US NATO ambassador sets out goals for renewing the transatlantic alliance

British officials confirm “no strategic shrinkage” for the UK despite budget concerns

Ivo Daalder, US Ambassador to NATO used his speech at the Royal United Services Institute, Global Leadership Forum, in London on 17 September to outline a number of American goals for renewing the transatlantic alliance. With an echo to a former US ambassador to NATO (one Donald Rumsfeld), he told the assembled audience of academics, business leaders, policy makers and officials that we live in “a world of many unknown unknowns”.

But while Daalder acknowledged that “today Europe is now less vulnerable to conventional conflict and more at peace than at any time in its history”, he warned that “transnational terrorism – egged on by its cousins of social, ethnic, and religious strife – had reached across our threshold, striking at the very heart of our shared transatlantic home”. He also set out a nerve-jangling list of other security challenges that were “knocking at our door”, including proliferation of WMD and their means of delivery, cyber attacks, the consequences of climate change, energy insecurity, weak states and trafficking by criminal networks.

Thus, Daalder described the “new normal” for NATO is to do things it didn’t do before – and to do so during an economic crisis of “historic proportions”. The answer, according to the US ambassador, is to renew partnerships, with NATO becoming “a regional hub in a global security network, providing the context, structure, and modality for cooperation with other countries and organizations”. But to do this requires adequate resources and Daalder warned against allies seeking the easy option of cutting their national contributions to NATO.

Despite growing fiscal pressures, the US Ambassador reiterated Washington’s desire for agreement at the NATO Lisbon Summit in November on the deployment in Europe of missiles defences, the so-called, Phased Adaptive Approach. “What we want NATO to do is to embrace the system, not to pay for it”. He emphasised “We’ll pay for it. You don’t have to pay for it. But NATO will embrace the system by continuing to fund and continuing to build the common command and control capability that allows the system to operate, not only under national auspices but connected through a NATO framework”.

In subsequent presentations at the Global Leadership Forum senior British officials confirmed NATO as the “first instrument of choice” for the new UK coalition government and that the “fundamental relationship with the United States” would continue. Despite possible cuts of up to 20 per cent in real terms to the British defence budget shortly to be announced in the forthcoming Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR), compounding an existing £37 billion black-hole in the defence procurement budget, “strategic shrinkage” was not on the ruling coalition’s agenda according to the UK officials. However, the new UK government would be placing a stronger emphasis on bilateral diplomacy to reinforce multilateralism, the conference was told. A more discordant chord was struck by one of the panellist who urged Britain to be more “hard edged” about the United States and warned that the net result of the UK’s Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) and CSR would leave the UK “where we started but with less money”.