Divided Nato must rethink its purpose

A lot of what is being said now by Moscow and Washington in the aftermath of the Georgia crisis is diplomatic posturing and militaristic bluster. As Russian columns were heading through South Ossetia to Gori, Vice-President Dick Cheney said that "the Russians will be made to pay". To which Robert Hunter, one of the most accomplished former US ambassadors to Nato, countered that there was no point in the American leadership dishing out vague threats that they had little chance of carrying out.

Similarly, the deliberately leaked story from Moscow over the weekend that the Russian Baltic Fleet is to be radically modernised with new nuclear weaponry - in reaction to Poland's decision to deploy key parts of the US anti-missile shield - appears a flight of military wishful thinking. The Russian navy is

still a shadow of the old Soviet navy in its pomp, and the Russian defence budget is on paper smaller than Britain's. Moscow can't afford a fully nuclear Baltic Fleet, and, besides, what could it achieve – apart from starting a nuclear World War III?

There is something equally unrealistic about Nato's stance today. Nato was set up 60 years ago to protect and defend the security area 'from the Urals to the Atlantic'; in other words, from Turkey in the southeast to Canada in the northwest. By the time the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, the alliance had accomplished its mission of keeping its member nations safe from a nuclear-armed Soviet Union and its allies in the Warsaw Pact.

At the end of the Cold War, the key to the arrangement between 16 nations lay in Article 5 of the founding Atlantic Treaty, which said that an attack on any one member would be considered an attack on all, and all member nations were obliged to respond. This was only invoked once - by George Bush after 9/11 to launch his global 'War on