AFP, NATO chief George Robertson called Monday on the transatlantic alliance and the European Union to set aside their divisions and adapt to new global security threats in the future.
“We really need a NATO-EU relationship that embraces the future and not the past,” Robertson told a conference of defence experts and military officials in Berlin, organised by the Welt am Sonntag newspaper.
He urged the two blocs, which have been in dispute both over the EU's military role and how it might overlap or conflict with that of NATO, to broaden their cooperation in areas where their work is complementary.
“NATO needs forces that are far more mobile and flexible than in the past,” said Robertson.
He placed particular emphasis on the ability to mobilise soldiers and send them to conflict areas like Afghanistan, saying that strategic lift transport aircraft and air-to-air refuelling planes were badly needed.
Robertson said that NATO members “must improve the usability of their armed forces” to allow for “deployment in far greater numbers.”
He also urged Alliance states to speed up political decision-making, sometimes held up in national parliaments, so that troops could be deployed more quickly and effectively in times of crisis.
Robertson, who will be replaced as head of the US-dominated 19-nation alliance by Dutch Foreign Minister Jaap de Hoop Scheffer on January 1, called on NATO and the EU to avoid pointless and unconstructive debates on how to react in the world's hotspots.
The NATO chief has been sharply critical of a Franco-German-led initiative for the European Union to create a military headquarters separate from NATO and warned against “duplication” again at a news conference with German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer.
The NATO-EU relationship could serve as a bridge “connecting the two sides of the Atlantic and the integrated Europe that I have always been a champion of,” Robertson said.
“But at the moment we've got an affair and not a marriage. We must move now into areas of deeper cooperation in order to make sure that we use the collective strengths to impose some degree of order where there is disorder in the world today.”
Robertson, who is in Germany as part of his international farewell tour, renewed his call for greater modernization of European and Canadian troops in the alliance and for them to assume a bigger share in NATO peacekeeping missions.
“We cannot have 1.5 million troops in uniform and a million in reserve and say you're overstretched when a total of 55,000 European and Canadian troops are deployed in the trouble spots of the Balkans and Afghanistan today,” he said.
“That is not acceptable to taxpayers and it is not acceptable to foreign ministers so we must connect ambition to military action.”
Despite the row over the EU military headquarters, Robertson singled out Germany for praise for its participation in stabilization efforts in the Balkans and particularly Afghanistan.
Fischer said the proposal for an HQ, which is also backed by Belgium and Luxembourg, would not lead to duplication and aimed in fact to boost the efficiency of European armed forces with greater cooperation.
Meanwhile German Defence Minister Peter Struck lashed out at Washington's “coalitions of the willing” policy as practiced in Iraq, in a rare criticism from a German cabinet minister since the recent thaw in transatlantic relations following Berlin's vocal opposition to the Iraq war.
Struck said that such alliances were “damaging” for NATO and asked whether the US-led war in Iraq complied with international law.
