign policy. NATO rarely featured in his remarks, except in passing when noting the role of Australian Defence Force units under NATO command in Afghanistan.14 In a major public speech in September 2006, asserting a redefined foreign and security policy for Australia under a future Labor government, neither NATO nor a putative Australian role within it received any mention at all.15
In this overall context, arguments for revised NATO procedures that would allow Australia, or other non-NATO partners, a deliberative role in NATO’s political decision-making governing, for example, future operations in Afghanistan or elsewhere, seem rather irrelevant. This is not to suggest that involvement in political and strategic decision-making is not important. Historically, its absence severely tested the Anglo-Australian relationship in the Mediterranean theatre during the Second World War, and Australian governments have worked hard for decades to increase such access and influence within the ANZUS partnership. Practical, less formal and wide-ranging arrangements are favored currently, at least at the official level in Canberra. Given that the key relationship for both Australia and NATO is that with the United States and given that Australian involvement in operations as part of the Global War on Terror will almost certainly be predicated on US involvement, a focus on NATO decision-making practices perhaps misses the point. To the extent that it can, Australia will seek to exercise influence upon US decision-making processes and the success or failure of those efforts will be determined in Washington, not Brussels. Equally, opinion in NATO itself is clearly divided over the desirability of extending formal access to its internal processes to non-NATO partners. This point has been reinforced by the French Minister for Defence, Michele Allliot-Marie, in a clear statement of French attitudes ahead of the Riga Summit.
Geographically, we should indeed acknowledge the contributions made to NATO’s military operations by non-Alliance nations. This is the case, for example, for Australia and Japan in Afghanistan, operating however according to different modalities. It would be desirable to improve the practical modalities of their association with NATO operations without changing the essence of the organization, which this author believes should remain a European-Atlantic military alliance.16
This approach is consistent with Australian thinking and expectations, at least in the short to medium term.
In summary, the notion of an expanded NATO to include Australia in some form of membership is probably optimistic, because there seems little need for it and because even at the governmental level in Canberra, the emphasis currently remains on cooperation, albeit in a heightened form. Much will depend on the detail of what is proposed, on operational needs and developments in the next stage of the Global War on Terror, on attitudes and developments in Australia’s own region and on the cycle of domestic politics. A formal alliance of Western nations on a global scale (‘global NATO’) is an idea whose time is yet to come, at least for Australians. Equally clearly, one would be unwise to dismiss unequivocally such a possibility in a complex and turbulent security environment in the future.
Endnotes
1 ‘Background briefing by senior Administration officials on the NATO Summit’, 29 November 2006. <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/11/20061129-4.html>.
2 The full text of Article IV is: Each Party recognizes that an armed attack in the Pacific Area on any of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes. Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall be immediately reported to the Security Council of the United Nations. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security. Accessed on 01 November 2007 from: http://australianpolitics.com/foreign/anzus/anzus-treaty.shtml.
3 The Prime Minister of Australia, the Hon. John Howard MP, Joint Press Conference, 14 September 2001, <http://www.pm.gov.au/media/Speech/2001/speech1240.cfm>, accessed on 15 October 2007.
4 Financial Times, London, 24 January 2006. For a full transcript see < http://nato.usmission.gov/ambassador/2006/Amb_Nuland_Macedonia_030806.h…;.
5 An early and detailed analysis of the basis for an expanded NATO with responsibilities and missions outside Europe and in a global partnership to defend Western interests is provided by Ronald D Asmus, Robert D Blackwill and F Stephen Larrabee, ‘Can NATO Survive?’ in The Washington Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 2, 1996.
6 Ivo Daader and James Goldgeier, ‘Global NATO’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 85, No. 5, September-October 2006.
7 ‘Enhanced cooperation with NATO in a New Security Environment’, 19 May 2004, accessed at <http://www.foreignminister.gov.au/speeches/2004/040519_nato.html>.
8 Speech by NATO Secretary General, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, Australian Defence College, Canberra, 1 April 2005, accessed at <http://www.nato.int/docu/speech/2005/ s05041b.htm>.
9 <http://www.iiss.org/whats-new/iiss-in-the-press/press-coverage-2006/apr…;.
10 Article 10 of The North Atlantic Treaty states: ‘The Parties may, by unanimous agreement, invite any other European State in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area to accede to this Treaty. Any State so invited may become a Party to the Treaty by depositing its instrument of accession with the Government of the United States of America. The Government of the United States of America will inform each of the Parties of the deposit of each such instrument of accession’. The North Atlantic Treaty, 4 April 1949, Washington D.C. Accessed at <http://www.nato.int/docu/basictxt/treaty.htm#Art10>
11 ‘Partnership with NATO could hold pros and cons for Australia’, 28 April 2006 accessed at <http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewForeignBureaus.asp?Page=/ForeignBureaus/arch…;.
12 ‘Japan to embrace Australia as key ally’, The Canberra Times, 9 January 2007, p. 6.
13 Ronald D Asmus, ‘Rebuilding the Atlantic Alliance’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 82, No. 5, September-October 2003 discusses the breakdown in relations and argues for repairing the relationship through changes on both sides of the Atlantic.
14 In a public address in August 2004, Rudd noted in passing that ‘there is no NATO in East Asia nor is there an East Asian equivalent of the CSCE’, going on to say that stability in the region had been underpinned by ‘a strong continuing US strategic presence reinforced by a range of alliance relationships in key regional powers’ in Kevin Rudd, ‘Australia’s Engagement with Asia - a New Paradigm?’, Asialink-ANU National Forum, 13 August, 2004.
15 Kevin Rudd, ‘The Renewal of Australian Middle Power Diplomacy’ address to the Sydney Institute, 19 September 2006.
16 Michele Alliot-Marie, ‘Don’t diminish NATO’s effectiveness’ Op Ed in the Washington Times, 20 October 2006, accessed at http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20061019-090449-4426r.htm.
