It’s been a rough few weeks for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A bedrock of the liberal international order, NATO has over the years faced challenges and crises from both within and without. But until recently, few would have envisioned NATO becoming a punching bag for the president of the United States—the nation that was its architect and for seven decades its principal leader—while that president moves publicly closer to Russia.
NATO’s first secretary general, Hastings “Pug” Ismay, famously declared that the organization’s mission was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” It’s a wonderful line that encapsulated 75 years of brutal history and tragically learned lessons. And it’s worth reexamining Ismay’s framework through this prism to understand just how, exactly, NATO was intended to ensure just that.
Of all the recent absurdities, the one that would have most astounded the alliance’s founders would have been an American president berating a German chancellor for not spending enough on Germany’s military.
Germany was the main protagonist in three wars over the course of 75 years which cost tens of millions of European lives. In the wake of WWII, the Continent’s leaders were determined to integrate the newly-disarmed Germany into a rules-based order under the leadership of liberal democrats. One of the central ideas of NATO was that membership would prevent Germany from feeling the need to field a mighty military—instead, Germans could look to their new allies for protection while they rebuilt their civic and political life. So there is a profound irony in Trump’s hectoring Angela Merkel about Germany’s military spending.
Even more ironic: Trump—through his hostile rhetoric—is empowering the long-dormant strains of European populism that were the source of so much trouble and tragedy in the first place. While Germany itself is no longer itself a primary threat, illiberalism is on the rise in many places with Trump’s apparent endorsement. There is something perverse, then, about insisting that other countries spend more on weapons while simultaneously encouraging unstable nationalism across the Continent. Trump fails to see that a military alliance in which our former adversaries (and potential rivals) allowed the United States to become a hyperpower is a priceless strategic dream. The statesmen of yesteryear would be shocked that America was able to achieve such a system—and even more shocked that our president was now trying to dismantle it.
As for the Russians, NATO was designed to counter Soviet expansion. It was the teeth in a program that included the financial and economic pillars of the Bretton Woods institutions and the Marshall Plan. By organizing and galvanizing a consortium of like-minded nations, NATO accomplished one of the greatest achievements in geopolitical history: the resolution of a major conflict with neither of the primary adversaries firing on one another.
We have sadly arrived at a moment when Russia appears to be a geopolitical adversary once again. There are real questions to be asked of whether the West missed a vital opportunity to help Russia get back on its feet and regain its rightful place as a great power—much as we did after World War Two with Germany and Japan. Russia experts can also reasonably debate the wisdom of expanding NATO eastward and even seek to understand the historical importance of Crimea to Moscow.
But the moment when Russia was not seeking to destabilize our way of life has passed. And just as during the Cold War, the NATO alliance under American leadership is the most important institution we have for countering Russian adventurism and revanchism and its desire to once again be a hegemonic power in Europe.
The final prong of Ismay’s framework was to keep the Americans “in.” When he spoke these words, the tragic consequences of U.S. isolationism were so recent that they needed no further elaboration. These disastrous decisions, and our reckoning with them, shaped our policy in the post-war world.
As the supreme economic and political power in 1945, the United States could have dictated a global political and economic framework. Instead, we chose to create a rules-based international system that was strongly in our interests, but that compromised enough to earn the support of other nations—even our former enemies. The lessons of American isolationism were bitterly, but well, learned: Just 12 senators opposed the North Atlantic Treaty that created NATO in 1949. Among them was the still die-hard leader of interwar isolationism, Robert Taft, who refused to let go of his complaint that we were “arming Western Europe at American expense.”
And now we have a president cheerfully invokes the isolationist slogan “America First” as he assaults the most important and effective military alliance in modern history.
NATO has served us well. It is, by any reckoning, a bargain: By any reasonable measure, the cost of war dwarfs all else. We gain far more than we spend on NATO by deterring potential adversaries and by not having to stand alone. The allies Trump derides serve side-by-side with our troops. Indeed, the only time in its history that NATO’s Article 5—the clause mandating mutual defense for members—has been invoked was for the defense of the United States after September 11. Statesmen from Churchill to Truman to Reagan have seen the wisdom and strategic value of the organization. Indeed, Churchill advised his protégé Ismay, “NATO provided the best, if not the only, hope of peace in our time.”
That is as true now as it was then. But now we have no Churchill. Only a pennywise and pound-foolish president who wants to undermine that best hope by rewarding our adversaries, punishing our allies and undermining our defenses.
