Antonio Alonso / Rakhmatullah Nurimbetov
Professor at CEU San Pablo University / Uzbek Political Scientist
Seventy-five years ago, the Treaty of Washington was signed by twelve countries in a very solemn way. Nowadays, the member states of this defense organisation are 32. All of them, decided in Vilnus in July 2023 “to fulfil NATO’s three core tasks of deterrence and defence, crisis prevention and management, and cooperative security”. On the other hand, The Shanghai Five group was transformed into a Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in 2001 and their main commitment is still to fight against the three evils: terrorism, separatism, and extremism. How these organisations evolved? What are their main challenges nowadays and in the next decade?
NATO and SCO evolved, but how?
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the declared enemy of the NATO Alliance, it suffered also an existential challenge. Supposedly, they would face the hardest decision since its inception in the 1940’s, as there was no reason for the existence of a defense alliance to deal with the Soviet Union, as the Soviet Empire no longer existed. However, they didn’t self-dissolved but they transform the organisation to deal with the so called “new threats”: terrorism, climate change, gender inequalities, etc. Of course, the “very timing” Yugoslavian crisis provided the proper opportunity to keep alive the Alliance, to grant a new horizon of action for them. If that crisis was internally originated or triggered from outside, or a mix of both endogenous and exogenous factors doesn’t matter for the main purpose of this article: to state a comparison between the two organisations, both in their evolution and the next future situation.
During the 1990’s NATO strive for its own survival, and, again, a new crisis, the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent operation in Afghanistan, provided a further meaning to sustain the organisation and to renew it. In addition, the invasion of Iraq enabled and structured new commitments from Asian countries. In that moment, the alliance with the Indo-Pacific started to gain strength. NATO obtained more and more engagement and support from those Asian countries –the so called AP4, Australia, New Zealand, Japan Republic of Korea, but also India and some others—. This is interesting because that means that NATO desired to expand not only their members –as it did in Europe several times, especially in 1999 and 2004— but also wanted to create partnerships with external actors not integrated inside the Alliance.
Even if several American and NATO political leaders granted Gorbachov and Yeltsin not to expand the organisation to the East –“not one inch Eastward” was the expression repeatedly used—, the reality is that finally NATO expanded to the East. It seems nobody cared about signals and warnings coming from Moscow: “Please, don’t do that. Listen to our worries” seemed to say many times the Russian leaders. Maybe, the most famous one was made by Putin in 2007 at the Munich Security Conference. Nobody paid attention, or at least, apparently, nobody cared, or they miscalculated –“Putin is so weak, he is not going to dare to materialize his threats”, or sentences like these—; anyway, what happened really was that in August 2008 Russia invaded Georgia and took South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Azharia, and attacked Tbilisi. In that moment, the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, made both sides to stop the war, sit down and negotiate an agreement.
On the other hand, China wanted to solve the border delimitation problems with the new Republics former members of the Soviet Union –Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan—. Besides, China realize such a forum was useful to promote a more peaceful and stable neighbourhood and they introduce the topic of the three evils as a common ground for all the members, apart from the delimitation of borders. In 2001 Uzbekistan –not a neighbouring country to China— joined the forum and it became the SCO. Since then, it has accepted new members searching peace, harmony, stability in the Central and South Asian region. That’s why, they admitted India, Pakistan, Iran and Belarus, apart from having two observers –Mongolia and Afghanistan—. Obviously, this expansion was made not against anyone, and anyone stated to feel threatened by such expansion. The contrary happened in the case of NATO expansion in Europe –as noted above— and new partnerships in Asia –as China perceives it as threatening—. Will NATO repeat in Asia the same mistakes they make in Europe and disregard the Chinese warnings?
However, both expansions are difficult to deal with, although for different reasons.
The forecast for the next decade
The main obstacle for the NATO’s future is the Ukrainian war. Although Ukraine is not a NATO member, despite not having any kind of agreement to guarantee its defense from any foreign attack, NATO provided ammunition, training and funds to help Ukraine in the war against Russia since 2014. In spite of solving the problem in a table of negotiations, or at the UN Security Council, they decided to escalate the conflict. When Russia invaded the Ukrainian territory NATO continued to supply weapons and provided almost everything necessary for the war, at least as much as possible they –every member of the Alliance— could do. Actually, NATO is part of the conflict, not part of the solution. As NATO defined in its Madrid Strategic Concept (2022): “The Russian Federation is the most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security and to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area”. As a consequence, as UK and USA provide intelligence, communications and weapons able to destroy targets well inside (hundreds of kilometres) Russian territories, Russia considers them as enemies. At east for now, Putin didn’t order to attack American or British cities, but he has given instructions to kill any foreign soldier operating in Ukraine, no matter if American or European. So, it seems clear that the survival of NATO as such organisation depends on its victory in Ukraine supporting Zelensky “as long as it takes” or “to the last Ukrainian”.
On the SCO side, the successful of the organisation depends on its ability to balance the sometimes with –at least apparently— contradictory interests and worries of so diverse members. Its success relies upon their ability to negotiate and accept diversity, apart from listening to anyone, granting all of them the possibility to be heard and treated respectfully.
