Old Umbrella, New Umbrella : Is NATO the Organization of the Future?

Thursday’s summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization catches the leaders of its 16 member nations far short of agreement on where NATO goes from here.

Washington is committed to keeping NATO strong enough to justify an American presence in Europe during the years of change and perhaps upheaval that lie ahead. Fine, but beyond that, President Bush takes little with him to London except his increasingly legendary affability and, in effect, a new way of saying that NATO would use nuclear weapons only if all else failed.

Bush obviously hopes the nuclear language will ease Soviet apprehensions about NATO membership for a unified Germany and Europe’s skepticism about nuclear weapons of any kind now that the Warsaw Pact is falling apart. And it might.

But the Bush language does not really change NATO policy, so it won’t be enough to carry the day. The NATO conferees will be hungering for something more.

Some may raise the issue of a new security organization. It’s worth considering: With so little reason to expect early agreement on NATO’s next mission, alliance leaders should spend at least some of their summit time talking about just that possibility.

A larger role for the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe should be considered. Until now the CSCE’s central goal has been promoting human rights. But with so many tyrants swept from office in Eastern Europe, in the cause of human rights, CSCE has virtually worked itself out of a job.

But with a relatively small investment in staff and equipment--of which CSCE now has neither--it could take on assignments that would contribute to peace of mind in both Eastern and Western Europe without encroaching on NATO’s charter.

Two tasks come to mind--missions that are a good fit for an institution whose members include the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as all members of NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

One would be to fly the reconnaissance missions envisioned in President Bush’s “Open Skies” proposal. Those aircraft would maintain the same close-up surveillance of ground forces and munitions factories that satellites perform at longer range.

Another would be to monitor military radio frequencies and break in to question the purpose of any orders to forces that sounded suspicious to CSCE monitors.

Concern about another war has had Moscow hard-liners this week accusing Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev of “losing” Eastern Europe and Moscow’s generals asking publicly whether arms control negotiators are leaving the country too weak to defend itself. Both charges are absurd, of course, but a new role for CSCE might help calm these concerns and at the same time build Western confidence in Soviet assurances that it plans no sudden military moves.