All agreements were not actually made in the
North Atlantic Council meeting, but in fact, it was made in the Istanbul Summit, 2003, except for the signing of the missile defense contract which happened on 28 November. The Council meeting was held on 29 November.
Main topics While the tensions between NATO members from the build-up to the
invasion of Iraq had dissipated, the NATO summit, and the months preceding the summit, were marked by divisions between the United States and the United Kingdom on the one side and France, Germany, Italy and Spain on the other. Two rifts existed, one about the military contributions to the
war in Afghanistan, and the other concerning whether or not NATO should assume a more global role.
War in Afghanistan , Afghanistan. The need for more troops in the south of the country was a major discussion point of the summit Before and during the summit US president
George W. Bush,
British prime minister Tony Blair,
Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper and
Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende made a plea to European NATO members to make more troops available for deployment in
Afghanistan, remove the
national caveats (i.e. national restrictions on how, when and where forces can be used) and start sending its troops into the conflict-ridden south of the country. According to
Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) General
James L. Jones it was not the lack of combat troops and the caveats were the problem, but the lack of adequate helicopters and
military intelligence to support
airlift and on-the-ground operations. A number of NATO member states also pledged to provide additional assets, including fighters, helicopters, infantry companies as well as training teams that will mentor the
Afghan National Army.
NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said that the removal of some of the caveats meant that some 20,000 of the 32,000 NATO troops in
ISAF are made "more usable" for combat duties and that 90% of the formal mission requirements were now filled. Military sources, however, told reporters at the summit that these caveats never existed in emergency situations, adding that it would be a strange alliance where one country's soldiers refused to support their allies in an emergency. The group was modelled on the one set up for the
Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s. Political scientist
Joseph Nye commented that "while the Riga summit relaxed some of these caveats to allow assistance to allies in dire circumstances, Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, and the US are doing most of the fighting in southern Afghanistan, while French, German, and Italian troops are deployed in the quieter north. It is difficult to see how NATO can succeed in stabilizing Afghanistan unless it is willing to commit more troops and give commanders more flexibility." The controversy surrounding the differences in contributions to Afghanistan indeed remained after the summit. For instance, in March 2007, British commanders accused the NATO members that refused to fight in the conflict-ridden south (in non-emergency situations) of causing "huge resentment" and a sense of betrayal and undermined the credibility of the alliance. They added that despite the earlier pleas for reinforcements or to have "operational caveats" removed, some countries, notably France and Germany, were still not heeding their requests. Besides the above discussion about contributions and caveats, the summit was noticed to paint an optimistic picture of the war in Afghanistan and Afghanistan's future.
Role of NATO The second, more fundamental rift, concerned a discussion about whether NATO should form close relationships with countries far beyond NATO's borders, in particular Australia, Japan and South Korea. The United States and some other NATO members pressed for a closer relationship with these countries.
R. Nicholas Burns,
Under Secretary for Political Affairs explained the US proposal: "We seek a partnership with them so that we can train more intensively (...) and grow closer to them because we are deployed with them. Australia, South Korea and Japan are in Afghanistan. They have all been in Iraq (...) [and] in the Balkans." It was however not clear how far this plan would have gone in practice, but the US insisted they were not seeking to turn NATO into a global alliance: membership would not be offered to the prospective new partners. The idea of a "global" NATO however was strongly opposed by France, which considers NATO a regional defense alliance that should not spread its wings too far over the globe. The French Defence Minister
Michele Alliot-Marie summarized the position of France as follows: "The development of a global partnership could... dilute the natural solidarity between Europeans and North Americans in a fuzzy entity [and it would] send a bad political message, that of a campaign launched by the West against those who don't share their ideas. What a pretext we would offer to those who promote the idea of a
clash of civilisations." It is expected that PfP membership is for these three countries the first step towards NATO membership. As a result, the PfP offer sparked the anger of the UN tribunal trying suspected war criminals from the Balkans. The initial phase included expanding those countries' participation in relevant existing NATO training and education programmes, and the establishment of a Middle East faculty at the
NATO Defense College in Rome. As a second phase, NATO would consider supporting the establishment of a Security Cooperation Centre in the region, to be owned by the MD and ICI countries, with regional funding and NATO assistance. Senior NATO staff have tended to highlight this project as evidence of NATO's forward-thinking and its desire to avoid becoming a party to a "clash of civilizations". The CPG intends to provide a framework and political direction for NATO's continuing transformation in the coming 10 to 15 years. More specifically, the document expresses the belief that the principal threats to the Alliance in the coming decades are terrorism, proliferation,
failing states, regional crises, misuse of new technologies, and disruption of the flow of vital resources. According to this document, the Alliance should adapt to these new threats and set out the Alliance vis-a-vis capability issues, planning disciplines and intelligence for the next 10 to 15 years, including among others the need for joint expeditionary forces and the capability to deploy and sustain them over long periods of time. The document further underlined that NATO's forces should be able to conduct a variety of missions, from high to low intensity, and emphasized the likelihood that NATO will need to carry out a greater number and range of smaller operations. The CPG also confirmed the principle that 40% of the member states' military forces must be re-deployable, and 8% must constantly be on operations abroad.
Energy security 's absence from the conference The Riga summit was the first NATO summit that underscored the need for
energy security, following the
Russia-Ukraine gas dispute. The "Riga Summit Declaration" (par. 45) stated that "Alliance security interests can also be affected by the disruption of the flow of vital resources" and that it supported "a coordinated, international effort to assess risks to energy infrastructures and to promote energy infrastructure security." It further states that NATO leaders "direct the
Council in Permanent Session to consult on the most immediate risks in the field of energy security, to define those areas where NATO may add value to safeguard the security interests of the Allies and, upon request, assist national and international efforts." It was even proposed that Putin could honour
French president Jacques Chirac, who was at the summit and whose 74th birthday coincided with the summit, by visiting Latvia. He later made clear that this would not go ahead. The Alliance also affirmed that NATO remained open to new European members under Article X of the
North Atlantic Treaty, but remained largely silent on the prospects of Georgia and Ukraine, two countries that had declared membership as a goal, as the summit limited itself to noting the efforts of both countries to conduct an "intensified dialogue" with NATO. In other words, Ukraine showed more ambivalence in its desire to join NATO, whereas in Georgia the pro-Western
Rose Revolution coalition remained united.
NATO Response Force NATO Secretary-General
Jaap de Hoop Scheffer announced that the
NATO Response Force was finally fully operational since all capabilities necessary were in place. The force is believed to be capable of performing missions worldwide across the whole spectrum of operations (such as
evacuations,
disaster management,
counterterrorism, and acting as "an initial entry force") and can number up to 25,000 troops and should be able to start to deploy after five days' notice and sustain itself for operations lasting 30 days or longer if resupplied. The heads of state and government also agreed to share the costs of airlift for the short notice deployments of the Response Force.
2010 Theatre Missile Defence In September 2006, NATO selected an international consortium led by
Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) to build an
Integration Test Bed for the Alliance's future
Active Layered Theatre Missile Defence (ALTBMD) capability. After two months of negotiations, ALTBMD Programme Manager, General (Ret) Billard, and SAIC contracting Officer, Mr.
Robert Larrick, signed the contract on the first day of NATO's Riga Summit. This decision was based on an unpublished report agreed upon earlier by NATO ministers following a study into the feasibility of theatre missile defences. This programme is one of three programmes that NATO is pursuing in the area of missile defence. The contract puts the Alliance on track for having, by 2010, a system to protect troops on missions against
ballistic missiles. The contract is worth approximately 75 million EUR for work that would be conducted over a period of six years. The theatre missile defence would be a multi-layered system of systems, comprising
early warning system sensors,
radar and various
interceptors. While NATO member countries would provide the sensors and weapon systems, NATO itself would develop a commonly funded NATO architecture to integrate all of these elements. The development of the ALTBMD system was agreed by NATO members in large part because it is limited. NATO members are deeply divided about the multi-tiered BMD architecture promoted by the US
Missile Defense Agency (MDA). ==Views on the summit==