Can you hear the laughter? A low throaty guffaw emanates from a cellblock in The Hague. A rasping chuckle breaks the silence in Baghdad. And in a deep corner of Hell there’s a chorus of hilarity from ghosts who haven’t had anything to celebrate in decades. For Slobodan Milosevic, President Saddam Hussein and the spirits of politburos past, these must be the most delicious of days. The alliance which was their enemy is now fighting itself. Nato, the physical embodiment of the West’s willingness to defend its values, is a squabbling, sundered, supine mess.

The decision by France, Germany and Belgium to veto military aid to Turkey is more than just a signal of division and irresolution in the struggle to disarm Saddam. It may be the fatal blow which fractures one of history’s most successful alliances.

Nato was held together throughout its most difficult days by the same cement which kept the Iron Curtain in place — the fear of Soviet power. When the Berlin Wall fell, Nato began to crumble. It had lost an evil empire, and struggled to find a role.

In the decade after the collapse of communism Nato faced two significant challenges. They exposed faultlines in the alliance which now threaten its foundations. The first of those challenges was the break-up of Yugoslavia, the second has been the entrenchment of democracy in Eastern Europe.

The Nato response to war in its Balkan backyard uncannily prefigures the current split over how to deal with Iraq. Faced with tyranny, Europe’s anciens régimes preferred appeasement to confrontation. The Franco-German proposal outlined this week for containing Saddam, by sending in more UN monitors and spinning out talks, has melancholy echoes of the disastrous European effort to constrain Milosevic.

While US opinion ran heavily in favour of using military force to strike at the Serbs, and lending support to the Bosnians to secure their freedom, the Europeans preferred endless negotiation with Belgrade and the deployment of UN personnel. The consequence of European irresolution was tragic. The UN’s peacekeepers became Milosevic’s prisoners, hostages in blue helmets whose presence on the ground only delayed the eventual reckoning. Worse still, the peacekeepers became prison guards in the service of Milosevic, penning Bosnians into “safe havens” until the Serbs came to massacre them.

The immediate problem with the Franco-German plan is the failure to learn the lesson of Yugoslavia; just as you cannot keep a peace when a dictator wants war, so you cannot inspect disarmament when a tyrant will not disarm. As Hans Blix has pointed out, he doesn’t need any more men on the ground, he needs a change of heart from the only man that matters, Saddam. And division among Nato members can only encourage Saddam to believe that no change is necessary because the West does not have the stomach to enforce its will.

Which brings us to the deeper problem which Nato now faces, the identity crisis at the heart of the alliance. There is a philosophical division among member states which will only grow as the alliance is set to expand. It can be characterised as a split between old and new Europe, but it is fundamentally a division between those who believe that foreign policy should involve ethics backed with force and those who don’t. It is a divide between Palmerstonians on one side and pacifists, parasites or pirates on the other.

On one wing are Britain under the quintessentially Palmerstonian hard-liberal Blair, the centre-right Governments of Spain and Italy and, most tellingly, those Nato nations which have suffered under communism, such as Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. They are all far more resolute in pressing for action than France, Germany and Belgium. More determined still are those nations, the Vilnius Ten, knocking on Nato’s door. These countries remember, as keenly as the citizens of Bosnia, the consequences of appeasement.

These were the nations which languished under dictatorship while the West practised détente. These were the peoples who delighted at Reagan’s depiction of their oppressor as the evil empire, even as the European Left blanched at such indelicacy. These same nations enjoy their liberty now because Reagan and Thatcher were resolute in their determination to confront Soviet aggression.

They remember that the “peace movements” of the European Left which fought against the deployment of cruise and Pershing were toasted in the Kremlin. So it doesn’t surprise them when Saddam proclaims: “We admire the development of the peace movement around the world in the last few years. We pray to God to empower all those working against war.” These nations recognise that when foreign policy is all therapy and no discipline, an exercise in feeling someone else’s pain without a willingness to endure it, then it achieves nothing.

Set against them are those who now practise pacifism, such as Schröder’s Germany, which will not countenance any meaningful action against Iraq, parasite nations such as Belgium, which treats Nato as just another bureaucracy to keep its restaurants afloat, and the quintessential pirate nation, France. French elites treat foreign policy like sex, a sphere in which morality is never allowed to intrude. Just ask a Rwandan Tutsi.

A coalition which seeks to satisfy the needs of the hard-headed on one side and the soft-headed, or plain hard-hearted, on the other places unnecessary strains on itself. Alliances are means to an end, not ends in themselves. Nato itself may be the last casualty of communism, superseded by new coalitions that better reflect our world’s new divisions. But no one who believes democracy is worth fighting for can feel anything but regret.

michael.gove@thetimes.co.uk

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