Will the Partnership for Peace (PFP) produce the kind of Baltic security we want to see by the end of this decade? At the outset, I would like to say that security is Latvia's number one foreign policy priority, along with promoting the security and stability of the international system to which our country belongs. While history and specific interests have shaped different zones of security in Europe, there are in reality four broad security issues: collective defense, collective security, conflict prevention, and domestic political and economic reform. All contribute to stability and support the continuity of foreign policy objectives.
This framework should constitute a firm foundation for developing a defense planning system. According to the new Partnership for Peace requirements, defense planning should focus on both national and collective military tasks, and each type of task should have a common policy rationale from which forces and capabilities are derived.
Latvia needs a policy rationale that will ensure that its real and continually changing security requirements determine the supply of military and non-military equipment capable of meeting those requirements. Thus, the search for such a rationale should start with adjusting the process of developing the foreign, defense, and other policies that bear on Latvia's security. In this context, I will first describe NATO's new roles and missions as they relate to the Latvian defense establishment. Next, I will review the evolution of NATO as a systemic entity. Finally, I will try to evaluate the opportunities that new circumstances and the Partnership for Peace offer as a way to yield the kind of regional Baltic security that we would like to see by the year 2000.
As announced at the January 1994 Summit, NATO will move away from fixed force and command structures toward effective, mobile, combined joint task forces. Therefore, some of the missions that are currently being carried out through the Partnership for Peace program will absorb non-NATO units and may involve peace-support operations. NATO will become increasingly active in crisis management and peace-support operations.
This change will affect how forces are trained. Peacekeeping training is very different from training for warfare. Thus, Latvia will require forces simultaneously trained for both types of missions, and their number will be more dependent on capabilities. The difficulty will be reconciling the need for maintaining traditional capabilities with the need for non-traditional capabilities, which include the whole range of peacemaking, peace-enforcing, peacekeeping, disaster relief, and humanitarian operations.
The founders of NATO, I submit, did not think of their creation merely as a classic defense arrangement. The North Atlantic Alliance originated as an open, not a closed, system--as an allied order governed by the voluntary adherence to principles and norms. The organization that built on the North Atlantic Treaty of 4 April 1949 has evolved into an even more inclusive organization and become a component of international order itself, supplementing the collective security system of the United Nations.
At the London Summit in 1990, NATO heads of state set in motion a series of reviews intended to adjust the Alliance to the world that was changing around it. The Summit also outlined for the first time that NATO's security interests were not tied solely to the defense of its own territory. The first step toward NATO's out of area engagement came with the Alliance's Strategic Concept in the Fall of 1991.
In 1992, at the Copenhagen North Atlantic Council meeting--which was a follow-up to the Oslo CSCE meeting--NATO agreed to provide peacekeeping under the CSCE. For the first time, NATO assumed peace support as a new mission and, in this respect, linked to the CSCE. On 10 January 1994, NATO began the process of extending a security influence outside its own existing alliance. NATO has always been, I believe, both an alliance and a system, intra-regional as well as extra-regional. If NATO is to remain an alliance and also a system that contributes to the international security order, however, it may need to expand to the East.
In a presentation to the Atlantic Council on 3 December 1993, then U.S. Defense Secretary Les Aspin explained that Partnership for Peace would provide a "framework for detailed, operational military cooperation for multinational security efforts that has NATO at its core." For the moment at least, no other organization is capable of functioning as an effective agent for coordinating multinational security concerns. The NATO Partnership for Peace program is designed to prevent disequilibrium from arising, and we must build upon that mandate. It also aims to develop closer long-range political and military ties, but we do not consider PFP to be a substitute for full membership in NATO.
We believe that NATO members will realize that Latvia has much to offer the Alliance. Our Presentation Document is being drafted and will be submitted in July 1994. We also plan to establish liaison offices at NATO Headquarters in Brussels and at the Partnership Coordination Cell at Mons. The Baltic Council of Ministers, which was established on 13 June 1994, will accelerate the creation of the common Baltic peacekeeping battalion for the three states. This battalion will be made available to the Combined Joint Task Force for employment in all peace-support operations. In addition, we expect that our aims for the PFP will be met as efficiently as possible and that, via "sixteen plus one," we will become active, reliable, and stable partners.
The expansion of NATO is inevitable. Yet we do not expect rapid entry into NATO since shifting the Alliance's defense lines may raise concerns for those countries that would be near its new borders.
Today, the new military establishments of the three Baltic States are being organized from the ground up. Only limited financial resources can be allocated to them, however, without weakening our national security by compromising political and social stability. Consequently, it will be financially impossible to deploy well-equipped military forces for a decade or more. Until then, our challenge will be to maintain a credible military force posture in order to support our regional security objectives.
Security relationships in the year 2000 are likely to have very different features from those of 1994. We are facing a complex agenda as we think about and plan for the future. To cite President Woodrow Wilson's remarks in January 1917, "There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace."