For the Congress of Istanbul by Brian Beedham
That was the easy part. The enlargement of NATO is about to proceed, with none of the gruesome consequences the pessimists had predicted. The Russians do not seem to be mortally offended, and with a guest-room in the NATO barracks from which they can observe what the alliance is up to they should be able to see why they have nothing to fear, provided Russia stays a friendly Russia. The scheduled recruitment of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic is not going to draw another dividing-line across the map of Europe, because the door remains open to further new members, and maybe not only European ones. The cost of expansion will not be prohibitive (though the current estimates are admittedly much too bland, and the Europeans in particular will have to spend more on defence if they are to preserve any sort of technological spit-and-polish). So far, so surprisingly good. Now the advocates of NATO enlargement must recognise that this is only the first step of a march into unknown territory. "Enlargement'', in fact, was always an inadequate word to describe what needs to be done with the Atlantic alliance. What is at issue is not how many countries belong to the alliance but why they want to belong to it–what sort of military problems they think they may have to face together in the future, and what provides the basis for that togetherness. We should from the start have understood that we were talking not about the alliance's size but about a redefinition of its purpose: in short, its reformation.
If the reformation goes well, the consequences will be very large indeed. The new alliance's work will for the most part be done outside Europe, because no major challenge to the peace is likely to come from inside Europe (fingers still crossed about Russia). Since NATO will therefore no longer be basically a protective American arm around Europe's shoulder, the relationship between the two parts of the alliance will have to grow more equal.
The United States will be entitled to ask for European help in operations outside Europe, in return for its continuing support of Europe's own security. The two sides of the Atlantic will need to work out where their interests coincide not only in Europe but in other parts of the world as well; and to protect those shared interests they will have to devise a much more sophisticated decision-making machinery than the simple here-come-the-Russians test of cold-war days. All this is complicated stuff. The benefit to be won is huge–a global partnership of the democracies–but it will be hard work getting there .
If the reformation does not take place, on the other hand, the price will also be large. An unreformed alliance is unlikely to survive, because in the absence of the old Soviet threat and with no new ideas about the future the alliance's members will not see why it needs to exist and why they want to be part of it. Europe and America may thus come apart. If they do, they will not merely have lost the chance to create in the 21st century the permanent partnership that kept on eluding them in the 20th century. They will, separately, be much more vulnerable to the dangers they are likely to face in the new century than they would have been if they had held together.
Some people still say that these future dangers are too misty to be clearly defined, and that in any case they will probably be smaller and easier to control than the dangers of the cold war. Neither of these things is true. Three different changes in the pattern of global power could take shape over the next 20 or 30 years, any one of which might be as big a challenge to the principles and interests of the Atlantic democracies as the Soviet challenge used to be. The three possible developments are (a) the rise of another hostile superpower; (b) a period of technological and economic semi-anarchy; or (c), perhaps the likeliest of the three, a confused and multi-sided contest for influence over the chief no-man's-land of the post-cold-war world, the energy-rich area of central and south-western Asia that stretches from Arabia to Kazakhstan's border with China; call this third possibility the Great Game, Round Two.
Scenario I. Another hostile superpower.
A superpower is among other things a state (or a group of states, if they have got their foreign policies properly tied together) rich enough to be able to deploy large amounts of armed power well beyond its own borders. The only current superpower is NATO, when Americans and Europeans choose to act together, or the United States by itself when they do not. It is hard to believe that this monopoly will last for very long; but the number of places capable of breaking the monopoly is not large.
Pretty certainly, neither Africa nor Latin America is going to produce a superpower in the next two or three decades–Africa because it will still be too poor, and Latin America because of its geopolitical isolation. The Muslim world, for all the panic a few years ago about an "Islamic threat'', remains resolutely disorganised. A Hindu-governed India could prove to be a scratchy neighbour, but its foreign-policy ambitions are unlikely to reach beyond its own immediate surroundings. The only serious candidates for entry to superpower rank in the next third of a century are a revived Russia, a newly self-confident China and, just conceivably, an isolated and therefore neurotic Japan.
Of the three, Russia is at the top of most people's list; but in fact the odds are sharply against Russia once again becoming a major problem for the Atlantic democracies. To begin with, it is going to take much longer than most people had expected for Russia to rebuild the sort of armed forces a superpower needs. Its economy is still in ruins, and after President Yeltsin's latest fumblings with the Russian government it seems even less likely that its politicians will soon be able to put the economy right. During the prolonged period of confusion and incompetence that lies ahead Russia will remain (a) in need of good relations with the West, because it wants western economic help, and (b) militarily feeble. And then, by the time Russia's economy does eventually revive, its foreign policy is liable to be dominated by the rise of a new Chinese power on its long and vulnerable eastern border; in which case it will probably once again be looking for western co-operation, this time of the diplomatic and even military sort. Such a Russia will see the point of keeping its foreign policy more or less in step with the West's.
This will cease to be true only if "the West'' ceases to exist–if NATO breaks up, and a weakened Europe is separated from an increasingly inward-looking America. The Russians, no longer able to look for assistance to either part of this now-dead NATO, may then decide that they have no option but to expand their own military power until they are strong enough to be able to deal with China on their own. Such a Russia would of course be an unpleasant neighbour for a Europe newly detached from America. But, if China's power does grow, these may be the only circumstances in which Russia will return to being the problem it was between 1947 and 1989; otherwise, it should be an easier place for Europe and America to live with.
It is just as hard, though for different reasons, to imagine Japan becoming a military superpower. The difficulty for Japan is not lack of resources, or of competent government; it is the country's almost unique geographical vulnerability. This is a collection of small islands, most of whose people live on one narrow stretch of coastline no farther from China than Warsaw is from Russia, or Istanbul from Hungary. To be safe from the sort of military power China may possess in a dozen years from now, a Japan without a big ally would need both a navy as dominant as Britain's was in 1940 and a rock-sure anti-missile defence.
This is why Japan wants to hold on to the protection of its alliance with America; but the Americans, in return, want Japan to limit its military strength, because America's other Asian friends do not like the idea of an over-muscular Japan. This arrangement will probably last so long as America is willing to go on protecting Japan. If America withdraws from the western Pacific, on the other hand, China will have its own reason for keeping Japan relatively weak: China itself wants to be the dominant power of the area. It is just about conceivable that a Japan abandoned by America might choose to defy China; but it is far likelier that it will try to persuade China to let it keep its political and economic independence in return for accepting China as the region's one military giant.
That leaves China itself: a very different proposition. It is true that China's rise to superpower rank will not be as swift and as smooth as some had expected. Its extraordinary economic growth over the past couple of decades will not last for ever. This year's brave decision by China's new prime minister to demolish much of the economy's hopelessly inefficient state sector will have an economic price, if the millions suddenly made unemployed are to be given help while they wait for the private sector to provide them with new jobs. It could also have a political price, if it produces a reaction that weakens the government's authority. The rise of China will temporarily falter. But it will then almost certainly be resumed, for this is a country with great strengths. It has a huge labour force of assiduous workers who seem capable of mastering modern methods of production, and who can therefore draw in large amounts of investment from abroad. It appears to have a rare social cohesion, since more than nine-tenths of its population belongs to the same ethnic group. Its present Communist rulers probably exaggerate the importance of "Chinese values'', but the Chinese do seem to combine a more vigorous individualism than, say, the Japanese with a lot more self-discipline than, for example, the Russians. And history has given this potentially efficient and dynamic people a powerful motive for realising their potential. A country which once complacently regarded itself as the centre of the world, but then experienced a century and a half of humiliation at the hands of foreigners, now has its chance to reassert itself.
These are all reasons why China must be taken seriously. Now add the fact that China faces a wider range of foreign-policy challenges than perhaps any other country of its size in the world. To its east, it lays claim to Taiwan; it is in dispute with several countries about various small islands; and it clearly wants to assert its interest in supervising the sea-lanes of the western Pacific. To its north, there is the brooding memory of China's long quarrel with Russia over the ownership of large areas of Siberia; the border betweeen the two countries is now formally agreed upon, with one small exception, but the old animosities have by no means been laid to rest. And to China's west is perhaps the biggest temptation of all: the energy-rich region of ex-Soviet central Asia, which is bound to fascinate a rapidly growing but energy-poor economy like China's. This is a potent combination. Means, motive, opportunity: between them, they virtually guarantee that China is an emerging great power.
Scenario II. A time of anarchy.
At the opposite end of the spectrum from the rise of a new superpower is the argument that all international power, as geopoliticians use the word, may be about to disintegrate. This sounds implausible, at a time when most people worry more about over-concentration of power; but the idea has some serious supporters, and needs to be listened to. The claim that the accepted instruments of international power may be crumbling in their owners' hands consists of three propositions: (a) that it is no longer possible to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; (b) that the computers essential for so much of modern warfare are vulnerable to electronic counter-attack, and countries which depend on them are therefore about to lose their assumed military advantage; and (c), more generally, that the old authority of the nation-state is steadily being undermined by economic globalisation, with the result that governments are much feebler creatures than they used to be.
The proliferation fear is the strongest part of the argument. Only a few years ago we were congratulating ourselves that nuclear proliferation in South Africa and Latin America had been prevented. Now, the five official nuclear powers, and unofficial Israel, have almost certainly been joined by North Korea, with at any rate a couple of nuclear devices, and India, Pakistan and maybe Iran are probably lining up outside the door.
Worse, the blurry outcome of the recent confrontation with Saddam Hussein has left it unclear whether Iraq can be prevented from making chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. If Saddam cannot be stopped from doing this, no other secretive dictator can be; chemical weapons, and probably biological ones too, are easier to make than the nuclear sort. There is no shortage of ways of delivering these weapons to their targets, by missile or by innocent-looking merchant ship or by humdrum suitcase. All in all, it is not impossible that one part of the post-1945 definition of "great power''–possession of the means of wholesale extinction–will soon become so widely available that the five or six current nuclear club-wielders will have no real advantage over anybody else.
The saboteur-in-the-computer worry is a good deal mistier. It is true that some clever electronic burglars have broken into various computer systems, including military ones. The commission set up by President Clinton to inspect the electronic infrastructure of America's defences thinks there is genuine cause for concern about this; after all, computers are the basis of the "military revolution'' through which technologically-rich countries hope to be able to fight future wars with a minimum of human casualties. Even so, it seems hard to believe that the original makers of the military revolution, who continue to command vast amounts of research money and the world's most sophisticated information industries, will not find a way of guarding the heart of their war-making systems. Here is one field, surely, where defence can still beat off attack. The emasculation-by-globalisation idea is even more exaggerated. Of course, compared with 50 years ago, international trade has greatly expanded, and a much larger part of the world's economic activity takes place outside the control of governments (by and large with the cheerful consent of those governments, because they have realised that everybody gets richer this way). There has also been a vast increase in the ability of people in all parts of the world to communicate with each other without their governments knowing what they are saying. These are big changes. But they do not add up to a new world in which states, and the governments which run them, have ceased to be the chief movers of events. For one thing, economics is still not as "globalised'' as the enthusiasts had thought: look at the East Asian crisis, and the relatively limited effect it has so far had on other parts of the world. More important, economic power is still only one form of power, and not always the most potent. So long as the other ingredients of power–above all, the military sort–are chiefly wielded by states, and not by individuals or private groups, the feared era of techno-economic anarchy will not have arrived.
Anyway, for those of us looking at the future of the Atlantic relationship, the lesson is the same as it is when we contemplate the probable emergence of a Chinese superpower. Yes, to a modest extent all of our governments are somewhat less powerful than they used to be in their handling of events around the world. That strengthens the case for Europe and America to preserve their alliance. We can handle things far better together than we can separately.
Scenario III. The Great Game, Round Two.
But perhaps the main item on the agenda of the new NATO in the next 30 years is neither a grappling with neo-anarchy nor a head-on confrontation with China. It may be an old-fashioned tussle between a number of strong countries each of which wants to make sure that it has the last word about what happens in a stretch of the globe that is of economic or political interest to them all. As it happens, the end of the cold war has created a perfect example of the sort of region where such an old-fashioned contest of wills can take place. The collapse of the Soviet Union has turned a large part of central Asia into a collection of nominally independent states which have large amounts of oil and gas, very few people, and distinctly fragile governments. They sit next door to the equally worrying–oil-rich, politics-poor–group of countries around the Persian Gulf. Their other chief neighbours are Russia and China. Their oil and gas are of obvious interest to Europe and America. Here is a classic power-vacuum. It is also where part of that earlier Great Game took place; Rudyard Kipling must be rubbing his hands.
The central Asian countries may never be a match for the Gulf states as a source of energy, but as new oil and gas fields go on being discovered inside them it is entirely possible that central Asia will eventually produce as much oil as Saudi Arabia produces now, and quite a bit more than the North Sea does, plus very large amounts of natural gas. These countries will need little of this for themselves. A world whose total demand for energy is expected to rise by a third or more in the next dozen years, and is increasingly unhappy about its present degree of dependence on the Gulf, therefore finds central Asia fascinating.
In particular, China is delighted that this next-door region may help it to cope with the rapidly widening gap between its neo-capitalist economy's soaring demand for energy and its own very modest supplies of the stuff. Europe, though farther away, is just as interested. America depends less on imported energy than Europe does, but it will have a large hand in building the pipelines that will carry the oil and gas out of central Asia. Russia is in principle self-sufficient in energy, but it has a keen interest of a different sort in these countries: it does not want to see what used to be part of the Soviet Union disappearing into somebody else's sphere of influence, and to that end it will try to make sure that at least some of the pipelines which export central Asia's energy will run through Russian territory. The pipeline-route question has already brought the first flexing of muscles. There are four chief possibilities, plus an outlandish fifth. All involve a fine calculation of economic and political advantage and disadvantage.
There is the Russian route; but almost everybody else involved wants to prevent Russia getting the leverage that comes from pipeline-control, and a route via Russia will anyway be pretty expensive if it has to go around the Black Sea and the traffic-jammed Bosphorus. There is China–an agreement in principle has already been signed for a pipeline from Kazakhstan into China–but this route is long, mountainous and costly (and, if the Chinese themselves do not consume all the oil, they too will have pipeline-leverage over the countries that want the rest of it). There is the even more outlandish idea of a pipeline through Afghanistan to Pakistan and the sea; but that makes no sense until the Afghans end their civil war.
In straight economic terms, the best way is the short cut through Iran to the Gulf ports; but that will be reliable only if Iran's new President Khatami and his fellow-moderates overcome the religious conservatives who detest any connection with the western world. The strongest political argument is for a pipeline through Turkey to the Mediterranean; but this too is long and expensive, and anyway such a pipeline would first have to pass through the turbulent Caucasus. No ideal solution here, either.
The battle of the pipelines has begun. It will be fought chiefly with money and political pressure, though rougher instruments may sometimes get used. And, when the successful pipelines are at last in place, the winners of the battle will still have to keep a close eye on the region to make sure its politicians do not succumb to the blandishments–and threats–they will get from the countries which did not get the pipelines. This many-sided tug-of-war over central Asia will be a long, complicated business.
And remember that central Asia sits next door to the familiar instabilities of the Gulf. Remember, too, that the people living in these two regions–the stretch of land that reaches from the Red Sea to the Chinese border–are almost all Muslims; things will get even more complicated if the ideas of the Islamist revolutionaries spread outside the relatively few places where they have so far put down root. This part of the world could well be the Atlantic democracies' chief headache in the next couple of decades. That is one reason why, as we meet in Istanbul, we should recognise the new importance of Turkey. The Turks stand today where the Germans stood during the cold war. Turkey is now the big front-line country, looking out into the territory from which trouble may be coming. The Atlantic democracies need a self-confidently democratic Turkey to help them deal with the problem. And the general conclusions? First, the geopolitical landscape of the next 20 or 30 years is not so fog-shrouded that we cannot see roughly where we are heading. The Atlantic democracies will face, in rising order of probability, a challenge to their present degree of military superiority; the growth of a powerful China whose foreign policy will reach much farther into the world than that of today's China; and, partly because of that, a prolonged and dangerous multi-power contest for influence over a large segment of Asia. Second, these things are of equal concern to Europeans and Americans; they will not always agree on what is happening, and what should be done about it, but they quite often will. Third, it therefore makes sense to convert the temporary alliances which in the 20th century enabled the democracies to defeat first fascism and then communism into a permanent combination for meeting the challenges of the 21st century. Once upon a time, states would mobilise an army to fight a war, and disband it when the war was over. They then learned the merits of a standing army. We need a standing alliance.
