Time to deal with anachronistic acryonyms
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Oluşturulma Tarihi: Nisan 03, 2009 00:00
Yesterday, the G20 leaders wrapped up their summit in London. Today, many of the same heads of state will begin the NATO summit in Strasbourg and Kehl. The latter meeting will cover the 60th anniversary of NATO’s founding, which is on Saturday.
In an assessment of where NATO has come from and where it is headed, the organization’s Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer wrote thoughtfully in yesterday’s Daily News of the need for a new "strategic concept." We would not disagree with a word of de Hoop Scheffer’s concise and impressive essay.
We might, however, state the issue in more fundamental terms: NATO needs a mission. Not just NATO, but most of its contemporary acronyms now at risk of becoming anachronistic.
The World Bank, for example, was created to rebuild war-torn Europe as part of the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944. It went on to reinvent itself in the 1960’s as an agency of the developing world. But India was not sending astronauts into outer space in 1961 nor was Brazil bidding to sell aircraft to Europe’s fastest growing airline, which happens to be Turkish. We admire Belgian lace and chocolate as much as anyone. But the fact that Belgium has more voting clout in the IMF than China hardly squares with today’s realities.
The Swiss-based Bank for International Settlements was invented to handle war reparations payments as part of the Treaty of Versaille after World War I. It has reinvented itself several times in the interim and now is the "central bankers’ central bank." Perhaps French President Nicolas Sarkozy, huffing and puffing yesterday about the need for international financial regulation, should be sitting down with the BIS for yet another reinvention. Repeated efforts to drag the structure of the United Nations, including a redesign offered by Turkey’s Kemal Derviş, into the 21st Century have ended in futility. But a world organization controlled by the "Great Powers" of the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Russia and China does not reflect today’s geopolitics.
NATO is no different. It was created to confront the menace of the Soviet Union. Seeking to expand it in largely the same guise, while professing that post-Soviet Russia should relax and just watch, imprisons our thinking in an era that has ceased to exist.
As de Hoop Scheffer points out, cyberwar requires not a single soldier, but Cold War-era NATO has no strategy to respond. In an era when threats and defense are inherently no longer geography-specific, why are we still calling this an organization for the "North Atlantic?"
NATO’s new task cannot be solved with a repeat of the 1999 summit, when it last it adopted a new "strategic concept." Its mission needs to be entirely rethought. The same is true for all the world’s leading anachronistic acronyms.
We might, however, state the issue in more fundamental terms: NATO needs a mission. Not just NATO, but most of its contemporary acronyms now at risk of becoming anachronistic.
The World Bank, for example, was created to rebuild war-torn Europe as part of the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944. It went on to reinvent itself in the 1960’s as an agency of the developing world. But India was not sending astronauts into outer space in 1961 nor was Brazil bidding to sell aircraft to Europe’s fastest growing airline, which happens to be Turkish. We admire Belgian lace and chocolate as much as anyone. But the fact that Belgium has more voting clout in the IMF than China hardly squares with today’s realities.
The Swiss-based Bank for International Settlements was invented to handle war reparations payments as part of the Treaty of Versaille after World War I. It has reinvented itself several times in the interim and now is the "central bankers’ central bank." Perhaps French President Nicolas Sarkozy, huffing and puffing yesterday about the need for international financial regulation, should be sitting down with the BIS for yet another reinvention. Repeated efforts to drag the structure of the United Nations, including a redesign offered by Turkey’s Kemal Derviş, into the 21st Century have ended in futility. But a world organization controlled by the "Great Powers" of the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Russia and China does not reflect today’s geopolitics.
NATO is no different. It was created to confront the menace of the Soviet Union. Seeking to expand it in largely the same guise, while professing that post-Soviet Russia should relax and just watch, imprisons our thinking in an era that has ceased to exist.
As de Hoop Scheffer points out, cyberwar requires not a single soldier, but Cold War-era NATO has no strategy to respond. In an era when threats and defense are inherently no longer geography-specific, why are we still calling this an organization for the "North Atlantic?"
NATO’s new task cannot be solved with a repeat of the 1999 summit, when it last it adopted a new "strategic concept." Its mission needs to be entirely rethought. The same is true for all the world’s leading anachronistic acronyms.