The Nato Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer will step down at Nato’s 60th anniversary summit in early April. The former Dutch foreign minister has had some successes during his time in office but his tenure has been dominated by trans-Atlantic rifts, Nato’s struggling Afghan mission, and a failure to work more corporately with the EU. Little of this has actually been his fault but nor has he been able to help chart a way out of trouble.
NATO is no longer the place where Americans or Europeans go to talk about strategic questions. This is true not only for non-military topics such as the global financial crisis or climate change, but also for classic foreign policy problems such as the resurgence of Russia, the rise of China, and Iran’s nuclear programme.
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