On balance, NATO has taken some very promising steps as an Alliance and in conjunction with its European neighbors to enhance the capabilities for effective, collective engagement in peace support operations. It remains to be seen whether that promise will be fulfilled. For the United States, this means that NATO cannot become, as some members of the Alliance would have it, merely an insurance policy against the eventuality of a renewed Article 5 threat from some future resurgent "barbarians." Nor is it merely a question of NATO going "out of area or out of business." NATO has already gone "out of area" in its response to Bosnia, and demonstrated a willingness to use force (albeit after extensive and sometimes fierce debate) in the process. For NATO to maintain its relevance to the security interests of its members and the trans-Atlantic community as a whole, it must continue to adapt as an institution which can make good on the vision of enduring peace and stability in the London and Rome Declarations. This will not be an easy task.
There is a tremendous difference between the ability to generate consensus to respond to an Article 5 attack on a member of the Alliance and the ability to generate and sustain consensus to deploy NATO or PFP forces to engage in crisis management or peace support operations outside of the territory of member states. Obviously, the critical element in determining the future usefulness of either a NATO or PFP role in peacekeeping will be the political will of the member states when confronted with a situation in which NATO or Partnership forces might be deployed. At the present time, this is problematic, both as it relates to the willingness of members to deploy forces, and as it relates to the willingness of some states in Eurasia to have those forces deployed on or near their borders.
However, national political will is not static. Developing confidence in effective and legitimate institutional arrangements through which peacekeeping forces can be deployed and controlled could be a major step in building and shaping the requisite national political will to employ those forces when they are needed. This may be the most important contribution that NATO and the Partnership for Peace can make. By providing access to NATO's proven effective institutional command arrangements, while at the same time developing habits of cooperation and confidence among Partner states in the use of those arrangements through PFP, it may be possible to foster the emergence of the political conditions necessary for more effective peacekeeping throughout the entire trans-Atlantic and broader European region. This is not a short- term solution, but rather a long-term process. As the Harmel Report on The Future Tasks of the Alliance noted over a quarter of a century ago, it is one of the enduring functions of the Alliance to "pursue the search for progress toward a more stable relationship in which the underlying political issues can be solved."[footnote #45] This remains the goal reflected in both NATO and the Partnership for Peace today.
The Alliance has come a long way since its inception, when Lord Ismay is reported to have made his now infamous statement of NATO's three purposes: "Keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." But it is important not to lose sight of the broader truths behind this "politically incorrect" shorthand. NATO's mission is not just keeping the Russians out, but preventing the domination of Europe by any hostile hegemon. That can be accomplished, as it was for 40 years, by a hostile standoff, or, as it must be in the future, by concerted efforts to bring our former adversaries more closely into the fold of Western democracies through programs such as NACC and PFP. NATO must provide a valid rationale for America wanting to be kept in, through a workable program of equitably shared roles, risks and responsibilities without wasteful duplication or competition. The CJTF has the potential to advance this concept, if the Alliance can find a way to implement it. And NATO must be prepared to extend the benefits of participation in the integrated military structure to all of Europe, as it once did for Germany, not to "keep the Germans down," but to ensure that, as a result of a sense of real collective defense which only the integrated military structure of NATO provides, no member of the Alliance need ever arm itself to the point where it is more of a threat than an ally to its neighbors. If NATO can continue to fulfill these basic purposes, then its members need not worry about what's going to happen to them "without the Barbarians."