Obama reportedly horrified. PRAGUE (AP) — They’re the Czech Republic’s fourth-largest political party, but the hardline Communists could soon be outlawed if the center-right government has its way. It’s more than two decades since communism collapsed here, but the survivors and ideological heirs to the party that ruled from 1948 until the “Velvet Revolution” of 1989 are under increasing political pressure. Petr Necas’ government has taken the first step toward a possible ban by asking the Interior Ministry to work on a legal complaint to make it happen. A study commissioned by a Senate committee compiled numerous complaints from lawmakers about their conduct. The party, which is vehemently opposed to NATO, brands opponents “terrorists” and maintains friendly ties with the ruling Communists in Cuba, China and North Korea. Unlike most other communist parties in the region that have joined the left-wing mainstream, the Czech party has maintained its hardline stance. Supporters of the ban say it is a direct successor of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, whose members killed more than 240 political prisoners while thousands of other opponents died in prisons.
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Czech Republic Considers Banning Communist Party…
PARIS — Not having stopped here other than for a change of planes in nearly a year, I was delighted by the invitation to try out British Air’s Open Skies, a boutique flight to Paris that leaves from New York or Washington with only 85 passengers. The kindness of my hosts came just at the right time, as Mr. Pleszczynski and I had been discussing the French Open — the Championnats Internationaux de France , as they have been known since 1925 — and a few other items on the radar screen concerning this dear and old country, eldest daughter of the Church presently embroiled in a couple of savage wars of peace in Africa and engaged in a soul-searching debate regarding the proper limits on the press with regard to the private lives of public officials. At the tournament, the only debates took place on this legendary site’s famous red clay, with most of the top players advancing through the first round yesterday and the day before, Sunday. The weather is perfect under the clear azure skies that my friends assure me have been the norm since the beginning of spring, turning even the gloomiest souls into dreamers, though raising concerns about drought. The stadium itself, designed like one of those classical French gardens that make you think the world is rational, is so agreeable and well-organized that visitors turn happy — and courteous — even as they approach the gates on the avenue Gordon-Bennett, named for the founder of the New York Herald , also the Paris paper of the same name (many streets in Paris’ western quarters are named after Americans). It is hard to imagine that Roland-Garros, named for an aviation pioneer and World War I ace, was in competition last year with other locations to continue hosting this classic event in the tennis universe. Of the other four tournaments in the tennis grand slam circuit, only the All-England, held at Wimbledon near London, has never considered moving: the Australian and U.S. championships have, by contrast, seen changes in their locations. These have been on balance happy moves. Although Flushing Meadows represented a sharp departure from Forest Hills with its classic handsome layout, its clay and grass courts, its class, you must allow, I suppose, that the huge season-ending event in U.S. tennis needs the space and the big-time environment its new digs provided. There were good reasons to move the Internationaux away from Paris’s west side to a proposed new sports complex in a northern suburb. There was space there for a state-of-the-art stadium and facilities that other sports could use, for training as well as competition. French educational authorities as well as private athletic clubs are willing and often quite dynamic, but when you talk to the individuals involved you usually hear a note of apology for the second and even third tier levels of French amateur and professional athletics, with the possible exception of solo sailing and fencing. If you build it they will learn, I suppose that was the argument. However, this is far from a sure thing, and the excellent athletes here (and on American basketball courts) who grew up in makeshift sports programs in eastern and central Europe underscore an observation someone made on the plane, money does not make champions, coaches and teachers do. Not to get romantic about this, and I am sure good facilities cannot hurt, other things being equal, but anyway the French tennis federation opted to keep the tournament at its location near the Porte d’Auteuil, which is just at the edge of the Bois de Boulogne in a neighborhood of sports stadiums, including the famous Parc des Princes football field, where the Lille club played an important game last Saturday, necessitating a major mobilization of gendarmes in full riot gear in anticipation of post-game fan exuberance, which fortunately stayed rational, as these things go, possibly because sufficient minds were concentrated by the highly visible police presence. The expansion and redesign of Roland-Garros, scheduled for completion in 2016, calls for using nearby space to lay out some additional courts for both competitive play and training programs. A retractable roof will be fitted over the center court, whose bleachers already seats as many, about 10,000, as other major tennis stadiums. It is a risky gamble to change the character of a tradition-bound sport in a radical way, and this includes the environment in which it is identified. With all due respect for the capital’s northern suburbs, they are not the venerable and expensive old west side with its wooded areas and tracks-and-field and vast elegant sun-lit apartments in handsome old seven-story buildings. There would not be the old racetrack across the street with its fin-de-siècle architectural motifs. There would not be the nostalgic small poets’ garden tucked away next door to the tennis stadium where children play and old men read verses inscribed on stones. It made sense in every way to build on what they already had. Roland-Garros has been improved upon several times since its original design, done in great haste to allow the famous Four Musketeers of French tennis to defend their Davis Cup against the revenge-seeking Americans, at the time still led by the legendary Bill Tilden, who remains a contender in the perennial game of “greatest of all time.” This was back in 1928, and they (I mean the Mousquetaires) , won behind their own legendary champion, the crafty René Lacoste, known as the crocodile for the way he moved. Some tennis powers, as well as municipal bigs and ordinary citizens, question whether the proposed innovations can be successfully completed and worry about their cost, but those questions could be raised about a new venue as well. ME PERSONALLY, I WAS DELIGHTED for the innovation in my travel habits provided by my Open Skies hosts. Lately I have been traveling in African army cargo planes and broken down trucks, so the opportunity to see how the other half gets from A to B was welcome. Let me tell you, if you are an athlete — and I am, I say this purely as an objective fact not as a boast, the leading over-the-hill tennis player on Washington’s entire east side, which means I can beat Mr. Tyrrell, especially if we play after discussing critical questions relating to Republican Party politics over a few martinis — traveling on Open Skies is the ticket. They keep you in perfect comfort and get you on and off the plane and into Paris in record time. I have never spent less time getting out of an airplane and to my final destination, not that I am always sure what that is. They have the good sense to fly into Orly airport on the city’s southern outskirts and scarcely a quarter hour to the river, whereas the appalling Charles-de-Gaulle wasteland is way over in some distant zone to the northeast from which you cannot reach Paris in less than an hour. The seats are fantastic. Of course, my standard of recent comparison is benches in a Tupolev flying over an African desert (superb American-trained pilot, soldiers and their families, some with barnyard animals, but hey, I have also been in steerage). Seriously, this is the way to go. You can stretch your legs, you can have a drink — or several — you can read, you can speak to an elegant stewardess in any language you want, you can quote either Shakespeare or Corneille and she gets it, you can eat, you can not eat, you lean over and discuss restaurants and museums and sporting news with a fellow passenger who turns out to know more than you do instead of talking for eight hours about currencies and tips, or you can stay by yourself and enjoy the magic of moving through the clouds. How blessed we are! How foolish to let our human sins undermine all the wonderful gifts our God-given brains have made for us! Why cannot the Arabs get their acts together? Hah? I ask you. Not a single Arab competitor in high-level tennis. Well, the Russians have got there, several of them, at least among the women, have a clear shot at reaching the final next week, and look where they were just a few years ago. Freedom will out, my friends, and tennis is the index of its progress. After all — look at Rafael Nadal. This child of the New Democratic Spain — admittedly wracked by unseemly disturbances over the weekend, which threaten to cause real trouble down the road — this young man (24) from the Balearic Islands, was inconceivable during the years of the dictatorship. They had great players in Manuel Santana and Andres Gimeno, but not the explosion of talent across all fields, not just sports, which he epitomizes. I admit I am of those who sometimes asks whether Don Francisco got a bad rap, or at least an exaggerated rap, and whether the new Spain gets too wide a berth from American Deweyites (“the solution to the problems of democracy is more democracy”), but freedom, freedom — it is their country, let them deal with it. In the meantime, they have produced some fantastically good tennis players. One of whom is David Ferrer, who advanced easily to the second round. Rafa Nadal will try to equal the mighty Bjorn Borg’s record six victories here. The unexpected is always possible, but the man who may stop him is likely to be either Roger Federer or Novak Djokovic, who are in the same bracket and therefore will meet but for an upset. They both started out easily yesterday with straight set victories, although Feliciano Lopez forced Federer to a tie-break in the third. The only surprise on the men’s side, actually, was the comeback from two sets down by a 31-year old French qualifier, Stéphane Robert, over the Czech Thomas Berdych in a thriller whose final set (where there is no tie-break) went to 9-7. The Americans are not shining, with the graceful and fierce Williams sisters out of the running due to health problems and our teenage star Melanie Oudin already overwhelmed by the defending champion Francesca Schiavone. The men are represented by an attractive but weak field relative to what we usually send here, Isner, Querrey, Fish. The French have Gasquet and Monfils, maybe Simon, Tsonga, Bennetteau, while their Michael Llorda is already out. Perhaps the countries that sent the finest players of their time to Roland-Garros in its infancy, will be doing so again when all the renovations are finished in about four years’ time. It will be a gorgeous stadium then. But then it always was.
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We’ll Always Have Tennis — in Paris
The 400th anniversary of the King James Bible has received only muted celebrations in the English-speaking world, and no celebrations at all elsewhere. This book, which shaped the syntax, the imagery, and the wisdom of everyday discourse among speakers of English, and which has probably been more frequently quoted than any other source, including the Greek and Hebrew originals, is now receding behind the screen on which our ephemeral messages are scribbled. But the history of the English Bible is of great importance to us today, since it reminds us that our civilization is built upon translations. The Septuagint, the Vulgate, the Wulfila Bible (the fourth-century translation into the Gothic language), the Wycliffe Bible, and the translations of early reformers — the Czech Králice Bible, Luther’s Bible, the Geneva Bible, and the seminal translation by William Tyndale on which the King James translation is ultimately based — all these have brought with them profound and far-reaching changes in the social, political, and religious lives of ordinary people in Christian Europe. Every new translation has offered a promise of power to some and a threat to the power of others. A society governed by a privileged class of priests and clerks, whose authority derives from a text that only they can read, will be suspicious of translations of that text, and inclined to forbid them. Wycliffe survived only because he was protected by the powerful John of Gaunt, and Tyndale was burned at the stake in Bruges. Still, by the time of King James I versions of the Bible in English were available in every church, and it was no longer a threat to any vested interest to authorize a new and complete translation. How lucky we English-speakers were, that this translation should have been made in the wake of the Elizabethan dramatists, at a time when the English language was at its most muscular and taut, when it could be applied to matters both earthly and heavenly and at once give a fully imagined account of them, gripped in what Gerard Manley Hopkins was to call the “native thew and sinew” of the English tongue. All subsequent translations, set beside this version, are on a downhill path toward banality, and by the time of the New English Bible (completed 1970) it is fair to say that the immediacy and urgency of the King James Bible had been more or less dissolved in watery literal-mindedness. It is not just the literary merits of the King James Bible that recommend it, however. This was the Bible that the Pilgrim Fathers brought with them across the Atlantic, that the Methodist riders took around the farmsteads and cabins of rural America, the Bible that the merchant adventurers carried to India, Australia, and Africa, the Bible that provided the texts of Handel’s oratorios and which inspired the hymns of Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley. It is the Bible that was planted in the depths of the English-speaking soul during the crucial centuries when the sphere of English-speaking freedom was formed. I doubt that you can understand the motives of the early settlers of America without it. It gave them the names of their towns and villages, the names of their children, the maxims of their daily life and the routines and rituals of their sparse forms of enjoyment. They fought and cursed, made love and sermons, in the language of the King James Bible, and everywhere about us we see the difference that this has made. Ask yourself how it came about that a suburb of Washington, D.C. should bear the beautiful Hebrew name of Bethesda and you will unearth a history that is dependent at almost every point on the King James Bible and its immediate sources in Tyndale and Myles Coverdale. BUT THERE ARE OTHER and equally interesting ideas suggested by the history of biblical translation. When Christendom was first shaping itself from within the Roman Empire it was by means of the Vulgate, St. Jerome’s Latin version of the sacred texts. Those early Christians did not doubt that their most authoritative text, the one which contained the most direct messages yet received from God to man, had been translated from other languages, spoken by other people, in whom God had, for reasons of His own, chosen to confide. A kind of openness to the world and to other ways of life was the natural consequence of this. And this openness has characterized the Christian religion ever since. I may be wrong, but it does seem to me that this marks out an important cultural difference between Christian civilization and Islam. Ever since the 11th-century triumph of the Asharite school of Islam it has been orthodox to believe that the Koran cannot be translated, that the surahs were literally spoken, as we find them, to the Prophet, and that any attempt to represent their meaning in another language would falsify God’s word. Versions of the Koran in other languages are therefore routinely described as “interpretations.” A devout Muslim may learn to recite the Koran in Arabic without knowing, except in rough outline, what it means. And it is only Arabic speakers, who today form less than 20 percent of Muslims, who know what nonsense it is to say that this text cannot be translated. Of course, something is lost in translation — in particular the taut, breathless syntax of the original, and the poetic rhythms of the rhyming prose. But then, something is lost in every translation. And as our Bible teaches us, something may also be gained, and the gain may be more than the loss. It is perhaps true of St. John’s Gospel that the Greek original is inferior to Tyndale as literature. But the reader of Tyndale will discover exactly what the writer of the Gospel intended to say. The official non-translatability of the Koran has had important political consequences. The mullahs and ayatollahs have been able to assert a kind of monopoly over the sacred text, to withhold it and themselves from public scrutiny, and thereby to establish theocratic forms of government in which they hold power in God’s name. The downgrading of secular authority and secular law, the claim to absolute and incorrigible justification, follow from this as a matter of course. This is what we have seen in Iran and will no doubt see in Egypt should the Muslim Brotherhood finally fulfill its ambition of ruling that country, its Christian minority included, according to the shari’ah . The translatability of the Bible has had equally far-reaching political consequences. When the nation-states of Europe began to emerge after the Reformation, it was partly because people were beginning to see that law and language are far more reliable criteria of political loyalty than dynasty and religion, since law and language are instruments of peace, whereas dynasties and religions are always at war. The translations of the Bible brought the Christian religion to heel, contained it within the borders of the linguistic community, and overcame the medieval orthodoxy that, in matters of religion, the real authorities were situated elsewhere and outside the kingdom. They helped to domesticate the religious impulse and who can doubt, looking back at the wars of religion, that Europeans needed, at the time, to identify themselves in some other and more peaceful way than the way of faith? TRANSLATION OPENS THE WAY to a new kind of scholarship. Granted that the texts we hold sacred originated in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, and Greek, what do we know about the people who first wrote them down, and how can we be sure what they meant by the words they wrote? During the late 18th century this question gave rise to the science of biblical hermeneutics, which led the universities of Europe toward a new kind of skepticism. It became clear that the ancient texts belonged to specific social and political contexts, and that they were not necessarily aimed at the whole of humanity. People began to assign precise dates to them, to draw a map of Jewish history, and to distinguish which parts of the Gospels told the authentic story of Christ’s mission, and which were later fabrications. This scholarship has made it difficult to think of the Bible as God’s word — that is to say, as the word spoken to prophets and others by God. At best the Bible consists of words inspired by God, words which might have been marred and distorted in the process of recording them, and in which the element of inspiration and the element of fabrication might be hard to unravel. (Think of the bloodthirsty book of Joshua, for instance, and the story of Rahab, about whom the best can be said is that she was a whore: did God have a hand in that ?) It is impossible that the Bible should now have, for the educated Christian, the kind of authority that the Koran has for the Muslim. The Bible is a text to be discussed and interrogated, whose message does not remain entirely the same from generation to generation, but which responds to the changing circumstances of those who consult it. And one proof of its inspired nature is that it always does respond, that it offers thoughts, arguments, words, and guidance in all the changing scenes of life — including the changing scenes of our species-life. We can no longer point to the Bible as the final authority in any disputed question. But the Bible is as much a help to us as ever it was to the Pilgrim Fathers. It has persuaded us to take responsibility for our actions, and not to bequeath our problems to humorless old men in beards who pretend that only they know how to read the sacred text. That makes it the more sad that the King James Bible, which raised us to a higher level of seriousness, should have slipped behind the screen, taking with it so much of the English-speaking soul.
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Translating the Word
From the April 2011 issue of The American Spectator With policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic slashing public spending and searching for ways to reduce military budgets, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has just begun construction of a splendiferous new $1.38 billion headquarters on a 100-acre site in Brussels. Designed by Chicago architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, renowned for luxurious commercial buildings including the tallest in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the futuristic new NATO offices will feature eight sweeping wings covering 2.7 million square feet. Glass-walled elevators overlooking cavernous atriums showering natural light. Ecologically correct grass growing on the roof. Seventeen conference rooms. A range of amenities from cafeterias, restaurants, and banks, to shopping, sport, and leisure facilities. Pentagon staffers, eat your hearts out. The architects wax rhapsodic, comparing its weird configuration to “fingers interlaced in a symbolic clasp of unity and mutual interdependence.” As one SOM design director glowingly describes the sprawling steel and glass structure, “We wanted to break the norm of what is perceived as a government service, bunker-like building. We made it look very classy, giving the illusion that it was a world-class, floor-to-ceiling-type glass building, very inviting. We also paid attention to how these grand spaces look.” For an organization that’s been a perfect illustration of Parkinson’s Law (bureaucracies expand over time, regardless of workload) since it lost its original raison d’être when the Soviet Union collapsed, it seems a normal entitlement. “A modern NATO needs a modern building,” NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen insisted at the groundbreaking ceremony last December 16. Maybe. But does it have to be this extravagant, this grand, this pricey? The timing couldn’t be worse. The timing couldn’t be better . The provocative new structure comes just when the Obama administration is pushing to trim federal budgets by some $1.1 trillion over the next decade, along with reductions in Pentagon spending by $78 billion. Other major NATO members are also cutting defense spending, Britain by 8 percent, Germany by some $11.5 billion. The spectacular project at least has the virtue of symbolizing what has gone wrong with this self-aggrandizing, self-perpetuating body whose main mission often seems to be not collective defense of its members, but its own self-preservation. “It is somewhat ironic that NATO breaks ground on its new headquarters at the same time the fundamental sinews binding the alliance together are coming apart,” says Marko Papic, a senior analyst at Stratfor, a global intelligence analysis firm based in Austin. As for NATO’s image in a time of austerity, the controversial building is a well-aimed shot in the foot. “It is certainly unfortunate,” Stephen Flanagan, senior vice president at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. “We don’t need the crystal palace that’s on the drawing boards. It’s an easy target for critics when everybody is having trouble maintaining current operations.” I BEGAN COVERING NATO as a young Paris-based newsmagazine correspondent in 1966, when French president Charles de Gaulle abruptly tore up the lease on its headquarters. Belgium hastily offered to house the organization in Brussels, and I covered the opening ceremony the following year. Built in just 29 weeks — the lavish new offices have taken a decade of planning, construction will take another four years — the prefab headquarters was simple, but at least it looked lean, keen, and spartan-military. Not like a stately pleasure-dome for coddled fat cats. (Having recently revisited the present headquarters, I can attest that working conditions are equal to those in many federal buildings in Washington.) Over the years I interviewed NATO secretary generals and SHAPE commanders, rode in helicopters with SACEUR General Alexander Haig on maneuvers in Germany, went hunting for Soviet submarines in the North Sea on a Norwegian frigate, flew in an AWACS plane as it monitored bogey air traffic on the other side of the Iron Curtain. I wrote articles calling attention to threats like Soviet SS-20 missiles pointed at the heart of Europe. Never was there any doubt about the necessity of collective defense. NATO filled an obvious need. No more. Behind the façade of variegated non-defense activities, bigger and more complex command structures, and far-flung operations is an organization in identity crisis. “NATO’s mission has been unclear since the end of the Cold War, and there is a sense of it trying to validate itself as relevant to today’s world,” Richard Perle, assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and former chairman of the NATO High Level Group, told me. “It’s no longer the indispensable defense organization it used to be. It’s become so much less important that, if it didn’t already exist, you couldn’t start it today. It’s living on its legacy.” The North Atlantic Alliance was marked by mixed motives from the very beginning. As its first secretary general, Lord Ismay, put it bluntly, NATO’s purpose was threefold: “To keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.” It managed that, then ironically faced its biggest crisis when the Warsaw Pact disappeared in mid-1991. With that ended the specter of an onslaught of Red Army tanks across the North German Plain — and the Alliance’s mission. NATO went into limbo and into a funk. “It entered a profound existential crisis two decades ago,” explains Dominique David, executive director of the French Institute of International Relations in Paris. “But it managed to survive for several reasons. First, big bureaucracies never go away. They always find other pretexts to stay in business. Then, the U.S. wanted to keep an eye on Europe and NATO was a convenient way. But the biggest boost came in the early 1990s when former Soviet satellites requested membership. It became both a military organization and an instrument for the political stabilization of Europe. That made it a strange, schizophrenic animal constantly looking for new threats to relegitimize itself.” For the last 20 years NATO has tried hard to look relevant to Western security. From the homogeneous 16 members of the Cold War period, it has ballooned to 28 disparate countries with widely divergent perceptions of their individual security threats. Thus its recent operations far beyond the original Euro-Atlantic area threaten its cohesion. Is its place off the Horn of Africa, for instance, where its anti-piracy operation overlaps with two other international task forces? Many think not. “For us, the most important aspect of NATO is European operations,” a well-placed European defense official told me. “I’m not sure that fighting pirates in the Red Sea is its best role.” The Alliance’s eager quest for a convincing new role has led to mission creep on a grand scale. A new strategic concept formulated in 1991 tried to define a new threat environment that lacked any real dangers to its members. So security was redefined as not only a military issue, but one with political, economic, social, and environmental dimensions. Dialogue and cooperation were NATO’s new weapons “to reduce the risk of conflict arising out of misunderstanding.” Another strategic concept in 1999 expanded its purview to humanitarian operations. Still another issued at the Lisbon summit last November covered every conceivable threat from energy security to non-proliferation, cyber war, health risks, and climate change. It also invited Russia to participate in ballistic missile defense. Originally NATO concentrated on its core activity of defending the Euro-Atlantic area. Going “out of area” was verboten. That changed in the early 1990s when, as Dutch analyst Hugo Klijn of the Netherlands Institute of International Relations notes, “NATO followed the usual course of big, self-perpetuating bureaucracies: seeking new missions and linking to other big bureaucracies.” What new missions? Ill-defined and far from its designated area. What other big bureaucracy? The mother of them all, the United Nations. In December 1992 the North Atlantic Council, NATO’s governing body, declared that the Alliance was “prepared to take further steps to assist the UN in implementing its decisions to maintain international peace and security.” Suddenly it was in the global peacekeeping business as a subcontractor to the UN. Says François Heisbourg, special advisor at the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research and one of France’s top defense analysts, “They said in the 1990s that NATO had to go out of area or out of business, and that was true. It did go out of area and it stayed in business. But it lost its geographical focus and turned itself into an ad hoc coalition where countries agree or not to share risks and burdens together. That’s the new NATO.” It’s a NATO that considers it has a universal mandate, and whose name, “North Atlantic,” now bears little relation to its activities. In years to come, this might turn out to be more than many members, including the U.S., bargained for. Could the Alliance operate anywhere now? When I asked a high NATO official, the answer was clear. “I cannot envision a future in which NATO is not called upon to generate power of whatever kind for crises anywhere in the world,” he replied. “We airlifted disaster relief into Pakistan. If you can go into Pakistan, what’s off limits?” WITH NATO’s new vocation as a global, proactive, security, crisis management, peacekeeping, and humanitarian organization, it now commits Americans to fighting and dying in any hotspot on the planet. As a Cato Institute study puts it, “The transformation of NATO from an alliance to defend the territory of its members to an ambitious crisis-management organization has profound and disturbing implications for the United States… [with] the potential to entangle [it] in an endless array of messy, irrelevant disputes.” In the best bureaucratic tradition, the Alliance grew geometrically, metastasizing from its core area to the Baltic States, Central Europe, and, heaven help us, the Balkan powder keg. Enlargement aggravated its already complicated, consensus-based, decision-making process. Difficult with 16 members, it becomes virtually impossible to make timely, coherent operational plans with 28, even with — or because of — the more than 5,000 meetings it holds every year. “NATO’s enlargement [has] increased the complexity of an already complex NATO bureaucracy,” states another study by the Dutch institute, “and one wonders how NATO is managing its increasing bureaucracy with its complex procedures. One of the most important questions…is how this bureaucracy can remain effective and efficient.” Some allies ask the same question. “There’s a tendency at NATO to create numerous bureaucracies, and they’re not terribly effective,” a senior official at the French Defense Ministry told me. “With the British, we’re determined to slim down its command structure, which has become enormous, and reform its financial management.” The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said France is particularly unhappy with the way NATO spends money. “They have only a vague idea how much an operation is going to cost when they get into it, just presenting us with the bill once it’s under way. That’s no way to run an outfit that has to be cost effective, especially nowadays.” Even the diplomatic perks and prestige of international functionaries, plus the prospect of spiffy new offices, no longer attract the best and brightest to NATO, to hear Richard Perle tell it. “Here’s an indication of where NATO stands today,” he says. “When I was in government during the Cold War, NATO was the prized assignment. Everyone in the diplomatic service wanted to be ambassador to NATO, military people wanted assignments there. It was the center of something important. It no longer is. The new dangers threatening us are no longer things that can be solved by an alliance like NATO.” Prized or not, the civil-military bureaucracy has kept busy with things unrelated to defending member states. It has, inter alia, helped stabilize Bosnia, assisted peacekeeping in Darfur, combated ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia (an operation the Cato Institute called “just shy of a full-blown policy fiasco”). And it became embroiled in Afghanistan. THE MIXED MOTIVES AT NATO’s creation also marked its stepping into the Afghan quagmire. Was the International Security Assistance Force turned over to the Alliance because it was best qualified and equipped to handle the job? Or to make it appear a less American, more international effort? (Fully two-thirds of the ISAF troops are American; some countries have less than a token 10 personnel there.) Or as a costly, lethal way of modernizing NATO? As Karl W. Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, testified to the House Armed Services Committee in February 2007, “The Afghanistan campaign could mark the beginning of sustained NATO efforts to overhaul Alliance operational practices in every domain: command and control, doctrine, force generation, intelligence, and logistics.” It could also, he implied, make or break the Alliance. Right now NATO is positioning itself for a lifetime job in Afghanistan. Earlier this year its then senior civilian representative there, Mark Sedwill, declared that a long-term partnership would be required even after hand-over in 2014 to Afghan forces. NATO would then be in the business of Afghan socio-economic development. “We will be there as long as we are needed,” he promised. Canadian general Rick Hillier, who commanded ISAF from February to August 2004, came away bitterly disillusioned (he went on to Canada’s top military job as chief of the Defense Staff). In his bestselling book last year, A Soldier First: Bullets, Bureaucrats and the Politics of War , he writes that “NATO itself was looking for something, anything, to do that would allow it to prove that it was still a worthwhile organization.” When he took over his command, Hillier was appalled by “NATO’s lack of cohesion, clarity and professionalism.” There was, he writes scathingly, “no strategy, no clear articulation of what they wanted to achieve, no political guidance, and few forces. It was abysmal. NATO had started down a road that destroyed much of its credibility and in the end eroded support for the mission in every nation in the Alliance…. Afghanistan has revealed that NATO has reached the stage where it is a corpse, decomposing.” Strong words from a soldier known in Canada for speaking his mind. Small wonder that Hillier had little patience with NATO’s ponderous bureaucracy, with its “enormous numbers of high-ranking civilians and military — general officers were a dime a dozen…. It was a wonder that any decisions got made at all.” Today about 4,500 staff are at the Brussels headquarters. Along with thousands of others in its multifarious agencies and strategic and regional commands, they engage in a giddy flurry of activities. Many have only an imaginary relation to security. For example: • The Academic Affairs Unit runs a fellowships program and organizes conferences, seminars, and visits for academics and think tank researchers to “project the Alliance’s point of view and strengthen information on its goals.” In other words, a glorified PR operation with academic pretensions. • The Science for Peace and Security Committee “contributes to NATO’s mission by linking science to society,” whatever that means. Concretely, it funds grants for research on soft, fashionable subjects like civil science and environment. • The NATO Undersea Research Center in La Spezia, Italy, has a vast program including Marine Mammal Risk Mitigation that studies the effects of sonar on marine animals, “to counter the threat from quiet submarines.” • Then there’s the NATO Multimedia Library with its more than 18,000 books and subscriptions to 155 newspapers and magazines. And its annual Manfred Wörner Junior Essay competition with a $6,800 prize. And the NATO photo competition for young shutterbugs who learn that, for example, “Taking photographs of random strangers can be risky.” Really lucky individuals from member states get to go to the NATO School in Oberammergau, Germany. Located in the heart of the spectacular Bavarian Alps, the school is, as NATO puffs it, “a very special place…blessed with the beauty of the mountains.” After a grueling day studying intelligence or joint operations, participants can relax at the NATO Recreation Center with skis and snowboards and then get a massage. ONE OF THE CLEAREST SIGNS of the Alliance’s identity crisis is its bloated PR operation — when its mission was obvious, it didn’t need an advertising campaign — euphemistically known as the Public Diplomacy Division. Its multinational staff of 125 labors “To raise the Alliance’s profile with audiences world-wide.” Equipped with two television and 10 radio studios, it generates a torrent of programs, press releases, pamphlets, magazines, DVDs, and audio-visual presentations. It also organizes frequent international conferences, seminars, and other media events boosting NATO. It runs the web-based natochannel.tv, where slick films show what it’s like aboard a submarine or to go on patrol in Afghanistan. But mainly it carries every speech, statement, declaration, and press conference by Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Variously described as dynamic, bossy, and high-handed, Rasmussen, a former prime minister of Denmark, seems to think he is still leader of a country instead of a multinational organization where policy is made by consensus among members. “For him, ambassadors to NATO are just flunkies, he doesn’t bother to consult them,” one exasperated official of an Alliance member told me. Like a chief of state, he is given to churning out his own declarations on world crises that have little to do with Euro-Atlantic defense (Egypt, Libya, et al.), calling for the usual democracy, freedom of expression, less violence, etc., etc. He travels widely promoting new roles for the Alliance. Just last February he was in Qatar and Israel selling NATO’s services in the Middle East. “NATO’s new strategic concept is relevant to the Middle East,” he explained earnestly to an Israeli newspaper. “It gives NATO a clear role in taking on the security challenges that will dominate in the 21st century…. I imagine anyone in the Middle East can see the relevance to your region.” But the secretary general appears subject to homesickness. As I walked through the quiet, mostly empty headquarters hallways one recent Friday with my NATO minder, we passed the impressive glass doors to his office. “Is he in?” I asked. “Not likely,” came the answer. “Every Friday afternoon he heads back home to Copenhagen.” Rasmussen does get some credit for responding to allies’ prodding for reform, not that he really has any choice at this point. “We have committees for nearly everything,” sighs a headquarters official. “Whenever a topic has to be examined, like armament systems, they create a committee. We had more than 400 of them until we recently began eliminating some. Now there are 200 and we hope to get that down to 100.” NATO’s 14 agencies in seven countries, employing 6,000 people, with a separate budget of more than $13.6 billion, are also due for slimming one of these days. The military command structure, still basically unchanged since the Cold War, is due to be reduced from the present 13 headquarters scattered among member countries — which value them more for job creation than defense. That will be a long and difficult reform, Stephen Flanagan of CSIS explains. “Right now they’re trying to decide which commands in which countries can be eliminated, but for some members that’s the only part of NATO they have in their territory, so they resist cutting. The new strategic concept gave a better sense of where the alliance should be going. Now the question is, will they really do it?” What’s certain is that NATO will approach reform softly, softly. It is giving itself two to three years to implement changes, and few if any personnel layoffs are planned. As one official admits, “We hope to make savings, but the NATO budget is so complicated, it’s hard to put a figure on how much we’ll save.” GOING GLOBAL IS CLEARLY one of Rasmussen’s top priorities. Two objectives, involvement in the Middle East and closer relations with Russia, worry many allies, especially when he acts like a loose cannon. He unveiled a Middle East peace plan of his own at a 2009 conference in Abu Dhabi, shocking ambassadors back at headquarters. “None of the NATO ambassadors or Missions had any advance warning of the statement,” leaked documents say. “Many acted with incredulity to his statement.” He has been trying to cozy up to Russia, making him the first secretary general in NATO history to seem to believe the Russians can be trusted. Not everyone is comfortable with that. “The new members in central Europe joined the Alliance for protection against a resurgent Russia and want NATO to return to its original mission of collective defense,” says Marko Papic of Stratfor. “But Western members like Germany and France now consider Russia a partner, not a potential enemy. These incompatible threat perceptions make me wonder whether the Lisbon summit is not the beginning of the end for NATO.” Defense analyst Thomas Skypek, a Washington Fellow of the National Review Institute who believes America should do a hard-headed cost-benefit analysis of NATO membership, points to France’s recent $2 billion sale of Mistral-class ships to Russia as an example of the lack of common threat perception. “What really is the Alliance’s mission?” he asks. “Ask the 28 member states and you’ll get 28 different answers.” The Mistral is a force projection helicopter carrier that can land 450 assault troops. France went through with the deal despite Washington’s protests and concern in NATO’s Baltic members over where Russia might project that force. The U.S. Mission to NATO has warned Rasmussen off from exceeding his mandate, according to confidential cables released by WikiLeaks. “We strongly urge you not to get ahead of Allies’ deliberations by announcing new NATO-Russia initiatives that have yet to be formally considered by the Alliance,” said one. Another cable said that after a December meeting with President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin, Rasmussen had exaggerated their interest in cooperating with NATO. (In response to my repeated requests, the U.S. Mission, the largest at NATO with 100-plus staff, declined to be interviewed for this article.) Such differences within the Alliance about its proper mission are one indication that it has become a futile exercise in herding cats. Another sign is that several European members are already developing alternative, regional alliances while retaining the U.S.-supplied advantages of NATO. Baltic countries are talking with Nordics like Sweden and Finland about their mutual security. Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Hungary are building a European security architecture in the Visegrad group. The European Amphibious Initiative led by France held its first out-of-area exercise last year in Senegal. And France and Britain recently signed a historic new defense agreement to pool and share military resources. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to shoulder the bulk of the NATO burden. Ten years ago America accounted for about 50 percent of the Alliance’s total defense spending. Today that figure is up to 75 percent. Spending by European members has dropped $61 billion over the last two years. The French defense official quoted above says frankly, “Many European members are investing as little as possible in military equipment. As long as they think they can count on the Americans to provide AWACS, transport aircraft, and so on, why bother to maintain an adequate defense force?” Richard Perle agrees. “Other NATO countries are getting a free ride, and have been for a very long time. But even more now, because they don’t feel any sense of danger. During the Cold War you could push, say, the Germans to do more, because their security depended on NATO. Germany doesn’t depend on NATO anymore.” MANY ON CAPITOL HILL are now looking closely at our relationship to NATO. Congressman Barney Frank, a ranking Democratic member of the House Financial Services Committee, argues that we should spend less on defending the wealthy nations of Europe. “NATO is a great drain on our treasury and serves no strategic purpose,” he declares. Without going that far it’s fair to ask that we re-evaluate our membership in the Alliance. As Senator Richard Lugar, Republican leader of the Foreign Relations Committee, put it in an e-mail to me, “The Alliance must be judicious about its missions. NATO should not function as a ‘universal peacekeeper.’ But NATO remains extremely important to U.S. security.” At Lugar’s request, the Republican staff of the committee is currently reviewing NATO’s mission, as well as its future role and financing. To be sure, some instrument for mutual defense, like the Alliance’s Article 5 — an attack against one is an attack against all — is useful. Furthering interoperability of equipment so allied forces can act together is also worthwhile. But with American interest in Europe waning while concern over Asia waxes, it’s time to recognize that the rigid, fixed alliance of Cold War days is outdated and in urgent need of revamping. “NATO is here to stay,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen declared with bravado at the December groundbreaking. As if an expensive new building project could ensure its survival and counter the growing doubts about it. The U.S. should send a clear message that a new, frugal defense era is here, and start by questioning the suitability of that exorbitant new headquarters. For such a message, the timing is perfect.
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NATO Reconsidered
After the Arab League urged creation of a no-fly zone over Libya, Mustafa Gheriani, a spokesman for the Libyan Transitional National Council, said, “We hope the Europeans will deliver now.” But with divided opinions and shrinking militaries, the Europeans can’t deliver. The Libyan crisis again demonstrates that the emperor has no clothes, at least in Europe. For years a transnational European elite hoped to turn the continent into a third Weltmacht to compete with America and China. While the Common Market and then European Union created an economic colossus, leading European politicians wanted more. The Euroelite frustration was palpable. For years the EU talked about forging a united foreign policy separate from that of America. Plans were advanced for European military planning and multinational units. These efforts came to naught. No one thinks of Europe in confronting geopolitical problems. Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform, complained: “On many of the world’s big security problems, the EU is close to irrelevant. Talk to Russian, Chinese or Indian policy-makers about the EU, and they are often withering. They view it as a trade bloc that had pretensions to power but has failed to realize them because it is divided and badly organized.”
