NATO and the environment.

• Author: Berlind, Alan
• Position: North Atlantic Treaty Organization - Report

Editor's Note: As NATO celebrates its sixtieth anniversary, a retired senior Foreign Service Officer recalls President Nixon's initiative on its twentieth anniversary to create a NATO "Committee on the Challenges to Modern Society." Despite great scepticism about its utility and appropriateness for a military alliance, the new body quickly became effective and highly valued for its work on the environment, and it continues to thrive.--Ed.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization's sixtieth anniversary on April 4, 2009, brings to mind an earlier birthday and an event that, without in the least detracting from the Alliance's principal missions of defence and deterrence, gave NATO for the first time a human face and a peaceful link to the outside world. In April 1969, allied heads of state and government celebrated the twentieth anniversary in Washington, the treaty's birthplace, to review two decades of success in keeping the Cold War at that temperature and to lay out broad plans for the future. As to the latter, it was up to the host, President Richard Nixon, to come up with new initiatives, and his gurus and speech writers did their job.

Inevitably, three "bright ideas" emerged, two without much substance and the third seemingly without hope. First, Nixon proposed that, in addition to the occasional summit meetings, the more frequent gatherings of foreign ministers and defense ministers, and the daily consultations at all levels, military and civilian, among national delegations at NATO headquarters, there be regular meetings at the deputy foreign minister level. Secondly, the already existing Atlantic Policy Advisory Group, charged with long-range planning, should be complemented by a new medium-range policy planning group. Other than requiring additional manpower, these two rather redundant proposals were relatively harmless and were welcomed with a ceremonial clinking of glasses.

But it was the third bright idea that brought the assembled dignitaries not to their feet but to extremes of wonderment and despair. A certain amount of pre-summit consultation had of course preceded Nixon's bombshell, but nothing compared to the heavy lifting required in the weeks and months thereafter to convince loyal but unbelieving allies, as well as highly skeptical American civil servants, that NATO, designed for military purposes, and despite having had detente added to its objectives two years earlier, had, or should have, anything to do with international cooperation on seeking solutions to environmental problems common to developed nations: in short, the creation of a NATO Committee on the Challenges to Modern Society (CCMS).

Not just Alliance member states felt uneasy with the idea. Other organizations also questioned the need for yet another environmental effort at the international level, among them the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the European Economic Community (EEC--the forerunner to the European Union), the Economic Commission for Europe (ECE), and the United Nations, then in the process of launching the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP). All were concerned that a NATO competitor would distract attention from their efforts and command resources from national capitals upon which they depended. Their concerns were to be borne out.

Nixon's Commitment to the Environment

Whatever political and promotional motivations lay behind the CCMS proposal, Nixon was genuinely committed to environmental protection. It was he who at the outset of his administration established a Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) at the White House and the Environmental Protection...