NATO's new commanders face new problems

By Peter Muench

MUNICH (DPA): New is good, the public relations wizards and slick-talking advertising writers say -- new is always better than old.

That may explain why during its 50th anniversary celebration last year, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) launched a major image campaign to present itself as the new-from-the-inside-out mainstay of stability in the new world order.

Unfortunately the alliance faced a new challenge at the time, the air campaign to try to stop Serb ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, and came out at the end of it looking worse for the wear despite its ultimate victory. Since then, new tensions have appeared along the traditional stress-lines within NATO.

Now new leaders have taken command in the alliance's Brussels headquarters, and making those problems go away must be very high on their agenda.

NATO Secretary General George Robertson has been at work since October, picking up where his predecessor, Javier Solana, left off. For U.S. Air Force Gen. Joseph Ralston, NATO's new supreme commander for Europe, who has been in office since Wednesday, the transition itself was a touchy matter.

Ralston's tough-as-nails predecessor, U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark, who clashed with Pentagon leaders during the Kosovo campaign, had to step down three months early.

The 56-year-old Ralston, known as a close associate of American Defense Secretary William Cohen, may himself be surprised at his promotion, especially since his own career suffered a setback as a result of what America's scandal sheets call a sex scandal.

Ralston's 1997 nomination as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff foundered when the Air Force announced that he had had an extra-marital affair 13 years earlier.

The command pilot, with 147 combat missions over Vietnam and Laos to his credit, survived the scandal and later became the joint chiefs' vice chairman. In a press release about his appointment as NATO's European supreme commander, the Air Force called him a "warrior, diplomat and politician."

In his new job, plagued with mounting tensions between the United States and NATO's European members, Ralston will need plenty of diplomatic skills and maybe even the bullet-proof hide every warrior wishes he had.

One of his first priorities will be prodding along the modernization of the alliance's military forces, a step everyone agrees is necessary.

The Kosovo campaign underscored its importance, particularly among the European members of the alliance, whose weaknesses were glaringly obvious. But whenever the subject comes up, the Europeans wave their annual budgets, cry poor and dig in their heels to resist American calls for them to increase their defense spending.

Their resistance to increasing their military budgets has not stopped them from going on the offensive with their demands for a bigger voice in defense policies.

The European Union's decision to establish its own security policy has, despite all the pledges of solidarity and loyalty to NATO, sent disturbing ripples, if not waves, through the trans- Atlantic alliance.

The Europeans have expressed their reservations about the unilateral American plan to set up their own anti-missile defense system -- and the United States keeps bumping up against the new European self-confidence.

NATO's new problems may, for the moment, overshadow some of its old ones, but the old ones are still there. Problems like keeping the peace in Bosnia and preventing new bloodletting in Kosovo.

If ever the alliance needed a boost, now is the time.