The UN and NATO have signed a – not very radical – declaration about their cooperation in places like Afghanistan and Darfur, and the Russians are peeved:
Moscow on Thursday accused NATO and the United Nations of secretly forging an agreement that tightens their cooperation without informing Russia, a U.N. Security Council member whose relations with NATO are badly strained.
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Russia was aware an agreement was in the works and assumed it would be shown to member states for review. “This did not happen, and the agreement between the secretariats was signed in a secretive way,” Lavrov said.
Russia’s anger reflected its wariness that closer relations could give NATO more clout at the United Nations, where Moscow holds veto power as a permanent Security Council member. Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko suggested that top U.N. officials went back on their word. “We were assured at the highest level of the U.N. secretariat that no such document would be signed without informing us in advance,” he said.
It was silly of the UN to let this come out the same week that the Security Council agreed to extend the UN monitoring mission in Georgia. But this agreement has been in the works for ages. I recall seeing a draft in 2006, although this was covered in scribbled deletions from the French, who didn’t want it to overshadow cooperation between the UN and EU. For a time, it looked like the deal was dead, but there’s been a lot of interest in it at the very top of both NATO and the UN.
I don’t think the Russians should worry too much: this is a piece of paper that summarizes a vast amount of UN-NATO cooperation that is already happening.
But signing it was a mistake for the UN. As a report overseen by Lakhdar Brahimi implied earlier this year, UN staff are seen as legitimate targets for terrorists and malcontents worldwide because it is associated with U.S. and Western interests. The challenge in an Afghanistan is for the UN to maintain some political autonomy. Even a low-profile declaration like this makes it just a little harder to do that.
And this minor diplomatic incident points to a growing conceptual problem for fans of multilateral security cooperation. This is a naive belief that all international security institutions have, or could have, shared goals and that we simply need to link them up better to meet those goals. This is a hangover from the happy days of the 1990s, when the West still had a grip on pretty much every organization from the UN to Boy Scouts, but it’s not sustainable in a more competitive world.
NATO and the UN have fundamentally different roles: the first is still, in the final analysis, a framework for Western security while the latter is a place to do deals between disunited states. The two can cooperate case-by-case, but this deep political difference remains. And it should remain – our best hope for resolving threats in a competitive world is to keep our range of political options open.
I think the only really interesting question in security cooperation at present is how we maintain and nurture sufficient institutional pluralism in the international system. “Diverse institutional responses to diverse threats” is my new slogan.
Acute readers will note that this is rather different to what Alex and David have been saying about climate change, commodity prices, etc. – i.e. we need shared awareness and shared platforms to tackle new challenges – not to mention the swirling demands for an international response to the financial crisis.
I’ll freely admit that I’m skeptical about the idea of truly shared understanding in ANY political realm (isn’t it just an old Enlightenment fallacy back to disturb the system?) but I do share the analysis that on an issue like climate change, international convergence on a (probably rather minimal) shared awareness of the threats involved and mechanisms to respond is necessary and just possible. Maybe. Climate change now is probably in the same category as nuclear proliferation during the Cold War: everyone can be scared into signing a big deal to tackle it, which is how we got the NPT, a pretty amazing treaty in retrospect.
But even as Russia and the U.S. were moving towards the NPT, they were on alert in Europe and Asia. It is possible to converge on global problems while competing on diverse localized security issues. So I’ll leave the search for common platforms to my colleagues, and argue for uncommon platforms down below.
