2004 Istanbul Summit - Reviews

Reviews

The international media reported that expectations for a successful summit were deliberately set low, because NATO leaders wanted to avoid a flare-up over the Iraq War. Therefore they agreed to meet the modest goals the Alliance had already set for itself in trying to stabilize Afghanistan, and endorsed a tepid version of the Bush administration’s initiative to promote modernization and democracy in the Arab world. The newspaper further commented that the summit had "a sort of "Waiting for Godot" quality about it — European leaders biding time, neither creating a crisis nor mending fences, in the hope that the American election in November will somehow spare them from the choice between having to deal with Bush and letting Iraq, and NATO, slide into further disarray." Other analysis were even more critical: "There have been NATO summits at which neither a special occasion was acknowledged nor decisions of particular relevance made. One example is the NATO summit in Istanbul in 2004, where the concluded measures hardly required a meeting of the heads of state and government, and the media presence was not justified by the agreed-upon resolutions." US and other government officials however emphasized that the summit was significant in terms of the alliance's unprecedented outreach beyond its traditional North Atlantic focus and its aggressive emphasis on force planning to tackle new challenges worldwide.

Whether or not the summit is considered important for its content, the meeting held some symbolic importance. First of all, it was the first NATO summit between the leaders of the North-American and Western European states, and Eastern European states, states that were finally, after decades of Cold War tensions, together in the same alliance. The media attention that these new members received during the summit, opened public debates about whether there was still a consensus about the purpose, the perceived threats and the future borders of NATO among its 26 members. That this was not the case, became clear in the run-up to the 2006 Riga Summit. Secondly, the holding of the summit in Istanbul made it the most eastern summit in NATO's history. It marked the increasingly key role played by Turkey as a major strategic hub due to its location close to the hotbeds of tension and conflict in the South Caucasus and the Middle East. The location of the summit made clear that NATO’s security concerns had shifted towards the southeastern part of the European continent. By shifting eastwards, the Alliance’s centre of gravity ventured into very different areas from those on which the Cold War military NATO had focused.

NATO's 2004 Istanbul summit was also remarkably silent on the subject of nuclear weapons policy and non-proliferation, as opposed to pre-summit diplomacy and earlier post-Cold War NATO summits and contrary to the demonstrations going on in Istanbul. In June 2004, shortly before the summit, NATO issued two fact sheets on nuclear policy, portraying the developments within NATO in a favourable light in the run up to the 2005 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference. In practice, no real changes since the end of the Cold War were implemented, as since the 1994 US Nuclear posture review the number of US nuclear weapons based in Europe remained unchanged, and as Cold War nuclear sharing arrangements dating back to the 1960s remained in force. Additionally, no changes were made to Alliance nuclear policy since the 1999 Strategic Concept.