When a leading NATO member makes public the military positions of another ally deep inside a war zone, possibly endangering those forces, NATO remains silent.
Judy Dempsey
More from this author...When NATO members undermine democratic values and the basic tenets of the rule of law, including an independent media and judiciary, they are not taken to task.
Over the past few years—and in particular, over the past nine months—several members of the U.S.-led military alliance have run roughshod over NATO solidarity and the basic principles upon which the alliance was founded in April 1949.
Turkey, for example, actually revealed the positions of French troops in northeast Syria. Since 2016, according to the AFP, these forces have been based in areas controlled by the YPG/PKK. The Kurdish YPG dominates the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan recently sharply criticized his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, for meeting SDF leaders in Paris and for offering to mediate between the SDF and Turkey. For Erdoğan, that was tantamount to negotiating with the Syrian branch of the PKK, which Ankara insists is a terrorist organization.
Yet Erdoğan went further. A Turkish news agency revealed the positions of the French forces. What sort of solidarity and discretion does that amount to, when one ally could endanger another?
Closer to home, NATO has to contend with Poland and Hungary undermining the independence of the judiciary and an independent media, not to mention that way in which nongovernmental organizations in Hungary have been vilified and refugees refused shelter.
Then there is the corruption in the alliance’s newest member, Montenegro, and the persistent attacks on the judiciary and anticorruption watchdogs in Romania.
Altogether, these examples do much to undermine NATO as an alliance, whose members pledge “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law. They seek to promote stability and well-being in the North Atlantic area.”
Back in the last 1940s, the rule of law and democracy didn’t matter that much for NATO. The alliance’s priorities focused on the security, safety, and protection of its members (in short, the West). When Greece and Turkey joined NATO in 1952, their membership was about bolstering the defenses of this part of Europe against the Soviet threat. Geostrategic interests and strengthening the anti-Communist bulwark took precedence over the rule of law and strong, democratic, accountable institutions.
In recent years, when it’s come to countries wanting to join NATO, there has been more emphasis on values and democracy. But in its own home, NATO’s record for upholding basic principles is far from stellar. And its reluctance to criticize its allies exposes some of its intrinsic weaknesses.
The first is that NATO countries are loathed to criticize each other, either publicly or even behind closed doors in the North Atlantic Council (NAC)—the forum in which alliance ambassadors meet. The NAC got its fingers badly burned during the U.S-led war against Iraq in 2002. Apart from NATO countries being so bitterly divided over the invasion, NAC sessions often ended up in shouting matches between the American and French ambassadors. NATO’s fragility was exposed for all to see.
Yet, wasn’t it necessary for ambassadors to speak out? Yes, they are constrained by their own governments. But if NATO could not—and did not—speak out against torture, or renditions, or the illegality of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, or what is now happening to Turkey’s democratic institutions, then what does that say about the alliance’s principles?
The second weakness is that NATO doesn’t have formal mechanisms to suspend an ally. And even if it wanted to discipline a member, that would require consensus.
Russia, for one, would be delighted if NATO washed its dirty linen in public. Ever since its establishment, the Kremlin’s goal has been to divide and weaken NATO with the eventual aim of getting rid of it. But the fact that countries still want to join NATO show their need for security and reassurance. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its proxy invasion of eastern Ukraine confirmed why countries want to sign up to the alliance.
NATO, however, does have an informal mechanism at its disposal. It is intelligence sharing—or the lack of it. One of the reasons why the big member states of NATO do not share intelligence across the board is because of the lack of trust, the feeling that the information will be passed on to non-NATO members (meaning Russia and China and other countries).
Yet none of the above legitimates a silence over the rule of law, over the erosion of basic democratic principles, and over how some allies are endangering others. NATO, it’s time to move on. What about scrapping some of the many talking-shop committees and instead creating a special ombudsperson responsible for NATO’s core principles?
Comments(14)
How about a rule that all NATO members have to re-apply for membership every 15 years: the Council could consider two applications per year?
At the moment, America is undermining democracy in a big way and cannot be trusted not to turn military information over to Russia. Turkey should be thrown out of NATO for a dozen reasons
"Potato, tomato, let's call the whole thing off...." Perhaps it's time to start asking the tough question: Shouldn't a wealthy Europe start paying for its own defense?
The benefit of being a NATO is in it's umberrela defence against Russia or anyone else. This in important to the baltic states and eastern Europe. The second benefit is having an exclusive market for Western weapons. Sharing intelligence is secondary. Having NATO members not spend the minimums set for defence and member countries buy Russian weapons systems is a problem. Turkey has gone beyond that in attacking a Greek naval vessal. Turkey should be expelled from NATO.
Why do we have barbarians as members of NATO? Yes I mean turkey!invarion and continued occupation of Cyprus, invasion of Syria and massacring thousands,compromising and revealing of positions of USA and French troops in Syria,inprisonment of journalists , justices and innocent people totalling 230000!!! Yes 230000 and the list goes on.. Turkey unlike what some say in Washington has never been a true and loyal ally to the USA It’s time for them to go. I hope the president and the new Secretary of State wake up and smell the roses
NATO is not about principles, it's about military dominance (specifically, over Russia) and arms industry profits. Everything else is just PR.
Is Turkey secretly joining Russia?
Turkey is not a democracy anymore! Every day is more like Russia. Are both autocracies joining against western democracies?
Great pieced by Judy Dempsey. Note: NATO has in the past imposed limits on "misbehaving" allies. While there was a dictatorship in Portugal, it didn't get all NATO documents; and when the Colonels ruled Greece (1967-73), they were "isolated" from much of the military side of the Alliance. The current US ambassador to NATO, Kay Bailey Hutichson in 1998, as a US Senator, proposed a mechanism for "counseling" new allies that fell short on democracy and other key factors in making them true "Western" countries. This mechanism would have been great help, now, especially in dealing with Hungary and Poland. The idea was slapped down, hard, by the person in the US administration in charge of NATO enlargement with the Senate, This person had no experience in NATO issues. Thus this important idea was not made part of the US process of ratifying the admission of the first three Central European countries to NATO. Pity. True short-sightedness on the part of the Clinton State Department at the time.
This post is not in support of any party targeting at systemic level the democratic concept. The wide spread systemic attack is easily discernible in Western media and beyond (not just Fidesz winning again and again). However, the bouc emissaire is always a newly minted NATO member in Central/Eastern Europe. This comment misses the most critical factor in geopolitics: time. Right or wrong, Poland and Hungary have a mentality of “guardian of civilization”, and they have centuries to prove and support it. Without Sobieski’s winged hussars Vienna would have been a Caliphate State in 1684; the reward was partition amongst local Empires. In 1939 they waited and waited for the global hegemon of the time (the UK) and France to unleash their armies in the West while the Sturzkampfflugzeugs were pounding a defenseless Warsaw; Coventry’s turn will come later. The reward: not even on the Napkin Treaty, not that it was technically possible; Solidarnosc and the Pope came later, and we can include here Brzezinski. Hungary lost twice in the 1914-1945 war, but Mohi is still present in the political DNA of the country; soon the Caliphate came along for centuries; the Light Brigade charge (1854) was in support of the Caliphate, not democracy in Hungary, 1848; 1956 they waited and waited for help, not that it was technically feasible. The comparison with Portugal and Greece is baseless; Poland is a front-line state, and war will be waged precisely there, potentially rapid de-escalation, or a NPR variant following a cyberevent; the ABM sites there, as well as Deveselu will be targeted immediately, as any ABM system is seen as a first strike enabler. Romania would probably follow on this list, but how many remember that without the Ploiesti oil the Wehrmacht war machine would have been forced to use more horses than it did. Ideally the focus of any discussion should be on the need for the wealthy EU and non-EU countries there to take their defense in their own hands, of course under the US nuclear umbrella. Paying back for ERI would be a good start ($8 billion, 3 years).
NATO is a collective security organization, not a collective democracy organization. To compare the problem of Turkey, which threatens the NATO security apparatus, with Poland and Hungary, which merely have sociopolitical regimes the author disagrees with, is hardly the hallmark of a scholarly article. No one, and I mean no one, in Europe or NATO is afraid that Poland or Hungary is going to start supplying Putin's Russia with military intelligence or try to undermine NATO defenses. The same cannot be said of Turkey under its present leadership.
The world we live in is not ideal. An alliance whose purpose is to wage war has to look for military strategic advantages wherever it can find them. The US deployed nuclear weapons in 1961 in Turkey, and the B61’s are still there; same Italy, 1958 to today, Germany, Belgium, UK, the Netherlands. Nowadays it is ABM systems protecting Europe against Iran and NK missiles; these would be immediately targeted in the event of a conflict, as they are seen as first strike enablers. Nations rarely risk nuclear annihilation (and C60 is now added to the mix) to get lectured on ideal democracy, especially when they have access to worldwide media and most speak English. This is in no way enticing anybody to actually not try to converge to some functional form of democracy, but they will always react vehemently against the arbiter elegantiarum attitude of many watchdogs (who, paradoxically are technically right). Ideally, an “ombudsperson responsible for NATO’s core principles” would be great, that person could go to India and China and talk about these principles. Sitharaman and Fenghe at MCIS 2018 didn’t make any reference to core principles (same nerve gas), they just talked defense; this conference was conspicuously absent from the news cycle, yet it is billions of people, armed with sizeable nuclear strategic triads; it is SCO, thirsty of oil and natural gas, and more and more targeting the last bastion: Bretton Woods. The ombudsperson would have to overcome the message of protector of Western civilization present in V4 politics, and not just there. However, the main ombudsperson message for the EU NATO members should be very simple: the US youth can’t pay for all your defense anymore; the trillions needed to upgrade the nuclear weapons should suffice. You could start paying for ERI, ABM systems, navy and air force deployments (already stretched to the limit from South China to the Black seas). The ombudsperson could convince the Norwegian people that punishing Boeing is unacceptable and make this an election issue. Even our always NATO sympathetic administrations might have limits on this one. The ombudsperson would also talk to the NATO EU peoples about the need to make defense central to their political discourse and make the NSS and NPR central to the public debate; that includes the possible trade war a la Smoot Hawley tariffs, where the EU must make a stance too. It is also time for an ombudsperson talking about the need for a TTIP based on the EU core principles.
NATO shows the pale face in Syria campaign In fact they do not care about success.Russia saw that and smile to NATO countries, recognizing their fee.
Sadly, a piece which demonstrates serious lack of understanding of what NATO is and one that rests on misplaced reccomendations which are more likely to aggravate the current tensions within the Alliance rather than offering a remedy. NATO embodies the collective identity of its entire cadre of membership,hence it is not an organism independent of or divorced from the concensus policy direction driven by Council decisions. That includes the public presentations of policies and positions of the Alliance by its secretaries general. As no member state will likely join a consensus for its public criticism or discreet penalizing , no such decision can be adopted. Keeping the Alliance together and displaying a front of solidarity, even through papering over differences have always outweighed the drive for censure and reproach. Likewise, upholdingthe sanctity of consensus rule has been a supreme principle and remains so today. Even a cursory reading of the minutes of negotiations of the Washington Treaty will testify to the greater wisdom of NATO's founding fathers for not stipulating a clause that is now advocated so unrealistically by the present blog and a few of its conributors, including by some who sat on the NATO Council for years.
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