“Transatlantic Relations”
Speech of Ambassador R. Nicholas Burns
U.S. Ambassador to NATO
Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden
April 29, 2004
Good afternoon, and thank you for that very kind introduction. I
want to thank Ambassador Rolf Ekeus, and the co-sponsors of this
event – the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and
the Stockholm Institute for Transition Economics – for the
invitation to speak with you today. It’s a pleasure to be here at
the Stockholm School of Economics I feel among friends here,
because of the presence of many Swedish colleagues with whom I’ve
worked so closely and because Sweden is a good friend of the
United States. Your Prime Minister Goran Persson was in
Washington, D.C. yesterday to meet with President Bush at the
White House, their third such meeting and surely a sign of the
respect our two governments and countries feel for each other.
Sweden is also a friend of NATO and -- under the auspices of the
Partnership for Peace program -- a valued and capable partner of
the Alliance. In fact, Sweden is currently involved in two NATO
operations. Sweden currently has command of the multinational
brigade in Kosovo, and there are some 700 Swedish peacekeepers –
including an infantry unit and a mechanized company -- helping
bring security and stability to Kosovo. During the terrible
violence that erupted last month in Kosovo, the Swedish troops
distinguished themselves with their quick and firm action to quell
the riots and to protect innocent citizens. Further afield, in
Afghanistan, not only has Sweden been a significant contributor of
humanitarian assistance to rebuild that ravaged country, but it
has also provided troops who are under NATO command in the
UN-mandated International Security Assistance Force, ISAF. We
greatly appreciate Sweden’s interest in doing even more,
especially its recent commitment to contribute to a new Provincial
Reconstruction Team under British command in the north of
Afghanistan. We hope Sweden’s example will encourage other Nordic
countries to take similar steps. Sweden and its very capable
Ambassador, Per Anderman, has also been an important supporter of
the joint U.S.-Norwegian proposal to adopt a new NATO policy to
combat the trafficking of women and children, especially in those
areas where NATO has military forces, such as the Balkans.
Since I began my career as an American diplomat in the early
1980s, I have admired your country and its tradition of active
international engagement and commitment to multilateralism. I saw
Sweden’s commitment to assist the poor in the Third World when I
served in Africa in 1980. And I saw Sweden’s commitment to
justice first-hand ten years ago when I worked as President
Clinton’s advisor at the White House on Russian affairs. In a
little publicized but very important Swedish-American joint
effort, President Clinton and Prince Minister Carl Bildt teamed up
to work behind the scenes to promote a withdrawal of Russian
military forces from newly free Estonia and Latvia. Over the
course of nearly two years, our two countries worked very closely
to assemble a Russian agreement with both Baltic countries to
agree to the departure of the Russian military forces which had
arrived in May 1940, one of the 20th century’s darkest
moments. Thanks to Carl Bildt, Ambassador to the U.S.
Henrik Liljegren, Lars Freden
and Sven-Olof Petterson, we managed to deliver a just
reward to the heroic peoples of the Baltic states. That joint
diplomatic venture symbolized for me what we Americans and Swedes
share – a commitment to progress, to defending democracy and to
idealistic ventures. While we are very different countries and
often don’t agree on important issues, we share a desire to make a
better world and to make a difference within it.
This is a period of exciting transformation at NATO. Since I
arrived at NATO in August 2001, the Alliance has weathered two
significant historical events that are having -- and will continue
to have -- a profound and lasting impact on trans-Atlantic
relations. The first was, of course, the September 11 attack on
the U.S. – which brought the Alliance together under Article 5
for the first time in our history. NATO Allies reacted by
launching the most revolutionary reforms in our history, creating
quite literally, a new NATO ready to stand on the front lines of
the war on terrorism. The second event was the Iraq War, which
plunged the Alliance into a crisis of confidence and disunity in
2003. That crisis has subsided and NATO has emerged strengthened
in 2004 for its new peacekeeping roles.
The United States and all of our allies can be proud of our
55-year alliance in NATO. While times have changed, NATO’s
mission is the same today as it was in 1949 – to defend the peace
and the territories and citizens of all allied countries. The
task for NATO this year is two-fold: to advance the political and
military reforms that September 11 triggered within the Alliance,
and to restore the trans-Atlantic unity so badly strained by the
Iraq War but so essential to NATO’s success as we seek to build a
peaceful world and confront the new security challenges of our
era.
NATO now faces a new challenge far different than any we have
confronted before. It is not a confrontation between states as
during the Cold War but a threat from failed states and,
especially, small, but fanatical terrorist groups. The violence
that Al Qaida, Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups are
inflicting upon innocent people in every corner of the world is
truly appalling and truly dangerous for all of us. We see
terrorism as an existential threat to all who prize freedom and
security. We must confront it, not just by military means, but
through soft power, as well as through a broad international
effort to cooperate in intelligence and law enforcement, and
through diplomatic and economic means to protect our peoples and
to promote a more peaceful future.
The surest path to success in this new campaign is to make full
use of the major institutions upon which international stability
is based -- the United Nations, the G-8, the European Union, and
NATO.
We
in NATO have been hard at work, and I am pleased to report to you
that the Alliance is active, strong and fully modernized for the
challenges ahead. During the past two and half years, NATO has
accomplished the most fundamental re-tooling of the Alliance since
its creation in 1949. We are creating a new NATO-- different in
mission, membership and capabilities than the old Cold War NATO or
even the NATO of the 1990s. NATO Allies answered the 9/11 wake-up
call, agreeing on the blueprint for the new NATO at the Prague
Summit in 2002. The results of our transformation efforts should
be evident at NATO’s Istanbul Summit in June 2004.
NATO’s most profound change has been our transformation from a
defensive and static military alliance, which massed a huge, heavy
army to deter a Soviet threat to Western Europe to a more
flexible, modern, and agile force focused on responding to threats
from well beyond the European continent and on a new vocation –
peacekeeping and stabilization efforts.
Put simply, NATO’s past was focused inward, on Cold War threats
directed at the heart of Europe. NATO’s future is to look outward
to the Greater Middle East to expand security in that arc of
countries from South and Central Asia to the Middle East and North
Africa—where the new challenges to global peace are rooted.
This transition is happening as we speak. While the majority of
deployed NATO forces are today in Bosnia and Kosovo, the majority
could well be in Afghanistan and Iraq one year from now. History
has given NATO a new challenge and we are responding to it with a
new strategic vision. As Secretary of State Colin Powell said
recently: “We fight terror because we must, but we seek a better
world because we can—because it is our desire and destiny to do
so.”
The changes to NATO are most evident, most comprehensive and most
impressive in our military capability. The result is that NATO
remains today the strongest military alliance of our time.
In
just two years, we’ve changed NATO more than at any time in our
history. Consider the following:
--
NATO Allies agreed to acquire a range of new military capabilities
necessary for the expeditionary missions far from Europe that are
our future—modern airlift and refueling, precision-guided
munitions, air-to-ground surveillance, combat service
support—redefining the way allies plan and think about our
national and collective defense.
--
NATO adopted a leaner and more flexible 21st century
military command structure. We created a new Alliance
Transformation Command in Norfolk, Virginia.
-- NATO created a new Chemical, Biological and Nuclear Defense
Battalion, spearheaded by the Czech Republic along with 12 other
Allies, to protect our civilian populations in the event of an
attack using weapons of mass destruction.
--And in the most important and decisive shift to a 21st
century alliance, we are building a NATO Response Force to give us
a powerful and quick capability to deploy our troops within days
to perform any mission -- whether hostage rescue, humanitarian
relief, or response to a terrorist attack -- in another part of
the globe.
The revolutionary changes on the military side of NATO are
complemented by equally creative political changes within the
Alliance:
--
Seven Central European countries joined NATO on March 29,
completing the Alliance’s greatest enlargement since our founding
in 1949. The old Cold War wisdom was to worry that adding new
countries would weaken the Alliance — one more country to defend.
The new wisdom is that enlargement strengthens us — one more
country to promote peace and freedom with us in the Balkans,
Afghanistan and Iraq. NATO enlargement extends our sphere of
security eastward virtually across two continents and helps to
consolidate the democratic revolution in the former Warsaw Pact
countries. With this enlargement, forty percent of NATO’s members
are formerly communist countries. The new members add real value
militarily and politically to our collective strength.
--
NATO has changed in one other important respect. We know that our
greatest strategic aim is to help create, in President Bush’s
words, “a Europe whole, free, united and at peace,”—everything
Europe was not during the tumultuous twentieth century. As Swedes
are well aware, NATO launched the Partnership for Peace in 1994,
and the emerging democratic peace in Europe is a major, historic
achievement for which NATO deserves much credit. But, a united
Europe will only be sustained if we build partnerships with those
countries outside of NATO and the EU but which are nonetheless
critical for Europe’s future.
--
One of NATO’s most important new partnerships is with Russia. We
established the NATO-Russia Council in May 2002, and it is
redefining, for the better, our relations with Moscow. While the
Council is off to a good start, we can do better -- both to work
out remaining differences with Moscow over its troop presence in
Georgia and Moldova, and at the same time, to promote closer
relations between our militaries and more shared work in theatre
missile defense, counter-terrorism, and counter-proliferation.
--
The same is true of NATO’s special relationship with Ukraine in
the NATO-Ukraine Commission. Ukraine is a country of strategic
importance and the U.S. welcomes its aspiration to grow closer to
NATO over time. But for this to occur, we will need to see much
stronger and sustained initiatives for domestic and military
reform by its government.
--
The U.S. has called for a new strategic outreach and engagement to
the countries of Central Asia and the Caucasus in 2004. We want
NATO to establish offices in these countries and to expand our
political and military activities with them. This critical region
should be a special focus for Partnership for Peace in the years
ahead. NATO’s Western European partners will be a key part of
this strategic shift in PfP. The strategic shift we have in mind
is not just geographic but functional as well. We need to make
sure that high-performing partners such as Sweden have
opportunities to keep pace with NATO’s transformation, and to work
as closely as possible with NATO without crossing your red lines
or ours. I say that because we greatly value the many
contributions you are making to peace in Europe and beyond.
--
NATO also has a new strategic partnership with the European
Union. The U.S. supports a strong EU and a capable European
defense that is grounded in cooperation rather than in competition
with NATO. As Europe takes on more responsibility for its own
security, it is crucial that we build a useful and constructive
relationship between NATO and the EU. For the U.S., however, NATO
must remain the pre-eminent security institution binding North
America to Europe and the core of our collective efforts to keep
the peace in Europe and beyond.
These substantial changes in our military capabilities, membership
and partnerships have positioned NATO for an ambitious future.
But, we would be well advised to learn from the lessons of the
Iraq crisis that engulfed NATO just one year ago as we promote a
future of broader trans-Atlantic defense cooperation.
While Europe’s relations with America are indeed changing in many
ways, I am confident that NATO will continue to recreate itself
and remain strong and purposeful for the future. We would be wise
not to overreact to the Iraq crisis for several important
reasons.
First, this is not the only disagreement we’ve had with some
European countries in NATO in the last half-century and it won’t
be the last. NATO survived previous crises – arguments over
Suez, Vietnam, Pershing Missiles, even differences over Bosnia
strategy in the early nineties -- by the Allies’ learning,
adapting and compromising with each other. And we emerged
strengthened and changed each time. Ours is a strong but flexible
Alliance, durable enough to sustain different points of view.
NATO is, after all, a democratic Alliance that does not require
the ideological uniformity of the Warsaw Pact to remain successful
and united.
Second, the great majority of Europeans and American understand a
central fact—our security is indivisible. We need each other’s
support in one alliance to meet the challenges of the modern
world.
NATO will stay strong because our mutual interests demand it.
European Allies continue to rely on the U.S. for the nuclear and
conventional defense of the continent. Of the many issues
Europeans are debating for their new constitution, for example,
what is missing is the call for an overarching European security
umbrella to maintain peace on the continent. No such initiative
is needed because NATO and the U.S. provide that now, as we will
in the future.
The United States also needs Europe. We Americans cannot
confront the global transnational threats that go under, over and
through our borders and that are the greatest challenges of our
time, without Europe. Weapons of Mass Destruction and terrorism,
the huge increase in international crime, narcotics flows,
trafficking in human beings, Global Climate Change, AIDS—there are
no unilateral solutions to these challenges. Instead, we can hope
to succeed only through multilateral cooperation, including with
Europe. There is a saying in the U.S. – “We all live
downstream.” In an era of globalized threats, no matter where we
are in the world, we live downstream. What happens in one region
of the world affects all others.
When all is said and done, the U.S., Canada and Europe are natural
allies. We are the most like-minded peoples on the planet,
sharing a common history, common democratic values, and an
interconnected economy. NATO will stay together because we need
each other.
As
we look ahead to 2004, here are the top five goals for all of us
in NATO:
Our first goal is to reinforce NATO’s long-term peacekeeping role
in Afghanistan. I just returned from Kabul and Kandahar two days
ago and I was impressed by the positive difference we are making
in that great but impoverished country. NATO leads the
UN-mandated International Security Assistance Force in Kabul. The
Alliance has decided to expand the Mission beyond Kabul starting
with the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) led by Germany in
the northern city of Konduz. That PRT was activated in January.
NATO now aims to establish five more PRTs before NATO’s Istanbul
Summit to bring stability to important provincial cities. As I
mentioned earlier, Sweden will be making an important contribution
to ISAF expansion with its participation in a UK-led PRT in
Northern Afghanistan. As ISAF expands, the U.S. hopes conditions
will allow for NATO to take command of all PRTs in its new area of
responsibility.
There is no international goal more important than helping the
Afghan people to rebuild their shattered country. To be
successful, NATO will need to commit even more troops and military
resources in perhaps the most difficult mission we have ever
undertaken. We must help the Afghan government to extend its
authority outside Kabul and to prepare for nationwide elections.
To do that, the U.S. calls on European nations to contribute more
troops and resources to join the 15,000 American troops already
there, in order to construct a more vigorous NATO presence in the
country.
Our second aim for this year is to examine how NATO might take on
a collective military role in Iraq, as President Bush has
suggested. No matter our differences on the war itself, Europeans
and Americans now share a common interest in fighting terrorism
and seeing democracy take root in Iraq. We know that the
Coalition must continue its efforts in Iraq lest chaos and even
greater violence ensue.
NATO is currently providing
support for the Polish-led multinational division in Iraq, where
17 NATO Allies are contributing forces to maintain security.
Secretary of State Powell and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, along
with a number of NATO’s foreign and defense ministers, are
exploring a more formal role for NATO in Iraq, such as turning the
Polish-led division into a NATO operation and giving NATO
functional responsibilities. Defining such a mission,
following the passage of a new UN Security Council resolution,
will be a leading issue for NATO at our Istanbul Summit in June.
Third, NATO must expand its
engagement with the Moslem world and Israel to help those
countries find their way toward a more peaceful future in the
Greater Middle East. The U.S. wants NATO to be one of the
building blocks for our long-term engagement in this vast region.
NATO over the past ten years
has developed relations with seven countries in the Mediterranean
Dialogue -- which the
U.S. supported at its origins and continues to support today. The
countries participating in the Mediterranean Dialogue are
Algeria,
Egypt, Jordan, Israel,
Mauritania, Morocco, and
Tunisia. While this is a valuable framework for cooperation, we
believe there are opportunities for even more fruitful cooperation
with Arab countries in a wider, more energetic initiative.
When NATO’s Heads of State
and Government gather in Istanbul on June 28 and 29, the United
States hopes that NATO will do its part to support the broad
effort to reach out to the Greater Middle East by announcing an
Istanbul Cooperation Initiative.
NATO’s initiative should
complement the other elements of support for indigenous reform in
the Greater Middle East by engaging interested countries
in the region to foster
security and stability.
At NATO, we have identified a
number of security goals that Europe and North America share with
many countries across the Greater Middle East: fighting terrorism,
stemming the flow of weapons
of mass destruction, improving border security, and stopping
illegal trafficking of all kinds. Our focus should be on
practical cooperation with those countries that wish to have a
closer relationship with
NATO. Modernization in these countries is not Westernization, and
they will evolve according to their own traditions and history.
But the Greater Middle East, Europe and North America must chart a
common path to defeat terrorism, create peace and promote
democracy for the future
Long-term change in the Middle East will help to attack the
foundations of the terrorism crisis and give the growth of
democracy and justice a chance to take root. It is a challenge
that none of us, neither Europeans nor Americans, can avoid, and
that all of us must embrace as one of the critical foreign policy
tests of our time.
Our fourth goal is to improve relations between the two great
institutions responsible for Europe’s future—NATO and the EU.
Their twin enlargements this spring will advance our common goal
of a Europe whole, free, and at peace, and will do more than any
other initiative to integrate Europe East and West for the very
first time in Europe’s long history. NATO is now ready to
consider concluding our peacekeeping mission in Bosnia as a
success in December 2004. We’ve done an outstanding job there,
having stopped the war and kept the peace for nearly eight and a
half years. Our leaders will consider supporting a new EU mission
under the “Berlin Plus” framework for military cooperation agreed
by the two organizations. And in Bosnia, NATO should maintain a
military headquarters in Sarajevo to help authorities to bring
Radovan Karadic and Ratko Mladic, two indicted war criminals, to
justice, and to advise Bosnia on defense reforms. However, the
U.S. wants NATO to maintain an effective presence in Kosovo to
prevent any repetition of the violence we saw in March. Together,
we must continue to support the transition to stable,
market-oriented democracies in Kosovo, Bosnia and Macedonia so
that the Balkans takes its rightful place in an integrated Europe.
NATO and the EU sometimes differed in 2003 in theological disputes
over Berlin Plus and on EU defense plans. We can improve
relations between NATO and the EU by avoiding rivalry in the
defense sphere, improving defense trade cooperation, and
cooperating to stem the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction. NATO, of course, should remain the core of Europe’s
defense; the United States will always defend NATO’s centrality.
The choice is not, however, as some in Europe would suggest --
between a Europe under the U.S. yoke, or an independent Europe.
We can instead choose a future of cooperation between NATO and the
EU that will benefit Europeans and North Americans alike, and that
will recognize and support a strengthened EU working cooperatively
with a modernized and renewed NATO.
Finally, our fifth aim this year is to elevate NATO’s relations
with Russia. Our constructive engagement with Russia, through the
NATO-Russia Council, has helped make our citizenry safer and more
secure today than at any time in the last 50 years. There is so
much NATO can do with Russia -- from search and rescue at sea to
theater missile defense to greater cooperation in the Black Sea to
joint peacekeeping. Our NATO-Russia Council is a good forum but
we can do even better. We need to set our sights higher on a
closer relationship that will put our past rivalry behind us
forever.
These are our top five goals at NATO in the coming year. It is an
ambitious and vital agenda and one that we must fulfill in this
time of great challenge for all of us. NATO’s prospects for
achieving such an ambitious 2004 agenda will depend on how
successful we are in removing the current major obstacles to good
U.S.-European relations.
One such significant obstacle is the persistent gap in military
capabilities between the U.S. and the rest of its Allies. If NATO
is to field long-term missions in Iraq and Afghanistan and remain
in Kosovo, our European allies will need to spend more – and more
wisely -- on defense and produce more effective militaries. The
capabilities gap between the U.S. and all its allies is huge and
growing. The U.S. will spend $400 billion on defense this year;
the 25 other Allies combined will spend less than half of that.
The problem is not just the spending gap but the fact that the
U.S., by devoting more to research and development, is yielding
far more from its defense investments than our Allies, who still
devote a considerable portion of their budgets to territorial
defenses and high personnel costs.
In
addition to the technology gap between us, there is an even more
critical “usability gap.” Of Europe’s 2.4 million men and women
in uniform, only roughly three percent are now deployed on our
priority missions in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
Declining budgets, poor training and standards, and a continued
reliance on conscription account for a Europe that cannot put a
sufficient percentage of its troops into difficult missions.
The European allies and Canada must do more to ensure the
usability and deployability of their forces if NATO is to succeed
in the 21st century. NATO’s most basic military
challenge is not that our forces are overstretched, but
underutilized. All of us, including the U.S., must reform our
defense forces so that more of our personnel are trained for the
difficult foreign missions that will likely be our responsibility
for some years to come.
Finally, let me conclude by citing two other barriers to a healthy
transatlantic relationship that all of us must overcome in 2004
and beyond.
A
few leaders on the Continent have called for Europe and the
European Union to become a counterweight to the U.S. This suggests
that our future should be one of strategic rivalry and
competition—the very antithesis of the transatlantic community we
have built together since the end of the Second World War. Such a
reversal would amount to a colossal strategic error. It would
repudiate the primary factor that has produced two generations of
peace and unparalleled security and unity in Europe—the presence
of the United States military on this continent and the existence
of NATO. I do not believe that the vast majority of Europeans
would support such a future or that it will occur. But, Europe’s
responsibility to preserve healthy transatlantic ties, it seems to
me, is to reject this competitive view of our common future and to
avoid the gratuitous anti-Americanism that was all too evident in
European public discourse during the past year.
Americans have an equal obligation to reject unilateralism and
work instead to preserve the great multilateral institutions such
as NATO that are so important for our common future. For the
U.S., President Bush and Secretary Powell have emphasized
repeatedly in recent months our commitment to “effective
multilateralism.” The U.S. commitment to working within NATO has
never been clearer than in the past year.
Nonetheless, many European critics have accused the United States
of losing interest in NATO since September 11, 2001 and using it
as a toolbox. Ironically for these critics, it is the United
States that has proposed nearly all of the initiatives that have
reformed NATO’s structure and mission in the last two years. And
it is the United States that now calls for ambitious NATO
deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq, and outreach to the Greater
Middle East. The United States has demonstrated its genuine
desire to see the new NATO act collectively. We hope now that our
European Allies will agree to use NATO as dynamically as we wish
to do in 2004 and for years to come.
It
is true that acting in alliances isn’t as efficient as acting
alone. Alliances don’t move as fast, and they may complicate our
decision-making and even our tactics in the field. But Alliances
are very effective in producing sustained, long-term commitment in
the most difficult crises, as we have seen NATO do so successfully
in the Balkans.
When the new Secretary General of NATO, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer,
made his first official visit to Washington in late January,
President Bush assured him of NATO’s centrality in the U.S.
National Security Strategy. The United States will continue to
voice America’s abiding commitment to multilateralism and to
NATO. NATO’s numbers tell the story: we are a forum with 46
countries in the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council; a partnership
with 41 countries in the Partnership for Peace; a dialogue with
seven Mediterranean states, and an alliance with 26 members.
Where else but NATO could any of us replicate this vital web of
multilateral relationships?
NATO remains today the world’s most powerful and important
alliance, dedicated to preserving peace and freedom for all of our
peoples. It took 55 years for Europeans and North Americans to
build this Alliance, which serves as our bridge across the
Atlantic, our principal forum to work together and our mutual
protection in a dangerous world.
In President Kennedy’s words, NATO Allies will continue to be the
“watchmen on the walls of world freedom.” We know that our
partners, like Sweden, are also standing watch. We have many
challenges before us, and the U.S. remains dedicated to working
with our Allies and partners alike to keep NATO at the center of
the great effort to build a democratic, peaceful and secure world
in the years ahead.
