Launching NATO's Transformation at Prague

All of us at NATO appreciate your service to the alliance as chairman of the military committee, and your continuing support of NATO in your new career. Thanks also to Dr. Karl-Heinz Kamp, Director of Foreign and Security Policy Planning for the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, for your kind invitation to deliver the Manfred Woerner Memorial Lecture this evening. I am delighted to be in Berlin to see the refurbished Brandenburg Gate and to meet with you as the German and American governments and our NATO allies prepare for NATO's historic Prague Summit in November.

Let me begin by saying a few words about the former NATO Secretary General in whose honor this lecture series is named. Manfred Woerner was a truly great NATO Secretary General whose legacy of leadership still inspires our Alliance.

Secretary General Woerner presided over the NATO alliance as it prevailed over communism. He was at the helm as the Berlin wall fell, Germany was re-united in NATO, and the Soviet Union collapsed. One of my predecessors, Ambassador William Taft, IV, said that Manfred Woerner was the guiding force behind NATO's post-Cold War agenda and that he led NATO as a German, as a European, and also as a true friend of the United States as we sought to construct a Europe "whole, free, and at peace."

Germany continues to provide NATO with key leaders who are important to its success. We welcome the vision of General Harald Kujat, the new chairman of NATO's military committee, and the expertise of Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs Gunter Altenburg. I also salute the significant contributions and unparalleled experience of my friend and colleague -- and able tennis partner -- Ambassador Gebhardt von Moltke.

It remains essential that the United States and Germany work together, bilaterally and in NATO, to face the challenges ahead of us. Konrad Adenauer and Manfred Woerner believed throughout their careers, as did generations of American leaders, that there can be no peace and no stability in Europe without German-American cooperation. That is undeniably true today.

They also knew that NATO is vital to Europeans and Americans alike to secure the defense of freedom. In this sense, we are gratified for Germany's sizeable troop contributions -- 6,000 strong -- to allied peacekeeping operations in Bosnia and Kosovo, and for its past leadership of Task Force Fox in Macedonia.

We also applaud Germany's efforts in the broader international security arena. More than 3,000 German troops are currently deployed to support military and humanitarian operations in Afghanistan. The U.S. very much welcomes and supports Germany's recent offer to lead the International Security Assistance Force with the Netherlands in Afghanistan. We encourage the new German government to be a strong and active presence in the Alliance and in the fight against terrorism.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am honored to be here tonight to share my thoughts with you on how the United States sees the upcoming NATO Summit in Prague. Our view is at once simple and yet far-reaching: we want the Prague Summit to launch a whole-scale transformation of the NATO Alliance for the 21st century. The old NATO served us well, but our task now is to build a transformed Alliance that can extend the peace and our common security for the next generation of Europeans and Americans.

We Americans see NATO as the most successful Alliance in history, and the most important for our country as we chart our 21st century foreign and security policy. But in thinking about NATO's future, we must agree that as the threats to our common security change, NATO must change with them. During the Cold War and into the 1990s, we faced threats from within Europe, and thus centered NATO's defensive strategy here in Germany to avert them.

Today, most of Europe is at peace. The threats to that peace come not from strong states within Europe, but from unstable failed states and terrorist organizations far from Europe's borders. The most dangerous threat in this new era is the toxic mix of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, aimed not just at our militaries but at our civilian populations as well.

NATO Secretary General George Robertson, speaking at a conference in Brussels recently, said, "Geography will no longer act as our shield," because the current and future security environment "does not afford us the luxury of fighting theoretical battles about what is 'in' and what is 'out-of-area.'"

NATO is already operating well beyond the borders of our member states, and that is where we will stay in the future. The old "out-of-area" debate is indeed dead. As Allies, we have already agreed that NATO must be able to act wherever our security and the safety of our people demand action, because the virus of insecurity and terrorism is spreading -- from the attacks in the U.S. on September 11, 2001 and at a synagogue in Tunisia to, in the last few weeks, a French oil tanker in the Indian Ocean, a nightclub in Bali, and most recently a theatre in Moscow.

With this in mind, it is clear that NATO is at a pivotal moment as it faces these new threats. We know that we must stand up to confront global terrorism and that we must create a renewed, more flexible, and purposeful alliance to defeat it.

When President Bush meets with the other NATO leaders in Prague three weeks from tonight, they will make historic decisions to create a new NATO to protect Europe and North America in the years ahead. Their agenda will be "the three news" -- new military capabilities, new members as we enlarge, and new relationships with Russia, Ukraine, Central Asia and the Caucasus. These "three news" are inter-dependent -- like the legs of a stool -- for without progress in all three areas, NATO will not be able to accomplish the transformation required to meet the threats of today and tomorrow.

With such an ambitious agenda before them, Prague will surely be one of the most important NATO Summits in half a century, and a historic pivot point from which NATO will redirect its efforts in the future.

Here is the NATO that the U.S. believes we and our allies need for the 21st century threat environment:

First, it is a NATO of new military capabilities. Capabilities designed to counter the new threats, which could come from anywhere, but most likely from outside of Europe. We need to decide at Prague on new ways to counter chemical, biological or nuclear attack on our forces and civilian populations. Our leaders will agree to create new NATO teams to respond to weapons of mass destruction, attacks in our cities and against our forces. The U.S. hopes they will also agree to examine options for development of missile defense to protect Europe and the U.S. from ballistic missile attack.

By Prague, we are asking each of the allies to agree on a specific set of new military commitments with timetables. We must also face the ever-widening capabilities gap between the U.S. and its Allies. Based on our experience in Kosovo, we cannot deal with soldiers unable to communicate with each other, aircraft unable to use precision weapons, commanders unable to see the battlefield. At the very least, NATO Allies must agree to fund within the next year, key functional capabilities in a few vital areas: strategic airlift; secure, interoperable communications; ground surveillance systems; protection against chemical and biological weapons; and more special forces units. In short, we need to be able to get to the fight quickly and flexibly, with lethal and precise firepower, and sustain ourselves until the job is done.

While not every Ally can do everything, NATO is built and sustained on the premise that every ally, whether big or small, can contribute something. Recognizing the importance of stronger militaries in the new threat environment, some Allies -- the U.K., France, Portugal and Norway -- have raised their defense budgets this year. For other allies, pooling of resources or specialization in certain capabilities may be the answer. All allies need to look hard at the resources they devote to our common security. In just the last few weeks, we have been encouraged that European Allies are considering the lease of air transport to get our soldiers to distant theatres, tankers to fuel them, and precision-guided munitions to win the fight once we get there.

The U.S. will spend 3.5% of its gross domestic product on national defense this year. We would prefer that all of our allies reach the 2% level. Unfortunately, some -- including Germany -- are well below that standard. Even without spending more money, many allies could use their existing defense euros more wisely by providing professional military units with the tools they need to carry out Alliance missions, rather than retain static conscript forces. European Allies that failed to invest in modern military capabilities in the 1990s must now rise to that challenge. We cannot succeed in NATO without Europe doing more. In return, the U.S. will continue to do its part to open our markets to fair defense trade. Indeed, we are beginning a six-month review of our export control system with that in mind.

But military hardware can only do so much. New threats require an agile, deployable command structure if we are to defeat them. Allies need to shed an outmoded mindset and a rusty NATO military order better suited for a continental war than the threats we face now. Our Allied armed forces need to think and be trained to deploy flexibly and quickly to ensure our security wherever it is challenged. At Prague, NATO leaders will agree on the major foundations of this new command structure to give us the capacity to respond to the new global terrorist threat by striking back quickly and with lethal force.

With this in mind, one of the most important U.S. proposals for Prague is to create a NATO Response Force to meet this new challenge. Secretary Rumsfeld proposed this multinational combat force of approximately 20,000 personnel from air, land, and naval components, able to deploy in- or out-of-area, ready for action within 7 to 30 days, and able to sustain itself in the field for up to a month. This proposal won broad support from Allied defense ministers in Warsaw, and we want it to be endorsed by heads of state and government at Prague.

We see this new NATO force as the heart of the transformation that NATO must adopt -- an ability that we did not have immediately after September 11 -- to strike back quickly and forcefully when an Ally is attacked by a distant foe, as the U.S. was by al-Qaeda. NATO must create this capability if it is to be relevant in the new global terrorist environment. A NATO Response Force, focused on combat missions, will complement and not compete with, the EU's proposed Rapid Reaction Force which will focus on peacekeeping duties. In fact, we see these two forces as mutually reinforcing, as we see the entire range of NATO-EU cooperation. We must now follow up to ensure that Allies participate in and contribute to the NATO response force, and get it ready to put planes in the air, ships under sail, and boots on the ground as soon as possible.

The Prague summit will be the first NATO heads of government meeting in a former Warsaw Pact country. That powerful symbol is linked directly to the second great step forward that NATO's leaders will take in Prague: to invite new members to join our Alliance. NATO is close to a consensus on a historic enlargement in Prague, certainly the largest since the Alliance was created. President Bush led the way to this decision when he said in his visionary Warsaw speech in 2001 that "Yalta did not ratify a natural divide, it divided a living civilization." He made it clear that his goal was to erase the false lines that have split Europe for too long. He said, "Every European nation that struggles toward democracy, free markets, and a strong civic culture must be welcomed into Europe's home. I believe in NATO membership for all of Europe's democracies that seek it and that are ready to share the responsibilities that NATO brings."

President Bush and his Alliance partners have the opportunity to create, in the 21st century, a world our fathers and grandfathers could not give us in the 20th. At Prague, NATO's decision to take in new members will serve one of the great strategic aims of our time: a Europe whole, free, united, and at peace. This summer, I visited some of the great battlefields of the first and second World Wars -- the Somme, Ypres, Bastogne -- where hundreds of thousands of Germans and British and Americans and others perished. Surely we have the capacity, by extending NATO's reach, to ensure that Europe never sees such bloodshed again, and that it will never again be divided by ideology or war.

I just returned two weeks ago from a nine-country, six-day tour of all the countries wishing to join NATO. My delegation and I met, for the third time this year, with the presidents, prime ministers, foreign and defense ministers of each country. We were very encouraged by what we saw and by the pace of reforms in all nine of the aspirant countries. Many of them have already been participating with NATO as "virtual allies" deployed in the Balkans or training and exercising with NATO forces, or by contributing to the anti-terrorism coalition in Afghanistan. Even after the heads of state and government make their decisions on enlargement, we expect continuing reforms in the "invitee nations" throughout the accession and ratification processes, and continued engagement with those nations not invited.

All of these countries have work to do to complete the reform revolutions that began a decade ago -- to vanquish corruption, illicit arms trade, trafficking of women and children. But all of them have made extraordinary progress. President Bush will decide in a few days which of the countries the U.S. will support. NATO, as a whole, then will announce its decision at Prague. I am convinced that NATO will be stronger when the new countries formally join our Alliance at our next summit in the spring of 2004.

The third aspect of the new NATO is our commitment to strengthen relationships in the east -- with Russia, with Ukraine, and with the frontline states of the Caucasus and Central Asia.

The NATO-Russia Council, created in May of this year, is off to a good start, and we look forward to taking stock of this progress with Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov in Prague. In September, Russia hosted a joint civil emergency exercise in Noginsk, where 30 countries cooperated to respond to a mock terrorist attack using chemical weapons -- a threat all of us could face. NATO and Russia are examining how we can work together on theatre missile defense, joint search and rescue, and training programs. We are also thinking through the threats of ballistic missile proliferation and weapons of mass destruction. The NATO-Russia Council can be the forum where Russia and all the NATO countries learn to cooperate in a way we have never done before. We need to keep that worthy goal as our target and undertake more ambitious projects together in 2003.

NATO had hoped at Prague to announce a new step forward in our relations with Ukraine. But allegations that President Kuchma approved the sale of a Kolchuga Radar System to Iraq has stopped our dialogue with him dead in its tracks. Ukraine must cooperate as we respond to this problem. The U.S. believes NATO should maintain its links with reformers in Ukraine, but we cannot conduct business as usual with leaders who violate United Nations sanctions on Iraq.

As NATO seeks new, more durable relations with Russia and Ukraine, we must also reach eastward to create new political and military ties with the states of Central Asia and the Caucasus. These countries were vital to our successful campaign in Afghanistan. As NATO seeks in the future to respond to the threat of terrorism and to instability in the arc of countries ranging from North Africa to the Middle East to South Asia, we need the active support of Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgystan to protect us and them from the many dangers we all now confront. As NATO devoted itself to stabilizing Central Europe and the Balkans in the 1990s, we must now look east in the next decade to extend our hand in partnership to each of these countries as we seek peace and stability for them and for ourselves.

Ladies and gentlemen, Prague will be a critical turning point for NATO because we will shift the mission and full military might of 19 countries from an inward focus on Europe outward to the new threats that we must all face together. In this sense, NATO's Prague Summit is about transformation, enlargement, and cementing our relationships with states to our east. NATO remains vital to Germans and Americans, Czechs and Latvians, Spaniards and Kazaks. NATO alone can weave the essential threads of political and military cooperation crucial to keep us all safe, prosperous and united in the dangerous 21st century world we inhabit. This is now NATO's central responsibility -- to unite us all, as Allies and Partners, from Vancouver to Vladivostock in a single, common, purposeful institution which can create a new democratic peace in Europe.

As we seek that peace, we must not shrink from challenging those who would destroy it. I want, in this context, to say a few words about the difficult issue of Iraq. Clearly there are different views on how to deal with the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction program. However, I know that we all can agree that Iraq is a serial violator of UN resolutions; that it is a country with a leader whose craving to dominate others has led him to build biological and chemical weapons; that Saddam's ruthless disregard for his own people and long-standing support for terrorism as a tool of both domestic and international politics shows he will have no qualms about threatening and actually using these weapons himself or through terrorist proxies.

After September 11, 2001, we can no longer afford to turn a blind eye to this threat. That is why President Bush has chosen to pursue action so vigorously in the United Nations. It is also the reason why Prague will be a place where NATO must speak about Iraq. It will be a valuable opportunity for allied unity in the face of this common threat. At Prague, we must speak with one voice and tell Saddam that the will of the UN must be respected and that we will stand together until this problem is resolved. As President Bush has made clear, we want diplomacy to succeed, but if it fails to convince Saddam to fulfill his UN obligations, the U.S. will have no choice but to pursue other options.

Ladies and gentlemen, as a career diplomat, I believe fervently that we can only conquer these challenges by maintaining the NATO bridge that links North America to Europe in common cause. We in the United States have struggled throughout our own history with isolationist versus more engaged foreign policy impulses. But we know that in the 21st century, ours is a global and interconnected world. International terrorism is, by definition, transnational. If a Saudi madman based in Afghanistan can recruit terrorists living in Europe for attacks on New York and Washington, DC, we Americans can no longer afford to think of the United States as invulnerable. Nor would we want to pursue a unilateralist course, for there is little of lasting consequence that the United States can accomplish in the world without the sustained cooperation of its Allies and friends.

Indeed, we Americans have much to gain from a multinational approach to defense and security. But we need strong allies to help. NATO must transform itself to remain the central pillar of transatlantic security and the indispensable Alliance. "If NATO succeeds in enacting these changes," to quote President Bush, "the rewards will be a partnership as central to the security and interests of its member states as was the case during the Cold War. We will sustain a common perspective on the threats to our societies and improve our ability to take common action in defense of our nations and their interests. ... we cannot afford to lose this opportunity to better prepare the family of transatlantic democracies for the challenges to come."

As we prepare for the NATO Summit in November, this is the strongest wish of the U.S.: that we will unite our two continents again in common cause for the challenges ahead, and for the peace and security of all our peoples. The new NATO is within our reach. Let's go build it together, at Prague and beyond.