On 20 August 2008, after a long period of dithering and uncertainty, Poland joined the Czech Republic in signing an agreement with the United States authorising the deployment of elements of the American national missile defence system on its soil. As far as Poland is concerned, this means ten interceptor missiles for deployment, by 2013 at the latest. For Condoleezza Rice, whose patience had been strained by Polish procrastination and demands for compensation, ‘this agreement... will help us to confront one of the new threats of the twenty-first century, long-range missiles... launched from countries such as Iran or North Korea.’ Despite this, as regards threats analysts have noted the coincidence of the Georgian conflict and this hurried signature. Moscow’s accusations regarding the true motives of the East European countries, which seem to have less to do with the ballistic threat of a rogue state than with an atavistic mistrust of Russia, have inevitably been taken into account. At a deeper level, the fait accompli policy in Poland and the Czech Republic has demolished a number of previous approaches patiently negotiated by NATO, which did its utmost to avoid exacerbating Russian concerns. Any consensual European debate having been invalidated, the problem now centres on a single certainty: nothing will divert the United States from its Third Site project. It only remains for it to accommodate European interests as best it can. Can NATO act as a catalyst for such a rebalancing?

Political Determinism

The Atlantic Alliance is both a political organization and a kind of ‘collective barracks’, which results in two distinctive consequences. In its political guise, NATO is a forum for debate. The European nations which cohabit there agree on neither the Alliance’s Strategic Concept, which has continually been reconfigured since the fall of the Berlin Wall, nor on the attitude to adopt towards Russia, or even on the intensity of the critical dialogue to be conducted with the United States. The purely military aspect of NATO, on the other hand, is much less problematic. The pooling of strategic capabilities, joint training, work on interoperability and standardisation do not produce great controversy, each European country recognising their operational value. These two aspects form an apparently balanced structure, in spite of the disproportionate weight of the United States. If the missile defence problem has occupied a place apart in NATO for the last ten years, that is because the logic of its operation risks disturbing this balance between military activities and political debate. In an integrated missile defence system, where decisions must be taken in a few minutes, control rests with the designers of the system architecture. A political free hand is accorded by the partners and allies once and for all. No revision is possible and the determinism is total.

To explore all the implications of missile defence, two avenues of study and thought have been followed within NATO. The first, relatively consensual, concerns theatre missile defence. In May 2001, NATO initiated two exploratory contracts for a future defence system, aimed at dealing with missiles with a range not exceeding 3,000 km. The aim of the Active Layered Theatre Ballistic Missile Defence (ALTBMD), agreed at the Istanbul summit at the end of 2004 and activated in 2006, is now to integrate the theatre missile defence resources of the Alliance nations into a common architecture, managed by a programming organization under the Conference of National Armaments Directors (CNAD). ALTBMD represents an investment of e700 million. France occupies an important industrial and technological place in it, with its SAMP/T (surface-to-air medium-range) system. There is also the work carried out under the auspices of the NATO-Russia Council, which is, or rather was, exploring the possibility of dealing with the theatre missile threat in a coordinated way.