Nato’s original Secretary General, the first Baron Ismay, pledged in 1952 that ‘not a ship, not a plane, not a gun’ would the North Atlantic Alliance ever use for any purpose other than self-defence. ‘There is no margin for aggressive adventure’, he maintained. ‘It never enters our thoughts.’footnote¹ This Cold War posture did not long outlast the Wall. Beginning in 1992 with Yugoslav flyovers, nato has ventured ‘out of area’ into Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia, post-invasion Afghanistan and Iraq, even Somalia and Sudan. Washington’s preferred auxiliaries for its expansionary ‘new world order’, Alliance forces now deploy ‘wherever they are needed’.footnote² The instigators of these campaigns may have quit the stage, except for the odd cameo—Messrs Clinton and Bush laying claim to stricken Haiti; peace envoy Blair urging war on Iran. However, many of their counsellors remain in situ, even retain an undeserved legitimacy.

A prominent example is the ‘conflict prevention’ outfit, the International Crisis Group. On the face of it, the icg represents a particularly successful ngo incursion into geopolitical affairs. A mid-nineties spin-off from us establishment think-tank the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Crisis Group purports to offer ‘new strategic thinking’ on conflict situations, aided by a global monitoring network it runs across sixty countries, with links to lobbying operations in Washington, New York, Brussels and London. Half of its annual budget of $16m comes from governments—mainly nato members, including the us and Britain—while corporate donors include rbs, Chevron and bhp Billiton; billionaire financier George Soros is a leading patron.footnote³ The organization styles itself as independent and non-partisan, but has consistently championed nato’s wars to fulsome transatlantic praise. Kofi Annan spoke for the entire House when he lauded the icg as ‘a global voice of conscience, and a genuine force for peace’. The credulous Western media also has moments of sycophancy. The ft praises the group’s ‘hard-nosed realism’, the bbc its ‘masterful’ and ‘essential’ research. The Washington Post likens its ‘excellent reports’ to investor credit ratings for conflict-prone states. Noting with admiration that ‘there is nothing cut-and-paste about the research’, the Guardian enthuses: ‘Long may it continue to thrive.’footnote⁴

Such commendation would seem no mean feat, especially given the dubious makeup of the Crisis Group board—a rogue’s gallery even by the standards of international politics. Outgoing president Gareth Evans was the West’s principal apologist for Suharto in East Timor while Australian foreign minister. Co-chair Thomas Pickering was a Reagan point man in Central America’s dirty wars, as us ambassador to El Salvador and one-time intermediary for Contra gunrunners. (This would become a habit: in retirement Pickering sold arms overseas for Boeing.) The Executive Committee includes among its number Mort Abramowitz, self-confessed ‘aggressive interventionist’ and former State Department fire-starter who obtained Stinger missiles for the Afghan Mujahidin; earlier on, while ambassador in Thailand, he had been instrumental in the us policy of backing Pol Pot against the Vietnamese-installed regime. Also featured are stalwart peaceniks Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Advisor; seasoned neocon Ken Adelman; Richard Armitage, Assistant Defense Secretary under Reagan and Deputy Secretary of State under G. W. Bush; retired nato general Wesley Clark, the bomber of Belgrade—alongside foreign friends: the likes of Aleksander Kwas´niewski, Polish promoter of nato and eu accession. Little wonder that us Secretary of State Colin Powell, attending a 2003 icg reception in the State Department, found the occasion ‘something of a reunion’.footnote⁵

These poachers turned gamekeepers retain an affinity with the ‘transatlantic link’. In the post-Soviet era, nato may have lost an enemy but Crisis Group found it a role—firstly ‘humanitarian warfare’, later the War on Terror. The icg’s Cold War veterans exploit their new-found peacemaker status to beat the drum for the Alliance’s onward march. From its capture of a united Germany in 1990, nato has absorbed all the Warsaw Pact satellites. Neutral Yugoslavia proved tougher to crack, but a series of ‘crisis response operations’ have firmly pushed the Western Balkans towards both nato and eu membership. The contribution of the icg’s gunboat diplomacy to the generally permissive environment for Western military operations cannot be precisely gauged. Crisis Group claims that up to half of its recommendations are taken up, at least in part, within a year: doubtless over-generous, though official acclaim does imply distinguished service. Indeed, for newsrooms shorn of foreign correspondents, ill-served by the academic fashion for statistical models and game-theory abstractions, the icg’s freely available, on-the-ground reportage passes for ‘independent’ authority—to all appearances with humanitarian credentials to boot. Yet a reappraisal of the group’s career, stripping away the usual pieties, will show its principals to be poachers still.

icg publicity invokes mismanagement of post-Cold War conflict as the imperative for its formation. Rwanda often features, although preparatory work within the Carnegie Endowment predated the 1994 genocide. In fact, the crucible for the new organization was not Africa but Europe. An icg history, released in 2010 to celebrate the group’s first fifteen years ‘on the front lines’, acknowledges that Bosnia ‘essentially defined its early years’. The account opens with Carnegie president Mort Abramowitz in besieged Sarajevo in early 1993, reconnoitring ngo activity for George Soros’s Open Society network alongside pr-man-for-hire Mark Malloch Brown, shortly of the World Bank.

At that point, Washington was busily scuttling European attempts to manage the Yugoslav fissure. For the us,nato’s preservation as ‘primary instrument of Western defence and security’ meant neutralizing Maastricht talk of eu capabilities.footnote⁶ Crisis Group later acknowledged that America intervened in Bosnia ‘to save the Atlantic Alliance from disintegrating’.footnote⁷ The elder Bush administration actively deepened the crisis by encouraging its Bosnian Muslim client to renege on an ec-brokered cantonization deal. With Europe floundering, nato’s moment approached—it was already monitoring a un no-fly-zone. Abramowitz acted as a bell-wether: his new organization would push for ‘immediate action’ by the ‘international community’.footnote⁸ In icg literature the term rapidly boils down to Alliance members. A nato summit in January 1994 confirmed their readiness to wage an air war against the Bosnian Serbs, while also agreeing new association arrangements with the ex-Eastern Bloc. It called the arrangements ‘Partnership for Peace’.

Crisis Group took shape amid the build-up to nato’s air attacks on Bosnian Serb positions of August and September 1995. Abramowitz secured $200,000 from Soros and dispatched Steve Solarz—co-sponsor of the Gulf War Authorization Act, and previously head of an influential Congressional committee on us Southeast Asia policy—to solicit donations from friendly governments. Initial talk of playing an active role in relief operations evaporated. A steering group in London in January 1995—attended by such luminaries as Bernard Kouchner, early exponent of the droit d’ingérence—defined an advocacy-centred agenda: ‘to determine the forces driving conflicts and persuade the international community to take effective action’. The official history neatly captures the new organization’s esprit de corps: