Wykład Radosława Sikorskiego w Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

Minister Radosław Sikorski wziął udział w szczycie NATO odbywającym się w Chicago w dniach 20-21 maja br.W trakcie szczytu minister Radosław Sikorski uczestniczył w spotkaniu z przedstawicielami państw, które aspirują do członkostwa w NATO, a są to Bośnia i Hercegowina, Czarnogóra, Macedonia i Gruzja. Minister wygłosił także wykład “NATO after Afghanistan – the View from Europe” w prestiżowym Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Poniżej publikujemy tekst wystąpienia w języku angielskim:

NATO after Afghanistan – the View from Europe
Chicago Council on Global Affairs, 20 May 2012

It is always a pleasure to be back here in Chicago. This is a city that thinks big. Looks outwards. Loves to innovate.

Back in 1893 Chicago hosted a huge World Fair, to commemorate the arrival in the New World of Christopher Columbus 400 years earlier. George Washington Gale Ferris Jr rose to the occasion. He built the world’s first tall revolving wheel, allowing people to rise high in the air and enjoy the sights. Ferris Wheels are named after him – the world’s largest wheel, fully twice the height of that first remarkable one in Chicago, is in Singapore.

Now, you are probably thinking that NATO Summits are just like Ferris Wheels. Imposing and impressive, but taking a long time to go round in a circle and end up where you started.

This was the view of former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau:

“I bear solemn witness to the fact that NATO heads of state and government meet only to go through the tedious motions of reading speeches drafted by others, with the principal objective of not rocking the boat.”

He had a point. There is lots of ceremony and choreography involved when 28 world leaders gather together. Much of the real work has been done in advance.

Which is good. Do you really want to see a large group of leaders drafting documents and improvising with far-reaching security and military policies? No, you don’t.

The funny thing about NATO is that people keep writing it off. One scholar, Wallace Thies, calls this “Alliance crisis syndrome.”

NATO is proclaimed to be dysfunctional, irrelevant, misfocussed, anachronistic. Even dead!

“NATO died in Afghanistan…. NATO, as a military alliance, is dead”

That’s what Charles Krauthammer wrote in The Washington Post, back in 2002.

Organisations can indeed become irrelevant and wither and die. Or, much worse, they can become irrelevant, but selfishly don’t wither and die. They instead linger on, wasting time and money, getting in the way of newer, better arrangements.

Since Krauthammer said NATO’s last rites, nine countries have joined NATO, bringing the total membership to 28. NATO has taken on thirteen new missions.

I don’t need to remind this audience of the history of NATO. How US soldiers crossed the world to scale the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc and fight and die to rescue Europe from its own tyranny. How George Marshall’s five-billion dollar “Europe Recovery Program” prompted West Europeans to work together to rebuild their shattered continent.

For US President Harry Truman, the Marshall Plan and NATO were “two halves of the same walnut”. In 1949 US officials pointed to Article 2 of the Washington Treaty to portray NATO as more than a classic military alliance – a new form of security community.

With NATO’s robust security insurance policy in place, Western Europe got on with the rebuilding peace and prosperity without worrying incessantly about Soviet military ambitions.

This generous but shrewd US strategic thinking set up the greatest motor of growth and progress in world history.

And it was a beacon of liberty for us in the enslaved East. Poland’s joining in 1999 was our coming home.

Our shared trans-Atlantic trading and security area now has 800 million people who accounting for half the world’s GDP, a third of world trade, more than €2 trillion in two-way investments.

We can and should build on this achievement. The Transatlantic Economic Council looks to negotiate by 2014 a free-trade agreement between Europe and America to boost growth and create jobs.

So far so clear.

Let’s look at the not-so-clear, and not-so-easy. Starting in Afghanistan. The NATO operation in Afghanistan has been NATO’s longest, biggest, and costliest in manpower and treasure.

At the last NATO summit in Lisbon, we agreed to complete the process of transition in Afghanistan by 2014. It makes sense to shift training into higher gear, and to support Afghan security, rather than continue to pour far greater resources into our own military missions.

Just consider the current price tag just for US operations – $10 billion a month. Financing 240,000 Afghan National Security Force personnel could be some $4 billion per annum.

We are on schedule, scaling down operations in Afghanistan. The security situation in Afghanistan is improving. More than 50% of Afghan people live in provinces under the control of the Afghan National Security Forces.

Two years from now, the withdrawal of the operational components of our troops will conclude. A new focus on training and mentoring will have begun.

It’s a tough problem. A lot is at stake. We don’t want to see Afghanistan slump back into oppression and chaos. NATO has signed the Declaration on an Enduring Partnership with the Afghan government; similar agreements have been concluded by the United States and European Union.

We have been helping stimulate regional security cooperation or at least regional security dialogue, to help ensure that Afghanistan does not become a security black hole, dragging other countries into its problems.

Let’s be honest. Afghanistan exemplifies a profound problem for NATO and for all countries looking seriously at global defence problems.

These days threats and hostile weapons are small, elusive, maybe literally invisible. Why should an enemy of this country strive to blow up a military base here in Illinois, when remote
hacking can disrupt its operations or create huge breakdown in nearby civilian infrastructure to immobilise it no less effectively?

This works both ways. Why send heavy NATO forces into remote areas of Afghanistan to fight terrorists and extremists plotting against us, when remote-controlled military drones can do a ruthless job attacking them as if from a clear sky?

Here in Chicago back in 1999 British Prime Minister Tony Blair put it starkly:

“The most pressing foreign policy problem we face is to identify the circumstances in which we should get actively involved in other people’s conflicts.”

We are not really closer to answering that question on the level of principle.

Libya? Yes. Syria? No.

What exactly are we defending these days, and against whom? Our physical territory and our people? Of course. On the borders of NATO, we insist on this. But what of the vital global IT and other networks that make modern life possible in our territory?

In an interconnected world, an attack on one nation’s networks can be an attack on all.

This is what Hillary Clinton said in 2010, in the context of online censorship by China and some other states. Her words also apply to defence.

If countries want the benefit of sharing those networks, don’t they have to shoulder a fair part of the responsibility to protect them? And what if they don’t, or can’t, or won’t defend them against attacks from within their own borders?

Whether we like it or not, long established doctrines of ‘national and collective defence’ have to change. New technology creates new possibilities for highly focused military action – and completely new moral and legal questions.

Precisely because modern weapons such as UAVs are so precise, some people assert that using them starts to look less like military action, and more like selective assassination. Good. We should tilt the economy of the battlefield to our advantage. That debate is already joined. NATO leads the way in formulating the legal and moral questions – and answering them.

This must mean looking at defence differently, and doing defence differently.

We have had the Prague Capabilities Commitments and the “Norfolk Agenda”. Yet military rationalisation has been halting.

The financial crisis now compels a change of pace. This issue is high on the summit agenda.

The NATO Secretary General urges us to move towards “smart defence”, above all for procurement. Bigger bangs – or maybe smaller but highly focused bangs – for scarcer bucks. Improved joint planning; setting acquisition priorities; coordinating efforts better.

European NATO members heard loud and clear US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates last year when he gave European allies a stern warning to pull their weight, lest American leaders tire of underwriting Europe’s security.

The European Union is looking at a new “pooling and sharing” approach to generating capabilities. Some countries find this is hard to accept – what about sovereignty?

The answer to that is that you have only what you can pay for. When times are hard it makes sense to share. For most countries in defence terms this means strengthening niche specializations, or investing in military systems where they enjoy a comparative advantage.

Through other NATO initiatives such as the Ballistic Missile Defence or the Alliance Ground Surveillance System, we are demonstrating resolve to do things better. NATO institutional infrastructure is being streamlined, reducing Commands from 11 to 6, and consolidating NATO agencies down from 14 to 3. This makes important savings in manpower.

All of which is fine, as far as it goes. But is it not a bit parochial? Americans see decades of peace in Europe. They ask themselves why the United States should not look away – and
move away – from European security and focus instead on the growing economic and military challenges that arise in Asia.

Just before his untimely death last year, our good friend and former Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Ronald Asmus gave a warning:

“We’re all focused on problems beyond Europe – Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, the Middle East. But I think you’re starting to see the first cracks and fissures in the foundation of European security and stability.”

Ronald understood the big picture. His family had come to the United States from Germany after WW2. He feared a weakening of the rules of the game in European security: the EU and NATO pulling back from further enlargement, as wider geopolitical competition crowded out long-standing cooperative security. You might think that he was right, given the continuing problems in the Eurozone.

This is my key point today: United States investment in European security continues to make sense. Retreating from trans-Atlantic economic integration supported by close military cooperation in NATO would risk undoing the civilisational gains we have achieved by working together since WW2. Europe still has more than its fair share of unfinished security business arising from the Cold War.

Last week my friend the Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Store and I wrote a joint letter to the New York Times. We pointed out that two decades after the Cold War ended, thousands of tactical nuclear weapons remain in Europe outside any arms control regimes, with no any credible system of accounting for these weapons.
Separately disagreements continue over conventional force levels in Europe, above all Russia’s suspension of compliance of the Treaty on the Conventional Forces in Europe.

These developments remind us that much of Europe – primarily the countries which emerged from the former Soviet Block – still does not enjoy the security that other European states within NATO enjoy.

The open door policy of the Alliance is not at the fore of NATO discussion today. But let’s not give any impression that we have forgotten our agreement from the Bucharest summit to help Ukraine and Georgia move towards NATO membership.

In all this NATO’s core Article V capabilities need to stay sharp. This means a robust exercises policy, exercises with troops not just staff officers and their maps. Stronger contingency planning, and pooling of allied intelligence. This is the heart of the “Connected Forces Initiative”, buttressing interoperability and complementing “Smart Defence”. I want to thank President Obama that we should have those plans. But it took ten years to start planning.

We also need to show discipline in not selling advanced military systems to countries that do not regard NATO as a friend.

In many policy areas the key to keeping European security in good shape means engaging creatively but honestly with Russia. Issues around missile defence and the possibility of other former Soviet republics joining NATO have been rumbling on for a long time now.

Protection against ballistic missiles is part of our collective defence and cannot be outsourced to a third-party.

There are positive developments. Russia has provided invaluable logistical support for ISAF. I do not know where we would be without Russia’s help in this. Last year for the first time a Russian submarine participated in a NATO exercise. Russia has participated in a joint counterterrorism exercise – Vigilante Skies – involving fighter aircraft. This year, we held a pioneering theatre missile defence exercise, exemplifying our willingness to work with Russia on missile defence. It is worth pursuing constructive ideas such as setting up a joint data centre. But the Lisbon declaration does not mean laying the groundwork for a joint NATO-Russia system.

Russia can swiftly deploy modern anti-aircraft S-400 and Iskander missile systems right on the very borders of the Alliance. Having military capacity does not mean a readiness to use it. Yet every two months or so Russia publicly announces plans for new military deployments in Europe. This is not exactly helpful.

Poland wants NATO to work closely with Russia on how to revive a comprehensive arms control regime in Europe, fostering transparency, openness and predictability. The NATO-Russia Council should engage on those difficult areas where we disagree.

To sum up.

The NATO family represents the world’s foremost force for stability, pluralism and creative democratic energy.

Twenty years after the fall of the evil empire, rival models are again available. Countries t draw on Western innovation to deliver economic success, without much if any democracy. A new form of global ideological competition unfolds.

NATO gives the world a unique political example – and sets a unique moral example.

Poland’s own recent history shows how NATO membership has helped remove legacy communist structures and instincts from any serious role in public life. The contrast with the dismal situation in our neighbour Belarus and in some other parts of the former Soviet Union and beyond is as striking as it is depressing.

At this time of new ideological competition and economic uncertainty, the need for democracies to stand firm – and stand together – on their core values and principles is not declining. It is increasing.

That is one of the main messages this Summit here in Chicago needs to deliver.