What is the point of NATO these days? Sometimes, it is worth going back and asking such questions from first principles.
Donald Trump’s undisguised disdain for the Alliance has horrified most diplomats and politicians, who take it for granted that NATO underpins the international order. But horror is not an adequate response. Defenders of NATO need to come up with a persuasive reason for the United States to build its military strategy around an integrated command structure in Brussels.
Before 1990, the logic was clear. Freedom was under threat from a Soviet empire that was gobbling up bits of real estate from Königsberg to Kabul. Americans and their European allies had to stand together to preserve a way of life — a way of life worth preserving. I certainly thought so at the time. In the late 1980s, I went so far as to set up a branch of Peace Through NATO, a British organization established to counter the arguments of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), at my school.
The collapse of the U.S.S.R. removed that rationale. As NATO frankly admitted in 1999, “large-scale conventional aggression against the Alliance is highly unlikely.” But bureaucracies rarely offer to disband themselves when their original justification becomes moot. NATO had become central to the careers of many military and civilian officials who understood that, in former Sen. Richard Lugar’s phrase, they had to go “out of area or out of business.” So they found new theaters: Kosovo, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, Libya.
To understand how thoroughly NATO shape-shifted during the 1990s, look at the men chosen to lead it. First, the crooked Belgian Willy Claes; then Spain’s Javier Solana, who had campaigned against his country’s accession; then the British Labor politician George Robertson, a former member of CND. All of them had been against NATO when it truly mattered.
So, to repeat Trump’s blunt question, “What good is NATO?” The unusual circumstances of the late twentieth century obliged Britain and America, traditionally maritime nations, to focus on the defense of Western Europe. Is it now time for Britain to return to her traditional blue-water policy, and the United States to her hemisphere, as Washington and Jefferson envisaged?
Not quite. Saying that we wouldn’t invent something now is not the same as saying we should scrap it. We might not start from scratch with an alliance housed in a gleaming new $750 million HQ in Belgium; but it is often better to work with what you’ve got than to begin all over again.
NATO has several advantages, ranging from interoperable systems to the credibility of the collective defense enshrined in Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty. It could, potentially, be a valuable tool for like-minded democracies to assert their values in a world where plenty of authoritarian regimes are willing to throw their weight about.
But we should be honest about something. The European Union and the United States are not always like-minded. Think of the issues where Brussels and Washington have quarreled since the end of the Cold War: Iran sanctions, support for Palestine, the Cuba embargo, the Iraq invasion, the Ukraine conflict.
You will notice two things. First, the United States, founded in a popular revolt, values democracy over stability, whereas the EU, founded in a spasm of revulsion against nationalism, values stability over democracy. Second, when American soldiers are deployed in anger, they are likeliest to find themselves alongside troops from the other English-speaking democracies.
Perhaps, if we are looking for a network of free nations prepared to deploy proportionate force in defense of their values, we should begin with the Anglosphere, and work with any individual European states willing to join.
Instead of trying to find ways to make NATO matter more, perhaps we should accept that it matters less. Keep it going, by all means, as a defensive pact. Let its leaders enjoy their summits, and its parliamentarians their perks. Concentrate on the protection of those of its members that are under a direct military threat — notably Poland and the Baltic states.
But stop pretending that an alliance designed to defend West Germany from a massed attack by Soviet T-72s is the right mechanism to police the world from the Balkans to the Himalayas.
Plenty of organizations carry on doing useful things long after achieving their primary purpose. There is still, for example, a Marshall Aid foundation, funding various worthy projects in Europe. A modest and narrowly focused NATO still has a role to play in world affairs; but only if we let it find its own level.
