WASHINGTON, April 27 (UPI) -- The sudden end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union removed NATO's primary objective, changing the nature of its security relationship with its European allies and dragging the organization into a decade of instability and uncertainty.
The 1990s presented peace-keeping and nation-building challenges in Bosnia and Kosovo, capping off with the new security threat of global terrorism. A new report by the Atlantic Council says that the transatlantic community has labored to adapt to these changes, their effectiveness hampered by operational and political gaps in the relationship between the European Union and NATO and a lack of commitment on the part of the United States.
Walter Slocombe, former Defense Department advisor and co-author of the report "Transatlantic Transformation; Building a NATO-EU Security Architecture," said: "There is no way to describe NATO since the end of the Cold War as a success. But it has moved forward. If anything, its capacity for planning operations has increased since the end of the Cold War by virtue of experience."
Organizational problems remain, and can be seen recently in Darfur, Atlantic Council President Jan Lodal said, in which you could see "planners struggling with the question of whether the EU or NATO should take control rather than just getting the job done."
The council's report lays out a specific plan for the challenges of coordinating the overlapping mandates and interests of NATO and EU bureaucracies, calling for the two institutions to integrate their military structure at the staff and operational levels and undertake "joint planning to identify future crisis scenarios."
According to the report, increased communication would carry the benefit of identifying and organizing military and civilian assets -- a crucial need in the age of nation-building operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
One of the key recommendations calls for NATO and the EU to develop "operational liaison offices" to encourage cooperation among non-military personnel working on reconstruction projects.
"We wanted to come up with a structure that, in principle, facilitated decision making and cooperation, even in the future when there is more capability," says co-author David Gompert.
The NATO-EU defense partnership currently operates under the Berlin Plus agreements of March 2003. However, these security parameters are limited and the emerging European Defense Agency presents the problem of overlapping institutional mandates. In some cases, troops could potentially be "triple-hatted" for service in NATO, EU and national missions.
The report advocates troop rotation schedules to avoid these problems, and allows for the cooperation of NATO response forces and EU-Battle groups "to develop complementary assets."
"NATO is certainly there for European defense," says Slocombe. "The question is what constitutes European defense?"
With a combined defense budget that is half of Pentagon expenditures, few expect the EU to effectively mount anything more than a medium-sized war.
"Americans since 1949 have been whining about European spending on defense," Slocombe said. "I think there should be more whining about defense spending on the right things."
The United States can take an active role in improving this relationship through the sharing of technology and acknowledgement of common goals, the report says. It calls for the United States to make compromises on joint security issues and to be fully prepared "to commit its military forces to NATO operations and to those EU operations where its resources would be useful and serve U.S. interests. In return, EU members will be willing to make their military forces and civilian stabilization and reconstruction assets available to support NATO missions."
The report notes that the diplomatic challenges of balancing the interests of all EU member states will be almost, if not more, difficult than institutional re-organizing.
"NATO organizational issues can be seen as a kind of code for relations on security issues between the United States and the EU," said Slocombe.
The Turkey-Cyprus dispute has allowed some member nations to find a bureaucratic loophole in the Berlin Plus agreements and stall negotiations for proposed joint missions with NATO. Additionally, the French government sees any U.S. movement towards deepening NATO-EU cooperation as a controlling strategy. While the U.S. faces an enormous challenge in convincing the French they will support the growth of European defense, the results carry global implications.
"There is a strong correlation between joint participation of the United States and the European Union and success," says Gompert.
As President of the Atlantic Council, Lodal says that he would like to see these recommendations attract enough attention to make a difference at the first NATO summit in Riga this November.
"The best way to move forward," he says, "is to get this partnership on the agenda."
