NEWSWEEK: Lord Robertson, we thought we wouldn’t ask you your favorite question: Is NATO dead? You’ve been asked that a couple of times. ROBERTSON: [Laughs.] Yeah, I know.
But you’re here; the buildings are still standing. And people are working to the exhaustion point. No, we ain’t dead… There is a lot of nervousness around Europe today because of the lack of predictability and the rise of irrationality. An animal-rights protester allegedly killing a guy with right-wing views in the Netherlands doesn’t fit into rationality. Macedonia lives with its ethnic mix of Slavs and Albanians as the best example of tranquillity in the former Yugoslavia–and then explodes almost overnight last February. An unstable world with irrational forces in many ways needs a NATO more than it ever did.
You are evolving? We have to. We have to transform into an organization that can tackle the next enlargement, that can make a serious contribution to [fighting] terrorism, that has a new relationship with Russia, that modernizes its armed forces so that they are able to deal, sometimes at long distances, with conflicts that affect Euro-Atlantic security.
This transformation you’re talking about costs money. Is fund-raising, in effect, a problem of yours? Yes, it is, and it is made more difficult by the fact that the big enemy is gone. Every country in Europe, and in North America, savagely cut defense budgets after the end of the cold war. [The United States] has now discovered this huge new enemy, and there has been a push that takes it way beyond what the Europeans are capable of allocating.
Are the Europeans going to come forth with more money? If the Europeans want to have an influence over how U.S. defense money is spent or what the United States does, then they’ve got to. But the European countries already spend very substantially on defense. There are 2 million soldiers in uniform. [The problem is] we still find it very difficult to get 30,000 to do peacekeeping in Kosovo, and that’s because they’re still oriented to the cold war–conscript forces, tank formations, heavy armor–and it hasn’t changed.
I think a lot of Americans who get impatient need to remember that until this year the United States had no homeland-defense capability. It didn’t think about an attack. So it was all force projection. The Europeans were geared 100 percent for territorial defense. That will change. But it’s not going to happen overnight.
Are the United States and Europe on the same page–in agreement about NATO’s aims and how to get there? I think yes. In the immediate wake of 11 September, you got a distinct chasm of perception. The United States had been attacked at home. And the Europeans were saying it was bad, it was horrible, we have to do something about it. But let’s think about it logically and coolly because London has had IRA explosions, Basques are killing each other day in and day out in Spain today, Italy had the Red Brigades.
There was a moment when I thought here that we might see a parting of ways because of that perception. America is thinking, why the hell are these Europeans so cool when something so horrible has happened? And the Europeans were saying, we’ve seen this before, why are they so emotional? But as the months have gone on, that’s changed. More has been done through extradition, the common arrest warrant, changes in domestic legislation, stopping money flows, putting up communication barriers to destroy [Qaeda] cells than was ever done in Tora Bora. But [the military assault on Tora Bora] is more telegenic than some guy in a bank switching off the accounts of suspected terrorists.
