Complicated Relationships
Our world is complicated. Relationships are not always easy. Alliances are being brokered and broken, nations being courted for trade and scrutinised as potential threats.
We are all of us too familiar with what is going on with our own ‘big’ relationship with Europe.
There’s another alliance we should consider. Nato. It’s 70 years old this week and much more than a military pact.
The British were major players in bringing this transatlantic alliance into existence. How should this venerable and valuable strategic partnership and military ‘insurance policy’ reinvent itself in a world of change?
One of its founders was Ernest Bevin; foreign secretary in the Attlee government and highly-regarded post-war strategist. Like Churchill, Bevin saw that the threat to western Europe would not come from the Soviet Union, not from a revival of German militarism.
A piece in The Guardian this week looked at Nato’s birth and charted the recognition that the main risk in the late 1940s was that Moscow-supporting communists would come to power through the ballot box, at a time when their support was running at 25% in Italy and 20% in France.
So Bevin called for “the creation of some form of union in western Europe … backed by the Americans and the dominions.” He said: “We in Britain can no longer stand outside Europe and insist that our problems and positions are quite separate from those of our European neighbours.” The sentiment is as relevant now as it was then.
Bevin led the creation of a European collective defence organisation in the shape of the Western Union in 1948 and took it to Washington to persuade the Truman administration and Congress that the best way to protect US national security interests was to underwrite European security by establishing Nato.
NATO is not just a military pact but an alliance of shared values. The treaty exacts a promise from members to “safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law”.
Added to that is a strong political commitment to collective defence with discretion on how to carry it out. If one ally is attacked, others don’t automatically have to go to war. Each member state is required to “take such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force”. Nato has always operated on the basis of trust, not legal obligation. These two features gave it the flexibility to adapt.
What is particularly interesting about this relationship is that there is a common goal, an alliance, a shared vision, yet there’s no obligation.
An interesting alliance that has been something of a gold standard for working together for seven decades. Bevan’s assertion that ‘Britain can no longer stand outside Europe’ came thirty years before we became part of the EU, I wonder what he’d make of where we are today.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/02/nato-70-precious-asset-us-europe-russia-china
