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186 Change and Continuity, 1990s and 2000s In many ways the direction of NATO-UN relations was only a deepening, both in friction and in collaboration, of a pattern that had been set in the 1990s. The abrupt end of the Cold War lessened the likelihood of vetoes on the part of the permanent members of the UN Security Council. It also fostered a partnership of sorts between NATO and the UN through crisis management in the Middle east and the Balkans. There were limits, however, to the movement toward collaboration. SecretaryGeneral Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s surrender of authority to NATO in 1995 was demonstrably grudging. he was suspicious of U.S. motives behind NATO’s demand for control of the Bosnian operation.1 And four years later his successor , Kofi Annan, was discomfited, along with many members of the UN Security Council, by NATO initiatives against the Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, over atrocities in Kosovo. It was not only the Russian and Chinese members that stood in the way of NATO action; NATO partners had their doubts about the alliance acting without explicit authorization from the Security Council. As permanent members of the council, Britain and France could lose status if NATO poached on its territory.2 Yet as leading members of NATO, frustrated with the behavior of Russia and China, they could welcome Secretary General Solana’s assurance that the UN had already granted sufficient authority for them to strike without additional sanctions.3 The crises of the 1990s opened the way for closer connections between NATO and the UN. But intimacy did not necessarily breed comity. The UN Charter made it clear in Chapter 7 that the UN was the prime mover in seeking and securing global peace. NATO regarded these crises as opportunities to express its support and agreement, in principle, but added caveats that can be traced to the origins of the treaty in 1949. NATO officials were uncomfortable with the frequent identification of the organization as one of many regional organizations 9 After 9/11 Afghanistan and Iraq After 9/11 / 187 that could serve the United Nations. This category certainly fits the eU and the OSCe—and as NATO recognized, for practical purposes, it also fit NATO under Article 52 of the charter, engaging in regional actions consistent with the charter’s principles. But the terms of the North Atlantic Treaty excluded Article 53, on the grounds that as a regional organization, NATO would be obligated to report its activities to the UN Security Council where the Soviet Union had a permanent seat. Soviet oversight of NATO deliberations in 1949 would have made a mockery of an organization designed to cope with Soviet aggression. Irrespective of the Soviet adversary in the Cold War, NATO’s relations with the UN, marginal as they were in those years, rested on its assumption that the alliance was an independent actor. Such was the position of the United States in the 1990s. What muddied the clarity of this position were the hesitations of the other partners—the two european allies on the UN Security Council as well as the doubts of the lesser powers—about a challenge to the authority of the world organization. The UN was accorded deference specifically in the preamble of the Washington treaty. Article 7 explicitly stated that “the Treaty does not affect . . . the primary responsibility of the Security Council for the maintenance of international peace and security.” This emphasis reflected a faith in the ultimate success of the UN, found particularly in the views of Senator Vandenberg and U.S. adherents of the United Nations in 1949. Fifty years later the American believers in the supremacy of the UN were confined to a few faithful. But this was not the sentiment of most of the european allies. With the end of the communist menace, the european partners now regarded reliance on the UN as a check on the influence of the American superpower in a unipolar world, given the attitudes toward NATO expressed by the administration of George W. Bush.4 The new millennium coincided with the rise of U.S. unilateralism in the new administration as reflected in its rejection of the Kyoto Protocol and the International Criminal Court, as well as its abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. This flouting of the views of its allies evoked negative reactions within NATO, from France and Germany, especially, as well as from the traditional adversaries of the Cold War, a rejuvenated...

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