To all appearances the Riga summit seems a minor one: few decisions were taken because Afghanistan was the major topic of discussion. The only thing that was new was the offer of a partnership with Serbia and Bosnia. This was hardly surprising, since many issues (including the contact group on Afghanistan, partnership and energy security) had been left at working group level, and with the Secretary General in particular. All of which serves to illustrate the lack of political declarations, the lack of inspiration and the lack of drive. To the satisfaction of France the idea of an overall partnership was postponed until a later date.
From a broader perspective, the military reality in Afghanistan has brought out into the open a number of matters of dissent that had been thought silenced or pacified, and problems that had been thought resolved. After Riga it is now clear that the expansion of NATO missions poses a problem, both with regard to operations well away from Europe and to those tasks which are not strictly military, a problem which gives legitimacy to the ESDP. From this point of view, the Riga summit was not insignificant.
The Riga summit has been described as minor by analysts, disappointing by the more Atlanticist among them. Certainly it does not bear comparison with other summits held since the end of the Cold War. The Rome summit in 1991 created a North Atlantic Cooperation Council and agreed an initial Strategic Concept. Those in Brussels in 1994, then Madrid in 1997, defined the Alliance’s European Security and Defence Identity (ESDI), and the fiftieth anniversary summit in Washington in 1999 took decisions on the first enlargement towards the East and the new Strategic Concept. Perhaps the most important, though, was that held in Prague in 2002 which, as well agreeing as a new wave of enlargement, adopted the principle of the NATO Reaction Force and fundamentally reformed the structure. At the less far-reaching summit in Istanbul in 2004, Alliance interest was shown in the Gulf States (the Istanbul Initiative). None of this was accepted at Riga.
On the contrary, serious questioning on the usefulness of NATO was once again in the forefront of discussions, and this despite the fact that the Alliance’s commitment to numerous operations from 1995 to 2005 would lead one to believe that it was no longer an issue. The situation in Afghanistan occupied everyone’s thoughts and prevented advances elsewhere. For all that, this feeble result was perhaps not as insignificant as it appears, since it would seem to suggest that the Alliance has bitten off more than it can chew. If so, then it would signify the end of the predominance of European security affairs in NATO thinking. If for nothing else, perhaps the Riga summit will be remembered for this.
Afghanistan
The increasingly difficult operational conditions in Afghanistan have dealt a blow to optimism. Three months ago we were writing that NATO could not fail,(1) yet today some hesitate even to mention the possibility. The situation in Afghanistan is critical: at the time of the summit, 184 Allied soldiers had been killed since the beginning of 2006 (of which 91 were American) whereas there were only 130 deaths in the whole of 2005. The issue is even more sensitive given the number of conflicts seen in 2006 during the takeover of responsibility of the regions in the south and east. The preparation for Riga made public the debate on reinforcement of Allied troops fighting in the south (British, Dutch and Canadian) and the east (American). There were three differing positions.
