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NATO Secretaries-General the Legacies of Joseph Luns and Jaap De Hoop Scheffer

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NATO Secretaries-General the Legacies of Joseph Luns and Jaap De Hoop Scheffer NATO Secretaries-General The Legacies of Joseph Luns and Jaap de Hoop Scheffer Ryan C. Hendrickson With the end of Jaap de Hoop Scheffer’s term as NATO’s Secretary-General, the time is ripe for an initial assessment of his service as NATO’s chief diplomat. NATO’s secretary-general, an office that did not even exist until three years after the Alliance’s creation, has generated little academic scrutiny. In part, this dearth of research is understandable given the few official powers held by the Alliance’s political leader. The secretary-general is charged with promoting consensus among the Allies – a rather broad responsibility that provides few organisational tools to achieve this end. In addition, the secretary-general must oversee and manage Alliance summits and ministerial meetings, and chair meetings of the North Atlantic Council, but has no voting authority. Given this limited institutional authority, coupled with the political influence of the Alliance’s ‘great powers’ and the organisational authority wielded by NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), most histories of NATO provide little assessment of the secretary-general.1 Three individuals from the Netherlands: Dirk Stikker, Joseph Luns, and de Hoop Scheffer, have served as NATO’s chief political leader, yet each has left his own, quite different, legacy. De Hoop Scheffer’s record, at least at this first early juncture, is very different from those of his Cold War predecessors, and especially from that of his Dutch predecessor, Joseph Luns, who was NATO’s longest serving secretary-general. This essay provides a short comparison of the legacies of Luns and de Hoop Scheffer. Joseph Luns Among all secretaries-general at NATO, Joseph Luns is the most understudied leader, which is remarkable given his 13 years at the helm (1971-1984). Luns simply loved being NATO’s chief diplomat, and relished the international and media spotlight that this position could compel. Nonetheless, much remains to be learned regarding how he sought to personally impact the Alliance, and to what extent he shaped NATO’s strategic direction. Despite this lack of research, historians and others have identified a number of his leadership traits and favoured policy directions that shaped his time at NATO. It is first noteworthy that Luns held a rather conservative political ideology on both domestic and international issues. Luns viewed the Alliance as an organisation that was there to provide collective defence of its members. Luns resisted calls for the Alliance to go beyond its borders, so much so that he opposed the queries of the Carter Administration regarding whether NATO would assist Western-leaning forces in Zaire in 1978. Luns noted: “Any European force in Africa will not be realised. All the Allies agree that NATO as such should not get involved in Africa.”2 In addition, as secretary-general Luns was a fierce opponent of an empowered European Community, which he viewed as a potential threat to NATO’s primacy in security affairs.3 Apart from his occasional opposition to the United States, Luns was generally known for his support of American foreign policy, which included American Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, who was viewed with considerable scepticism across much of Europe. In the later years of his tenure at NATO, when the United States encouraged the deployment of nuclear missiles in Europe, Luns backed the American position to the disappointment of many Europeans.4 Like all NATO secretaries-general, Luns also favoured higher defence spending for the Allies. When defence spending measures dropped to levels that he viewed as 1 dangerously low, he would personally contact a member’s defence minister to encourage more military investment.5 Beyond his preferred strategic directions for the Alliance, Luns’ legacy at NATO has been shaped in large part by his unique personality, which at times was impressively charming, but could also be over-powering and domineering. As chairman of the North Atlantic Council, Luns tossed aside the diplomatic etiquette employed by his immediate predecessor, Manlio Brosio, and instead chose to lead NAC sessions far more informally. Luns would refer to the NATO ambassadors by their first names, and sometimes would remove his shoes during NAC meetings, leading sessions in his stocking feet. Luns, who stood six feet seven inches, would also use his physical presence to demand compliance with his views: when an ambassador disagreed with him, Luns would publicly berate the ambassador in an efforts to generate consensus. At the Council’s conclusion, however, he would attempt to immediately undo the public embarrassment that he had just created and to repair the political damage that he had inflicted.6 Luns’ domineering personality likely gives some insight into his ability to remain secretary- general for 13 years, despite the decline in his knowledge of current affairs within the Alliance. During his last years in office, his effectiveness had clearly waned, as Luns chose to rely upon his accrued knowledge of strategic affairs; he no longer kept abreast of current political developments in the Alliance and became somewhat absent-minded in his day-to- day responsibilities and ceremonial leadership activities. In the latter stages of his tenure, Luns was increasingly viewed as uncreative, with little interest in policy entrepreneurship. He was no longer a leader who could steer-- or was even interested in steering--the Alliance in new directions, a stance which was markedly different from the approach of Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. Nonetheless, Luns clearly loved being NATO’s secretary-general and certainly maintained his political charm among the Allies.7 Jaap de Hoop Scheffer De Hoop Scheffer became NATO’s political leader after an unusually tense period. NATO had just undergone what many observers viewed as the organisation’s tensest episode in transatlantic relations, as some analysts pointed to NATO’s potential demise. The American decision to seek NATO deployments and defence measures for Turkey, prior to the war in Iraq, exacerbated a deep fissure in NATO between much of Europe, especially Belgium, Germany and France, and the United States. Although de Hoop Scheffer did not take office until January 2004, these conditions still prevailed when he replaced Lord Robertson, becoming NATO’s 11th secretary-general.8 On his first day in office, perhaps as one indication that de Hoop Scheffer sought to repair the damaged and still-strained transatlantic link, he addressed the press using both English and French – demonstrating the difficult but necessary job of the secretary-general, which demands an ability to build consensus among all Alliance members.9 Lord Robertson struggled to not only find commonalities between the United States and France, but also with his limited French speaking skills, which to some degree constrained his effectiveness as secretary-general.10 Other NATO secretaries-general, including Manlio Brosio and Lord Carrington, have acknowledged the importance of foreign language skills in promoting consensus.11 Thus, within this context, de Hoop Scheffer was arguably initiating his Alliance leadership in a symbolic manner to set the tone for a more meaningful transatlantic dialogue. While NATO continued to experience internal tension over a variety of issues, and disputes between Germany, France and the United States persisted, it is clear that five years later, de Hoop Scheffer leaves the helm of a fundamentally different NATO, one that would have been almost impossible to predict in January 2004. France’s re-entry in 2009 into NATO’s integrated military command is one indication of an Alliance in repair, rather than a withering 2 organisation. While French President Nicolas Sarkozy was responsible for this decision, de Hoop Scheffer made a number of efforts to assuage French critics of NATO that France’s ‘re- entry’ could be accomplished while simultaneously fostering NATO’s European Security and Defence Identity. De Hoop Scheffer lobbied the French elite and the public, assuring them that France was losing none of its historical ambitions in NATO through advanced military integration with the Allies.12 During his entire tenure, from his first day in office through his leadership at the Strasbourg/Kehl Summit in April 2009, de Hoop Scheffer consistently highlighted NATO’s operation in Afghanistan. In nearly every public address, he noted the primacy of this mission for NATO. Critical observers of NATO who complain that the Alliance has “lost its way” and is now drifting without a clear direction and mission must have not been listening well; de Hoop Scheffer has been unambiguous, almost on a daily basis, that NATO’s central concern was Afghanistan. As secretary-general, de Hoop Scheffer oversaw an expansion of NATO’s role in Afghanistan, which initially included a small peacekeeping presence intended to stabilise Kabul and build support for Afghanistan’s national government. The mission later expanded to a wider set of peacekeeping operations through the deployment of its Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in northern and western sections of the country. In August 2006, NATO also agreed to take on combat operations in southern and eastern Afghanistan, which are now set to expand considerably with the newly proposed strategy put forward by American President Barack Obama. All evidence indicates that de Hoop Scheffer consistently lobbied the Allies for additional resources and more troops to battle the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Certainly, from the standpoint of public diplomacy on Afghanistan, de Hoop Scheffer can be credited with consistently making the case that NATO must fight the Taliban and can succeed in promoting stability in Afghanistan. Apart from his leadership on Afghanistan, de Hoop Scheffer travelled widely as NATO secretary-general, far beyond what Luns or any previous secretary-general would have ever considered. De Hoop Scheffer spoke in Egypt, South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, among other states well beyond NATO’s traditional geographic milieu, all in an effort to produce more support for NATO’s operations to defeat terrorism, and to build wider appeal for NATO’s activities in Afghanistan.
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