NATO Watch Comment
Sixty years ago, on 18 February 1952, Greece and Turkey became members of NATO. This was the first round of enlargement for the Alliance, only three years after its creation and just after the outbreak of the Korean War. Few Greeks seemed in the mood to celebrate this anniversary, however. Greece, lest we forget, is in the depths of a Great Depression, with a fifth consecutive year of contraction now predicted, unemployment at a record 20.9% and poverty having now engulfed more than a third of the population.
Enter stage right, the NATO Secretary General with a message of hope to lift the nation’s dark mood. In a speech in Athens on 17 February Anders Fogh Rasmussen suggested that the security offered by the alliance would create the "right conditions for Greece's economic revival and its long-term prosperity".
The Greek defence budget was reportedly one of the hardest hit in the latest round of austerity measures, but Rasmussen warned that global challenges such as terrorism, proliferation, piracy and cyber warfare would "not wait until our economies are back in order" and required just as urgent attention and international cooperation as the financial crisis. He added that Greece should use the crisis as an "opportunity to introduce significant defence reforms". It should "concentrate on deployable forces" rather than "waste scarce resources on static forces stuck in barracks".
Rasmussen is encouraging all NATO members to adopt this "smart defence" approach at its summit in Chicago in May. However, it is hard to see how investment in “deployable forces” deters or is an effective response to proliferation or cyber attacks. The jury is also out on the effectiveness of out-of-area military counter-terrorism and counter-piracy operations. In both cases, military force is but one item in an interventionist toolbox that must be more heavily weighted towards ‘soft security’, including prevention and eradication of root causes. Finally, what if Alliance troops had remained in barracks over the past decade rather than being deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan? It would need acute counter-factual jiggery-pokery to spend more than the $6 trillion wasted on these two wars of choice.
Thus, while the principle that underpins ‘smart defence’—the need for allies to work more closely to provide military capabilities that individual countries cannot afford—is spot on, it also has the potential to conceal the development of unnecessary or destabilising capabilities for questionable strategic ends. Without proper transparency and accountability in the decision-making process, smart defence could be the most unwelcome gift since the Greeks tricked their way into the city of Troy with a wooden horse.
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