US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, preparing for a NATO meeting later this week, has warned against all "duplication" of resources between NATO and the European Union's emerging defense policy.
"We believe in the fact that Europe should have a force, but it should not be outside NATO," Albright told journalists on arrival in Budapest late Tuesday on a visit.
"The coordination of this is only logical, especially since there is no point in duplicating resources," she said, repeating Washington's long-standing position on the European defence initiative.
"I hope people will realize that it is a waste of energy, resources and manpower to keep duplicating things," said Albright, scheduled to attend a NATO foreign ministers' session in Brussels on Thursday and Friday.
The European Union is laying the foundations for 60,000-strong rapid reaction force that would be in place by 2003 and would be able to deploy to a crisis zone within 60 days and stay for a year.
While the new force will specialize in peacekeeping, crisis management and humanitarian missions, EU leaders say NATO will remain the cornerstone of trans-Atlantic collective defense.
Albright said she hoped the debate over EU-NATO duplication was over, but added: "I have a feeling that it will be part of the discussion" in Brussels.
US Defense Secretary William Cohen said in Brussels last week that NATO would become a "relic of the past" if the Europeans set up a competing defense structure while failing to live up to their Atlantic commitments.
This week's NATO foreign ministers' meeting will discuss NATO's role in the European Union's defense policy.
An EU summit in Nice last week decided the European Union should become militarily operational as of next year. But aware of Washington's reservations, it stressed that NATO remained the basis of collective defense and the rapid reaction force would not become a European army.
Cohen said in Brussels last week NATO and the EU should establish a mechanism that would allow open and collaborative defense planning, and avoid duplicating military planning organizations that already exist in NATO.
Such duplication "would only result in the weakening of NATO's capabilities" and reduce the United States, Canada and the Europeans "to responding to threats and crises in an ad hoc and fragmented, inefficient fashion." -- BUDAPEST (AFP)
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
