Blogging live from Day Three - and the close - of the Brussels Forum. In a few minutes, "NATO at 60," with Secretary General Japp de Hoop Scheffer providing opening remarks, will get under way.
NATO, of course, was already on the minds of panelists yesterday in the discussion on Afghanistan and the "Conversation With Russia" between the EU's Javier Solana (himself a former NATO Sec Gen) and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
Also happening yesterday, pacifist protesters staged "NATO Game Over," a quixotic attempt to scale the ramparts (well, chain link fence) of the organization's headquarters here in Brussels. It was an uneven match: horse-mounted police led the counterattack, and those protesters who resisted arrest were led away handcuffed. But it was a beautiful sunny day on the fields outside NATO, making for congenial press coverage conditions.
This photo of political graffiti ('We Come In Peace"), taken from a commuter train stop near NATO HQ, captures the mood of the peace movement here, which symbolically carried NATO off in a coffin yesterday, 60 being - in their view, shared in certain sectors of political Europe - the overextended life expectancy of an organization set up to defend the West during the Cold War.
But back to the Brussels Forum. Right now, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, looking more at NATO's future than its past accomplishments: "NATO has been a Transatlantic bargain," said Scheffer, "but was it viewed as a fair bargain on either side of the Atlantic?" Americans sometimes resented paying more than the Europeans, who in turn chafed at American interference. But it has held together for six decades. Now Scheffer says "the bargain needs to be extended" to such areas as energy and cyber security.
Operational realities - peace keeping, peace enforcement in Afghanistan - cannot be separated, are not even divisble "morally," said the Secretary General. Looking forward to the "big tent" Hague meeting, Scheffer stressed the need for coordinated action. "We need Russia, we need Iran" for regional stability in Afghanistan's neighborhood.
"Stabilize, secure, enable, and leave" - NATO's goals in Afghanistan, according to Canadian Defence Minister Peter MacKay, who joined Scheffer in a panel discussion, along with Polish FM Radoslaw Sikorski, and Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher, Chair of the House Armed Services Subcommitte on Strategic Forces and probable future State Department Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security, which, as moderator Jonathan Marcus of the BBC reminded the audience, was "the scary" John Bolton's old job.
Scheffer tried to justify NATO's branching out into esoteric areas like energy security (concern about the Arctic "high north" and free flows of oil) and cyber security (Russia's 2007 hacking of Estonia). To which Peter MacKay added concern over piracy on the high seas. There was general agreement on the need to modernize the organization to meet new security challenges, though moderator Marcus reminded the panel that many observers feel that NATO risks straying too far from its Article V core.
Given the world economic crisis and pressures on government budgets, will European members of NATO be able to expand defense spending? "This is a time to review priorities," said Sikorski, who said that Poland is "withdrawing from the 'easier' peacekeeping missions on the Golan Heights and in Chad to reinforce the Polish contingent in Afghanistan."
In the Q & A afterwards, the North American contingent of Tauscher and MacKay hedged somewhat on the notion of NATO as a cure-all for problems beyond collective security. That said, Tauscher said that emerging asymmetrical threats, especially in the cyber area, justified NATO focus. MacKay felt that while navigation in the melting Arctic is a legitimate question, NATO is not going to "do climate change." There are already other fora beyond NATO - NORAD and NAFTA in the North American context - for many of these issues. Neither addressed whether European-North American relations are adequately addressed in NATO fora and through what are essentially bilateral relations with the European Union.
Final discussion on the next NATO Sec Gen: MacKay has been spoken of as a potential replacement for Scheffer, but Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen has been touted as the front runner, and possibly the European and US favorite. MacKay sidestepped the question, but we were reminded by a questioner that Rasmussen - whose country became the focus for Muslim opprobrium after the publication of those infamous cartoons - may be opposed by Turkey, NATO's only Muslim member state and potentially a key player in a wider regional approach on Afghanistan.