The Future Of NATO

“An alliance in search of a mission”. Discuss with reference to NATO.
{Department of International Relations, London School of Economics and Political Science}

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, one of the most enduring inheritance of the end of the Second World War, has been depicted as the “most successful military alliance in history”[1], that has faced and overcome deep and momentous historical cleavages, such as the Cold War and the demise of the USSR. However, since the end of the Soviet threat, NATO has known several attempts to reformulate its commitment in the international politics’ arena by enlarging its membership to the former Warsaw Pact’s countries and, in order to readapt the alliance to the changing strategic environment, by elaborating three Strategic Concepts in 1991, 1999 and 2010. Despite these structural and ontological efforts, NATO has been seriously challenged by external events and the fading transatlantic bond between Europe and the US: divergences “over the war in Iraq, different perceptions of Russia, of missile defense, of terrorism and even over differing interpretations of relations with Georgia and Ukraine”[2] have underlined “a complete lack of strategic vision”[3] and, concurrently, undermined the efficiency of the most representative result of the transatlantic political community, originally shaped on the ground of common interests and shared values and ideas.

As a matter of fact, over the last years NATO’s evolution has been affected by the European governments’ increasing unwillingness to make sacrifice and take more risks than others in several military operations and, at the same time, the alliance has been characterized by a multi-tasked euphoria being “involved in everything from cyber-warfare to anti-piracy and missile defence, as well as a costly and complex campaign in Afghanistan”[4]: today, NATO as a military alliance “has lost its way”, its own telos and theological perspective and, as a result, it has no effective political clout anymore.

In this essay, I will be briefly analyzing the potential of NATO to be a tool of management not only between its own members, as it was during the Cold War and during the short period of the unipolar moment, but within the current international system, characterized both by a marked ideological shape and an increasing multipolar distribution of power. In order to accomplish this long-run strategic task, NATO’s members need to rediscover those ideal pillars and the common goods currently at stake and, most of all, they should reinforce and reformulate the transatlantic tie by thinking through their commitment into the alliance, especially in light of their national strategic interests.

NATO, not only a weapon of power

According to Ruiz Palmer, the distinctive difference of NATO with respect to the previous military alliances lies on the crucial importance of the “transatlantic compact” that could make possible the achievement of permanent cooperation between its members. For this reason, the purpose of overcoming the classical notion of alliance was at the core of the US Senate debates and hearings on the Treaty in 1949, when the US Secretary of State Dean Acheson launched the proposal made by the Truman administration.[5] Unlike classical alliances, historically conceived as instruments of power, the Treaty reflected the values of the emerging Atlanticist community, defined as an ethical community, characterized on the one hand by a shared sense among members of right conduct toward one another and, on the other hand, by its liberal-oriented content and the bourgeois respect for freedom and equality. As a matter of fact, the NATO alliance persisted after the Cold war because of “a deeply embedded community identity reinforcing democracy and free market economies”.[6] In addition, being NATO an institution whose members work closely for security common purposes, their own governments and people have broadened and deepened their reciprocal knowledge, by building confidence and reducing tensions, such as for the case of Greece and Turkey.[7]

Furthermore, NATO featured another different trait from the past organizations of collective security, which concerned its nature of being not only a defensive or anti-Soviet alliance: it was thought, and currently is, as a permanent peace treaty among its own members.[8] Such a reason offers a convincing explanation about its further enlargement soon after the end of the Cold war, especially with regards to the unified Germany. This argument is theoretically supported by Schroeder who, in 1976, criticized the common definition of alliances as weapons of power, sustaining instead their nature of tools of management between their members. By analyzing a broad set of alliances from 1815 to 1945, he stated that the supposed existence of an external threat is not always a powerful reason for building alliances; rather, alliances also work as pacta de contrahendo, by restricting and controlling the actions of the allies themselves in order to avoid and prevent future conflicts.[9] No better example could be Europe after the Second World War, when for the first time French and Germans were reluctantly involved into the same military alliance under the protection of the Anglo-American umbrella.[10]

In order to complement these two explanations, the endurance of NATO after the disappearance of the Soviet threat can be accounted for in terms of an institution which works as a “brokerage house through which members perceives opportunities to increase their individual autonomy, especially after their home territories are essentially secure from attack.”[11] According to this approach, the transatlantic bargain is based on NATO’s capacity to preserve security while providing asymmetric opportunities to the US and European states for greater autonomy to harness outside the stable Euro-Atlantic zone: “in the case of the United States [which possesses unparalleled military budgets and technology] marginal gains in autonomy come about through needed gains in legitimacy while European states [endowed with a greater measure of legitimacy and international approval] accrue autonomy by means of new force projection capabilities.”[12] That NATO’s potential is not primarily military is also sustained by Brzezinski, who recognizes how its real power derives from the combination between the United States’ military capability and economic power with the European’s collective political and economic weight, which make NATO globally significant.[13]

Despite different and sometimes conflicting perspectives of NATO members, for instance about the war in Iraq, the approach to the Russian question and the war on terrorism, since the end of the Cold war the alliance has acted strategically by shaping the external environment through cooperative security, by avoiding zero-sum and unilateral outcomes and by providing intra-Alliance reassurance and honoring collective defense commitments.[14]

Indeed, these three last accomplishments characterize the most recent Strategic Concept and they should be core drivers for rendering NATO not only an alliance capable of managing peacefully the Euro-Atlantic area and fulfilling with the national interests of its members, but also for securing the international system from the risks of terrorism, cyber attacks and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. However, is NATO, according to the current transatlantic bargain which underpins the alliance, really ripe and suitable for these new tasks?

NATO and the global disorder management

As previously seen, according to 2010 NATO Strategic Concept, the North Atlantic alliance need a conceptual redeployment. Given that its “fundamental purpose is to safeguard the freedom and security of all its members by political and military means”, the document recognizes how “the Alliance remains an essential source of stability in an unpredictable world.”[15] Since the end of the Cold war and the removal of the Soviet counterpart, the perception of living in a different kind of international political community has increasingly raised, and the transatlantic alliance has been facing an historical moment dense of unprecedented risks to global security.[16] This new and destabilizing awareness has entailed NATO’s shift from a threat community to a risk community, in intents and purposes as well.[17] In fact, both the Strategic Concepts of 1991 and 1999 admitted the existence of undefined, unpredictable, multi-faced and multi-directional risks to allied security required a “radical change to [NATO] approach to security”, making the Alliance a “risk management agency in all but name”[18]. This trend has been confirmed in the last NATO’s strategic document, by stating that both crisis management and cooperative security outside the Alliance’s geographical borders, along with the founding aim of collective defence, are the operational pillars through which the challenges of the modern security environment can be contained without affecting territory and populations of NATO’s members.[19] However, as Coker remarks, rather than looking at a range of deeply different threats and vague potential risks, which have pushed NATO to speak and to act in the name of the international community rather than working with it, a twenty-first century alliance should adapt its functional core to the most contemporary compelling challenges, namely fundamentalism in all its forms (religious and nationalistic as well) and global crime, both of them included in the concept of global disorder.[20]

As a matter of fact, the global disorder which affects the international system has several causes: globalisation and the related uninterrupted movement of ideas, people, capital and information; a world increasingly intertwined and economically interdependent[21]; the end of the unipolar moment and the American model of hegemony called into question along with the principles of liberal international order[22]; the emergence of widespread terrorist networks and extremist religious movements, strictly connected with criminal phenomena, piracy and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.[23] Furthermore, rather than a strategic retrenchment or a downsizing of NATO’s role and forces, Europe and the US should focus on understanding the new challenges, such as the political and underestimated implications of the slowly emergence of a multipolar order “in which the US and Europe will soon compete with China as a center of military, political and economic power. Such a transformation will bring back policies of counterbalancing” by the West.[24]

By this token, a rethinking of the Alliance’s mission is unavoidable, by taking account of the fact that NATO can continue as a successful marriage only if “the partners know what they may now reasonably expect of one another.”[25]

Conclusion

One of the biggest obstacles to this necessary redefinition of the international role of the Alliance regards the different military cultures of its own members, just like the divisions on the Afghan and the Libyan cases have shown.[26] The clash between different political and strategic cultures represents a central problem of alliance management, because risk cultures are supported by  particular perceptions of risk, today largely different for the US and Europe.[27] In fact, as the US have announced a massive redeployment of military capabilities in East Asia, now perceived as  the geopolitical priority for American national security planning, the forthcoming troops and investment reductions in Europe should incentivize its NATO’s member “to assume new responsibilities in effective ways”[28], such as growing military expenditures.

If geopolitical change requires European to rethink their attitude towards hard power politics, on the other hand Americans are called to strengthen their efforts towards a rule-based international order for coping with the risks of the global disorder that affect national interests and security of their European allies.[29] Such a Grand Strategy, which implies a future twofold mission for NATO (committed in facing threats from a multipolar world and risks from a globalized context), underpins a new kind of transatlantic bargain in which the previous exchange between the American military superiority and the European international legitimacy should be enriched with a more ambitious and radical change of mindset.

Citations & Bibliography

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