It was, as Tony Blair has recently reminded us, a Labour government that signed the North Atlantic Treaty exactly 50 years ago next week. For four decades the organisation that grew out of that signature prepared for a war that never came. And when the Berlin Wall came down, Nato was written off by some as a cold war irrelevance. But in the past four years the organisation has seen more action than in all its previous history: launching its first offensive operations, its first active military deployments and now its first bombing of a sovereign state. And Kosovo is not a one-off; Kosovo is just the beginning.
At an anniversary bash in Washington next month Nato’s 16 established members, three new Eastern European entrants and 25 “partners for peace” will enjoy a long weekend of dinners, celebratory speeches and congratulations. They’ll also approve a new “strategic concept” for the alliance, with a remit to intervene militarily across Europe and Asia in defence of common transatlantic interests, often without UN approval. That’s not hyperbole. Madeleine Albright, the US secretary of state, warned Nato’s governing body last December: “The threats we face today come from a number of different sources, including from areas beyond Nato’s immediate borders . . . Nato must be better equipped to respond to [non-self-defence] crises . . . it is sometimes better to deal with instability when it is still at arm’s length.”
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