Military

SHAPE News Summary & Analysis

27 May 2003

NATO

• In a contribution to Le Figaro, former French Defense Minister Millon urges Europe to strengthen its partnership with the United States and insists that a successful Europe depend on Euro-Atlantic cooperation. He suggests that NATO is a major tool to meet this great challenge and advocates the replacement of the UN by a reinvigorated NATO. The entire system of international cooperation needs to be reappraised, revised, and reorganized. The widespread and shifting terrorist threats, and the changing nature of conflict obliges the states to reconsider their defense, Millon writes. “The United States’ enemies are Europe’s enemies—yesterday national socialism and communism, and today Islamist fundamentalist,” he adds and charges: “Europe must choose…. To choose is to designate your friends and, by the same token, to identify your enemies.” The best response to the accumulated challenges and threats lies in a revived, reinvigorated, and regenerated Atlantic Alliance, Millon opines and continues: “We have a major tool with which to meet this great challenge: NATO… It is a matter of replacing the obsolete system of collective security, the United Nations, with that provided by an honest and active alliance between the two sides of the Atlantic. In a world full of grave threats …. such an ambiguous structure as the United Nations is ineffective and even counterproductive. A new Atlantic Alliance … would constitute a much more valuable, effective, and useful response for the defense of its members.”

The forthcoming G8 summit in the French spa town of Evian, to be attended by President Bush and President Chirac, is prompting media to look at the current status of Franco-U.S. relations.
Le Figaro, May 26, expected that “common interests would prevail over U.S.-Franco rancor.” The newspaper also downplayed reports that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld is advocating severing military ties with France and that his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, would like to assign a greater role within NATO to the DPC, of which France is not a member. “The Pentagon’s ideas about the decision-making process within the Alliance are probably doomed to failure. The Defense Planning Committee cannot replace the North Atlantic Council: The Council embodies supreme political authority within the Alliance. And several European NATO members would not agree to replacing the rule of consensus by a majority rule,” stressed the newspaper.

ISAF

• Deutschlandfunk quoted Canadian Foreign Minister Graham announcing in Berlin Monday, after talks with his German counterpart Fischer, that Canada will take over the lead of ISAF from Germany and the Netherlands this summer. In another development, Mashhad Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran, May 26, quoted the Afghan government’s advisor for security and military affairs saying Sunday that ISAF troops have been deployed in Mazar-e-Sharif, the center of northern Afghanistan’s Balkh Province. “It is worth mentioning that for the first time ISAF forces are being deployed outside of Kabul,” he reportedly noted.

ESDP

• Reuters quotes EU officials saying in Brussels Tuesday that countries against ceding more powers to the EU have scored a victory in the battle over a future European constitution by blocking the use of majority voting in foreign and security policy. The latest draft reinstates the right of national veto over proposals jointly made by the executive European Commission and a planned new EU foreign minister, the officials reportedly said. The dispatch notes that under an earlier version, EU governments would have acted by a qualified majority vote to endorse such proposals, except in special cases affecting their vital national interest. It adds that the Commission, backed by more integration-minded members had argued that in an enlarged EU of 25 members from next year, decision-making would become too cumbersome without a big extension of majority voting.
  
  
• European governments agreed Monday to launch the long-delayed Galileo space program, seen as a potential rival to the U.S. military’s GPS global satellite positioning system, writes Reuters. The dispatch quotes the European Space Agency (ESA) saying in a statement that an agreement had been reached among its member states—Norway, Switzerland and the 15 EU countries excluding Greece and Luxembourg—which finalizes the conditions of their participation in this project. It recalls that the Galileo system, which would be built around 30 satellites occupying three circular earth orbits and generate an estimated 140,000 jobs, has been criticized as redundant by officials in the United States.