Читать книгу America's Betrayal Confirmed - Elias Davidsson - Страница 15

As the Soviet Bloc disintegrated, Western strategists began looking for a new threat perception that would provide the Western alliance with a long-term focus for foreign policy. In his book, aptly called A Search for Enemies, published in 1991, Ted Carpenter wrote:

Since the Soviet Union’s East European empire began to unravel in the summer of 1989, Bush administration officials and numerous members of the foreign policy community have conducted a frantic search for alternative justifications for the [Atlantic] alliance. The range of suggestions NATO’s supporters have made is testimony to both their creativity and their desperation.{41}

At the time his book was published, the ruling elite in the U.S. had not yet openly identified a threat that could credibly replace that of the Soviet Bloc:

The best they have been able to come up with on short notice is the need to keep the bulk of Washington’s security commitments intact to guard against instability, unpredictability, and uncertainty. Such vague “threats” obviously lack the visceral impact or credibility of a large expansionist enemy such as the Soviet Union.{42}

Robert W. Tucker, writing already in 1990 in Foreign Affairs, pointed out that to maintain the Western alliance, “a new adversary must be assumed.”{43}

Foreign policy and military experts identified in the early 90s a garden-variety of potential threats to perceived U.S. interests – so-called rogue states, the drug trade, threats to sources of raw materials, access to Mid-East oil, terrorism and more – none of which could have provided a focus for American foreign policy.

The communiqué of the North Atlantic Council of 6-7 June 1991 stressed that NATO members prepare to address “other unpredictable developments that are beyond the focus of traditional Alliance concerns, but that can have direct implications on our security” and the “need to address broader issues and new global challenges.”{44} The Council did not specify any global challenges that could in the future have direct implications on NATO members’ security.

Phil Williams, Paul Hammond and Michael Brenner elaborated in 1993 on the need for public legitimation to maintain U.S. leadership in NATO: “Another difficulty with the effort to maintain U.S. leadership in NATO is that of domestic legitimacy… Preserving an alliance without an enemy and a strategy without a threat will not be easy…Without an external threat that acts as rallying point, unifying focus and target, the rampant pluralism and sectionalism of the U.S. political system may be impossible to overcome.”{45}

Both NATO hesitations and the Defense Planning Guidance suggest a frantic search for justifications to maintain or even extend the role of the Western Alliance. Yet the threats listed in official documents appear surprisingly vague, as discussed earlier with relation to the Defense Planning Guidance. Some even appear puzzlingly implausible.

Peter Jenkins, writing in The Independent in November 1991, illustrated the confusion prevailing at the time:

Suppose in the circumstances of today an American president were to propose contributing a 150,000- strong standing army to a military alliance for the purpose of defending Western Europe. Defend it against what, Congress would want to know? ...in the long run it is difficult to see how its cohesion [of NATO] can survive in the absence of any coherent external threat. Islamic fundamentalism is an alarming and destabilising force in the world, but can we imagine seriously the Muslim hordes once more at the gates of Vienna or Warsaw? Russia, more plausibly, could degenerate into a morbidly nationalistic state heavily armed with nuclear weapons, but it is hard to imagine such a Russia embarking on a course of western expansionism. Proliferation of nuclear weapons around the Mediterranean, or even further afield, in time may give new relevance to the doctrine of minimal nuclear deterrence towards which Nato is implicitly moving. Yet these contingencies do not mix into a cement of threat in any way comparable to the Soviet menace as construed during the Cold War.{46}