Atlantic Council

From Ronald Asmus, the German Marshall Fund:  Earlier this week, a Group of Experts appointed by NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and headed by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright presented their report on what a new alliance strategic concept should look like to the North Atlantic Council in Brussels. The group had been tasked to lay the groundwork for a new strategic doctrine at a time when the alliance appears more divided and fragile than at any time in recent memory. ...

While the report covers much ground and offers a wide spectrum of new proposals and analysis, its key focus is on offering compromise formulas to bridge the gap on three key divisions in alliance ranks.

Russia is the first of these. ...

[T]he Group of Experts calls for a strategy that today would couple strategic reassurance for Central and Eastern Europe with a policy of reengagement with Moscow. That means finally making good on an early unfulfilled promise to new member states, and taking prudent military steps to reassure them, like contingency planning, exercises, and defense infrastructure–in the hope that this will allow the alliance to generate a more solid consensus for engaging Moscow as well. ...

The second area where the report identifies new ground for an alliance compromise is the balance between home and away missions. ...

The message is clear: expeditionary missions are part of NATO’s future but they will be undertaken very selectively and only when NATO feels it has both the support and the resources to succeed. ...

Finally, the experts’ report calls on NATO to upgrade the alliance’s partnerships with non-member countries and declares these relationships to be a core task in the next strategic concept.

Ronald Asmus is Executive Director of the German Marshall Fund’s Transatlantic Center in Brussels and also served as an informal advisor to the Group of Experts.  (photo: NATO)