NATO and the broader Middle East, 1949–2007: The history and lessons of controversial encounters

Abstract

The engagement of the Atlantic Alliance in the Middle East dates back to the founding of the Alliance. With one eye on this history and one eye on current controversies, this article investigates the preconditions for and nature of the allies' engagement in the region in order to assess whether the Middle East today is causing a rupture within the Alliance. The article finds that the Alliance was never likely to engage as one in the region. The Alliance instead guarded its cohesion by either letting the Alliance leader, the United States, take a lead role or by acting as a coalition enabling framework. This latter option has prevailed since the early 1980s. Today, NATO can preserve its cohesion and simultaneously engage in the region if it continues this legacy of coalition-making from within the allied framework. Conversely, an effort to engage collectively in the region will likely set of internal tensions to the extent that the Alliance itself will be at risk.

Key words:

• NATO
• the Middle East
• Alliance Politics
• Intervention

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful for the comments provided by participants in the panel ‘A New NATO? Alliances and Change in World Politics’, International Studies Association, San Diego, 22–25 March 2006, as well as the reviewers of the journal. The author is grateful also to Camilla Schmidt for research assistance.

Notes

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⁹Donald J. Puchala, ‘The Atlantic Community in the Age of International Terrorism’, Journal of Transatlantic Studies 3/1 (Spring 2005), 89–104.

¹⁰Stanley Sloan, NATO, the European Union, and the Atlantic Community: The Transatlantic Bargain Reconsidered (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield 2003), 3–4.

¹¹Adda B. Bozeman, Politics and Culture in International History (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers 1994); Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster 1998).

¹⁴Henry Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812–1822 (London: Phoenix Press 2000), 1.

¹²See Henry A. Kissinger and Lawrence H. Summers, Renewing the Atlantic Partnership: Report of an Independent Task Force Sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations (New York: Council on Foreign Relations 2004); David P. Calleo, ‘The Broken West’, Survival 46/3 (Autumn 2004), 29–38; Sten Rynning, NATO Renewed: The Power and Purpose of Transatlantic Cooperation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2005).

¹³Robert E. Osgood, NATO: The Entangling Alliance (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press 1962), 7; also John S. Duffield, Power Rules: The Evolution of NATO's Conventional Force Posture (Stanford: Stanford UP 1995), 10.

¹⁵Timothy Smith, ‘U.S. Security and Italy: The Extensions of NATO to the Mediterranean, 1945–49’, in Lawrence S. Kaplan, Robert W. Clawson and Raimondo Luraghi (eds.), NATO and the Mediterranean (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources 1985), 137–56.

¹⁶Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation (New York: Norton 1987), 279; Lawrence S. Kaplan and Robert W. Clawson, ‘NATO and the Mediterranean Powers in Historical Perspective,’ in Kaplan, Clawson and Luraghi (eds.) NATO and the Mediterranean, 31.

¹⁷Peter L. Hahn, The United States, Great Britain, and Egypt, 1945–1956: Strategy and Diplomacy in the Early Cold War (London: Univ. of North Carolina Press 1991), 88–89; also Peter L. Hahn, ‘Containment and Egyptian Nationalism: The Unsuccessful Effort to Establish the Middle Eastern Command’, Diplomatic History 11/1 (Winter 1987), 23–40.

¹⁸Dean Acheson, despite being intimately involved in the making of the tripartite declaration, later wrote that the origins of this in principle far-reaching declaration are ‘not easy to explain’. Present at the Creation, 396. However, one observer notes that US support for the tripartite declaration (which included Israel) emerged from domestic US support for Israel – see Hahn, The United States, Great Britain, and Egypt, 1945–1956, 100. This support did not square with the US policy of avoiding military commitments in the region, which may account for Acheson's poor memory on the issue.

¹⁹See Roger Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East 1945–1951 (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1984), 583ff.

²⁰Hahn, The United States, Great Britain, and Egypt, 1945–1956, 115.

²¹Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East 1945–1951, 601–2.

²²Frode Liland, Keeping NATO out of Trouble: NATO's non-policy on out-of-area issues during the Cold War (Oslo: Institutt for Forsvarsstudier 1999), 56–7.

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²⁴Hahn, The United States, Great Britain, and Egypt, 1945–1956, 133.

²⁵See Nigel John Ashton, ‘The Hijacking of a Pact: the Formation of the Baghdad Pact and Anglo-American tensions in the Middle East, 1955–1958’, Review of International Studies 19 (1993), 123–37; also Elizabeth D. Sherwood, Allies in Crisis: Meeting Global Challenges to Western Security (New Haven, CT: Yale UP 1990), 65.

²⁶Liland, Keeping NATO out of Trouble, 59.

²⁷Britain did gain NATO's Mediterranean Command but the commander ended up reporting to the American SACEUR. Britain, in a saving move, had proposed to have the command report to the Standing Group instead of the MEC, but this bypassing of SACEUR and appeal to political visibility failed.

²⁸Ashton, ‘The Hijacking of a Pact’, 136; also Geoffrey Warner, ‘The United States and the Suez Crisis’, International Affairs 67/2 (April 1991), 307.

²⁹Kaplan and Clawson, ‘NATO and the Mediterranean Powers in Historical Perspective’, in Kaplan, Clawson and Luraghi, NATO and the Mediterranean, 8.

³⁰NATO, ‘Final Communiqué,’ 11–14 Dec. 1956, <http://www.nato.int/docu/comm/49-95/c561214a.htm> (accessed 13 June 2006).

³¹See Thomas Risse-Kappen, ‘Collective Identity in a Democratic Community: The Case of NATO’, in Peter Katzenstein (ed.), The Culture of National Security (New York: Columbia UP 1996).

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³³Liland, Keeping NATO out of Trouble, 123.

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³⁵Charles A. Kupchan, The Persian Gulf and the West: The Dilemmas of Security (Boston: Allen & Unwin 1987), 29.

³⁶See Kupchan, The Persian Gulf and the West, 219–21; Charles A. Kupchan, ‘American Globalism in the Middle East: The Roots of Regional Security Policy’, Political Science Quarterly 103/4 (Winter 1988–89); Janice Gross Stein, ‘The Wrong Strategy in the Right Place: The United States in the Gulf”, International Security 13/3 (Winter 1988–89).

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³⁸Sherwood, Allies in Crisis, 138–42.

³⁹Charles A. Kupchan, ‘Regional Security and the Out-of-Area Problem’, in Stephen J. Flanagan and Fen Osler Hampson (eds.), Securing Europe's Future (London and Sydney: Croom Helm 1986), 284.

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⁴¹Charles A. Kupchan, ‘NATO and the Persian Gulf: Examining Intra-Alliance Behaviour’, International Organization 42/2 (Spring 1988), 319.

⁴²Sherwood, Allies in Crisis, 151.

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⁴⁵Kupchan, ‘Regional Security and the Out-of-Area Problem’, in Flanagan and Hampson, Securing Europe's Future, 288–89.

⁴⁶NATO, ‘Declaration of the Heads of State and Government’, 10 June 1982, available at <www.nato.int/docu/comm/49-95/c820610a.htm>, para. 5e (accessed 13 June 2006).

⁴⁷NATO, ‘Final Communiqué’, 9–10 Dec. 1982, <www.nato.int/docu/comm/49-95/c821209a.htm>, para. 17 (accessed 13 June 2006).

⁴⁸Sherwood, Allies in Crisis, 183.

⁴⁹Sean Kay, ‘Putting NATO Back Together Again’, Current History (March 2003), 108.

⁵⁰ European Security Strategy, Dec. 2003, 3–4, available at<www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cmsUpload/78367.pdf>.

⁵¹Alison J. K. Bailes, ‘The European Security Strategy: An Evolutionary History’, SIPRI Policy Paper No. 10, Feb. 2005.

⁵²NATO, ‘A more Ambitious and Expanded Framework for the Mediterranean Dialogue’, 28 June 2004, <www.nato.int/docu/comm/2004/06-istanbul/docu-meddial.htm>, para. 8 (accessed 13 May 2006). See also Chris Donnelly, ‘Building a NATO partnership for the Greater Middle East’, NATO Review (Spring 2004).

⁵³Roberto Menotti, ‘Democracy in the Middle East: Democratize but Stabilize’, Middle East Quarterly 13/3 (Summer 2006), 1–9.

⁵⁴Ivo Daalder, Nicole Gnesotto and Philip Gordon, ‘America, Europe, and the Crescent of Crisis’, in idem (eds.) Crescent of Crisis: U.S.-European Strategy for the Greater Middle East (Washington DC: Brookings 2006), 1.

⁵⁵See Kenneth M. Pollack, ‘A Common Approach to Iran’, in Daalder, Gnesotto and Gordon, Crescent of Crisis, 7–24; Bruno Tertrais, ‘The Iranian Nuclear Crisis’, in ibid., 25–40.

⁵⁶Eva Goes and Reinoud Leenders, ‘Promoting Democracy and Human Rights in Lebanon and Syria’, in Daalder, Gnesotto and Gordon, Crescent of Crisis, 99–100.

⁵⁷Renaud Girard, La guerre rate d'Israël contre le Hezbollah (Paris: Perrin 2006), 77–8. It turned out that Italy took the lead in deploying troops but France nonetheless contributes around 1,650 troops to the peacekeeping force (FINUL).

⁵⁸Girard, La guerre ratée, 11.

⁵⁹Edward Luttwak, ‘Two Alliances,’Wall Street Journal, 10 Jan. 2007.

⁶⁰Jim Hoagland, ‘Mid-Course Corrections’, Washington Post, 11 Dec. 2003; ‘To Hold and To Fold’, Washington Post, 22 July 2004.

⁶¹Hans Binnendijk, ‘Talking Security’, International Herald Tribune, 20 April 2005.