NATO’s summit will open Sunday afternoon in Chicago as NATO summits do, with pomp and blather about a needed, purposeful, unified, stronger, more efficient Alliance. As austerity’s cousin, “efficiency” will receive buzzword status this year in the form of “Smart Defence,” NATO’s shiny new concept and the source of the sad, unintentional irony at the heart of this summit. This irony will become apparent when NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen stands before the world and touts Smart Defence in the same breath as he applauds NATO’s commitment to an epically dumb Washington-led boondoggle called the European Phased Adaptive Approach Missile Defense System.
The mouthful of a name contains the basics of the system. It is based in Europe, will be rolled out in phases, and, compared to the Bush-era system it replaced, was sold as an adaptive approach to some of the political and technological realities of European missile defense. It is the first missile defense project to be officially embraced by NATO allies, who historically have been left cold by the American faith that high-speed warheads can reliably be struck by other missiles hundreds of miles above the earth. Officially, consensus-run NATO has gotten religion. In Chicago, all 28 Alliance members will stand behind the outrageous lie that the first of the system’s four phases has achieved “interim operational capability.” NATO brass will declare with a straight face that a foundation has been laid for the next three phases scheduled between now and 2020. The U.S. is so excited it couldn’t wait for Chicago, and last week Navy Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery said that Phase 1 — a triad of Aegis ships equipped with interceptor batteries, a command-and-control base in Ramstein, Germany, and a radar in Turkey — now “provides an initial capability to provide some level of defense of Europe against a threat emanating from the Middle East.”
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