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On the Southern Flank: A Reassessment of NATO's Mediterranean Strategy

1986; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 6; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sais.1986.0065

1946-4444

Robert Rudney,

European and Russian Geopolitical Military Strategies

ON THE SOUTHERN FLANK:_ A REASSESSMENT OF NATO'S MEDITERRANEAN STRATEGY Robert S. Rudney HE MEDITERRANEAN TODAY IS MORE THAN the southern flank of NATO. It is the meeting place of Europe, Africa, and Asia, home of more than 300 million people, locus for the transport of a billion tons of cargo annually. A look at the map demonstrates the importance of the Mediterranean to the European peninsula. Its crenulated northern shore, with thousands of islands, provides much of the shelter and harbor for the continent's shipping. The surrounding lands are relatively poor, dry, and rocky and depend overwhelmingly on maritime commerce for their existence . The sea itself extends some 2500 miles from Gibraltar to Beirut and averages about 500 miles in width from north to south. Rome is thus closer to Tripoli than it is to Paris, Marseilles closer to Algiers than to Brussels, and Athens closer to Alexandria than to Rome. The map shows that from a global perspective the Mediterranean and Red seas are intercontinental inlets providing the main line of communication between the Atlantic and Indian oceans. The enclosure of the Black Sea within the Asian mainland is also quite evident — and immensely important. Historically, the Mediterranean has been the cradle of civilization but also of conflict. Egyptians and Hittites, Greeks and Persians, Romans and Carthaginians, Byzantines and Arabs, Venetians and Ottomans, French and Austrians have all sought some measure of control over sections of this region. The Renaissance city-state in Italy was not so much The author is research associate, Division of International Relations, Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain), Belgium. He is now engaged in an assessment of the European security and defense research sector and in a study of longrange trends in the European security system. He is coeditor of the Directory Guide ofEuropean Security and Defense Research and is the author of a number ofjournal and newspaper articles on current political and strategic developments in Europe. 163 164 SAIS REVIEW a Mediterranean work of art, as Jacob Burckhardt believed, but rather an exercise in self-defense and survival. The city-states provided the model for the establishment of independent, secular nation-states in seventeenthand eighteenth-century Europe. These nation-states distinguished themselves primarily as instruments of war and territorial expansion. War— and the struggle for supremacy between wars—has constituted a political reality for the Mediterranean from the very beginning of recorded history. Generally, the power that controlled the sea routes dominated the region. In the nineteenth century, England asserted her hegemony over the opposition of imperial France (essentially a land power) and successfully defended this position against the encroachments of czarist Russia (also a land power). This was the first time that a nonlittoral nation had dominated the region, and the history of these years provides a case study in extended deterrence. Like so much of twentiethcentury history, developments in the Mediterranean can be explained as the result of the decline and fall of the British Empire. The disastrous victory of the British in World War II only accelerated this process. Two years after the war's end the British had abdicated their role as a great power in the region. The ensuing power vacuum was filled by the United States, a newcomer to Mediterranean political struggles and intrigues. From the start American policy was predicated on a strategy of opposition to (or "containment" of) the expansionist threat by the Soviet Union, the successor state to czarist Russia. Through the nineteenth century, Russia had pursued limited aims in the Mediterranean area. Basically, the czarist regime reacted to opportunities presented by the constant deterioration of the Ottoman Empire . Russia's "Truman Doctrine" was enshrined in provisions of the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji (1774), which gave the czar vaguely worded moral authority to protect the rights of Christians under Ottoman rule. Russian policy through the nineteenth century was a study in contradictions, since it upheld the principles of legitimacy and sovereignty yet continually demanded concessions from the Ottomans to meet the "national" aspirations of the Balkan Christian peoples. Geography, too, was difficult. The same Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarji granted Russia a possession on the Black Sea which thereafter became a Russian...