NATO Summit: What can these leaders do?

NATO has come to Newport, in Wales, and to Celtic Manor, the hilltop-perched stone holiday resort that sits above the M4. The taxi driver from the train station said that he had never known business slower. Last weekend, the police were warning about protestors, telling locals to prepare for a crowd of anything up to 10,000. In the end only 600 turned up.

But that didn’t stop the police from shutting roads all across the town—and beyond. And the security is extraordinary. The train station had police inside and out. In the car park, more police. Police standing in pairs along all of the roads at two hundred yard intervals and at the Holiday Inn hotel, a division of police, a fleet of vans, patrol cars, horse boxes, so many police that a game of rugby was underway in the car park, the shouts not denoting attack by enraged anarchists, but a try.

The trip up from the hotel to the secure zone was by coach, through lines of yet more police, across the ring of steel—specifics here would be inappropriate—and then into the great sprawling zones and tents and food villages of the Nato Summit 2014, the media centre a huge prefab construction of milling scribblers from around the world. The room, lined with screens a place of constant, thrumming inactivity.

Then on the screens appeared Anders Fogh-Rasmussen, the Secretary General of Nato (see our interview with him here) and David Cameron, the Prime Minister, awkwardly passing onto the main stage to stand side by side and welcome not only the President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, but also the President of the United States, the man who is, after all, paying for the whole thing. Handshakes, a brief moment of posing for the cameras, and then off stage right. But no, not quite. An embarrassed pause. Cameron and Rasmussen come back onto the stage, Cameron somewhat red of cheek having forgotten to pose with Rasmussen for their handshake, which they presently do. They leave the stage once more with amused chucking of the shoulders—how could they have been so forgetful?

There is much theatre here: security theatre, political theatre. But this is a moment of great diplomatic and geopolitical crisis. The leaders of the free world milled about the screens, Angela Merkel, flanked by US generals, Philip Hammond, locked in conversation with John Kerry. It is impressive. The question hanging over all of these proceedings is: what can these leaders do? Is Nato capable of meeting the challenges that it faces, not only from the old adversary in the Kremlin, but also from the new enemy, in the parched wastes of eastern Syria? The time has come for the west to act. Can it?

David Cameron met President Obama on Thursday morning and the two of them travelled to a local primary school together for a photo op. A government source said the two discussed the situation in Iraq and Syria, and that on the question of whether Britain will bomb Isis fighters, Cameron is “not ruling things out.” There is now a “clear determination to confront [Isis],” on the part of the British government, and whips back in Westminster are speaking to Conservative MPs to assess their willingness to vote for air strikes against the extremists. MPs are reported to be amenable to the idea—keener certainly than they were last summer to vote for air strikes against the Assad regime. The UK has been also supplying and training Iraqi Kurds, a type of activity that does not require a vote in the Commons. The most recent air drop was on Wednesday night, when supplies were flown into Erbil, the capital city of the Kurdish region of northern Iraq.

The focus was now, a government source said, on ensuring the creation in Baghdad of an “inclusive” Iraqi government under the new Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi. It is hoped that the new leadership would include more Sunni members, in order to wind back the sectarian and divisive schism that opened up under the government of Nouri Al-Maliki, a highly sectarian Shia. Under the terms of the Iraqi constitution, a new government must be formed by no later than next Friday.

Cameron also met the King of Jordan for talks on Thursday, at which they too discussed Isis. Government sources said that the talks were not in response to any new specific threat and that Isis has not crossed the border into Jordan, a remark contradicted by a paper released on the same day by the Washington Institute, the US-based security think tank, which said that:

“Over the past few months, the Jordan Armed Forces (JAF) have prevented several cross-border infiltration attempts by armed groups from Syria. The latest skirmish—an August 24 clash in which the JAF killed two and captured five—was only one of several troubling incidents.”

On the second of the subjects to dominate the summit, Cameron convened and chaired a meeting on the crisis in Ukraine attended by President Poroshenko as well as Barack Obama. It was intended, one government source said, as a show of “solidarity” for Poroshenko and the discussions inevitably turned towards Vladimir Putin of Russia. What can be done about him?

Putin has already been hit by one set of sanctions, introduced by the west back in July and more will follow very shortly. Diplomats are currently meeting in Brussels to hammer out the details of a joint US-EU programme of restrictions on Russian businesses and individuals. There are already sanctions on five Russian state banks and it looks like these will be intensified, possibly with the addition of further restrictions on their ability to borrow on capital markets. There will be visa restrictions and travel bans on a number of members of Putin’s inner circle. State defence and energy companies will also be targeted, but crucially it is unlikely that Gazprom will be one of them. The reliance of several European countries, especially Germany, on Russian gas makes this last element of the sanctions especially sensitive.

The intention of these sanctions is to send a message: to get Putin back to the negotiating table by making it clear that he is not as indomitable as he perhaps assumes. That he has to stop the flow of weapons into Ukraine. That he has reached a red line. Putin’s release on Thursday of a “seven Point Peace Plan” for Ukraine suggests that his attitude may be changing. The manoeuvring against Putin is subtle and calculated, indications that the pace is being set by the cautious occupant of the White House.

So is that it? Will western governments do no more than offer solidarity with Ukraine and voice their disgust at Isis? A Number Ten spokesman made it clear that there was to be no big declaration at the summit. There would only be signals. Signals—of which the largest is the Nato summit itself, a very big signal to the world that the West still has clout. It is directed partly at Isis, but more so at Putin, at present engaged in a summit in Minsk where, hosted by the Belarussian president, he is attempting to negotiate a ceasefire with Ukrainian officials. One analyst commented that he Nato summit has “concentrated minds,” in Moscow. Another suggested that there was a risk that the Russian President would make some conciliatory gestures towards Ukraine and the west, but then return Ukraine to a position of “frozen war,” much as he has done before, in Abkhazia, South Osettia and more.

These are terrible problems of immense complexity, as was made clear in the joint article written by Cameron and Obama in Thursday’s Times. Nato and the various Governments represented at Newport are talking very tough. The sense here is that there is an increasing willingness to act. Whether anything will come of it is quite another matter.