The geopolitical conditions which led to the creation of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in 1949 rapidly disappeared following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. According to neorealism, if alignment is formed because of threat, it will falter in the absence of a threat. Scholars like John Mearsheimer and Kenneth Waltz even predicted that without the Soviet threat, NATO would cease to be a durable alliance. 1 The ending of the Cold War unlocked a period of profound soul-searching within the Alliance. The new conditions indeed led to an American rethinking of the US commitment to NATO, just as it led to a refocusing of priorities within European members of the Alliance. In May 1990, NATO’s Military Committee announced that it no longer considered the Warsaw Pact a threat to the Alliance. President George H.W. Bush then called for spending cuts which would eventually result in significant reductions in funding and force levels for NATO’s conventional and nuclear forces. He also proclaimed the emergence of a “New World Order,” suggesting that NATO was bereft of a strategic anchor. In addition, President Francois Mitterrand of France and Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany delivered a Franco-German statement on joint defence policies in late 1991, the provisions of which facilitated the formation of the Eurocorps on May 22, 1992. 2 This symbolic gesture was even interpreted by some observers as indicating that the two leaders hoped to replace NATO with a European defence “identity” as Europe’s primary security apparatus. 3 In short, the possibility of the termination of institutionalised US support for European security was seriously raised in this period, as was the possibility of NATO ceasing to exist.
The Survival of NATO
Following major debates about the appropriate direction for post-Cold War American internationalism, the administration of President Bill Clinton not only committed itself to the continuation of NATO, but also began to sponsor a major programme of NATO renewal and enlargement. After progressive transformation, NATO expanded rather than disbanded. It went on to participate in “out-of-area” action in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Libya. It developed a set of more or less concerted doctrines regarding “new threats” and broadened the function of NATO to include effective mechanisms for solving disputes and coordinating foreign and political policies instead of strictly focusing on military responses. 4 All these commitments were accompanied by major debates about the purpose and capabilities of NATO. Relevant debates included continuing tensions between Washington and European capitals over defence spending levels; accusations that the US was using NATO as an instrument of extra-United Nations (UN) unilateral power, especially the preference of Washington immediately after 9/11 for working through ad hoc rather than institutionalised alliance structures; and the developing relationship between NATO and Russia (particularly in the context of possible Georgian and Ukrainian membership of the organisation). However, NATO continued to exist and Washington remained formally committed to the defence of Europe. The recent history of the US commitment has been dominated by economic pressures, squabbles over NATO’s military performance in Afghanistan, and the apparent American preference for “leading from behind” in Libya. The current tensions within NATO were graphically expressed in retiring Defence Secretary Robert Gates’ June 2011 speech, “Reflections on the Status and Future of the Transatlantic Alliance”:
In the past, I’ve worried openly about NATO turning into a two-tiered alliance, between members who specialise in “soft” humanitarian development, peacekeeping, and talking tasks, and those conducting the “hard” combat missions…This is no longer a hypothetical worry. We are there today. And it is unacceptable. 5
But no matter how complicated the history of NATO debates has been, there was always a consensus on the fact that the US attitude was most crucial to the survival as well as continued existence of NATO.
The United States and NATO
Looking back on the period since the end of the Cold War, Washington was more than once expected to support NATO dissolution: when the Soviet threat subsided; when US decision on bypassing NATO was announced after 9/11; when NATO demonstrated its incapability to assume the overall responsibility for all military operations in Afghanistan; and when the US insistence on “leading from behind” in Libya became conspicuous. Nevertheless, by 2011, when the Libyan crisis subsided, NATO had remained for 20 of the most eventful and challenging years in the post-Cold War history, regardless of how frequently NATO was relegated to the very margins of debate. This interesting phenomenon raised a question: Why did the US remain committed to NATO in the post-Cold War period?
In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, Americans had high expectations of seeing the US scaling down its international commitments. They believed that there was no need to continue the institutionalised protection for European security and that it was time to focus on domestic affairs. With respect to this domestic demand, why did the Clinton administration nonetheless choose the opposite course: to remain committed to NATO and to support NATO enlargement? Moreover, NATO not only expanded its membership, but also participated in “out-of-area” actions, which were regarded as “the most visible manifestation of NATO’s development in the post-Cold War period”. 6 Kosovo was basically a NATO operation, though 80 % of its tasks were completed by the US. Hence, why did the US support the Kosovo mission to be accomplished under the framework of NATO? On the contrary, Afghanistan at first saw the US declining to work through NATO. Why did the Bush administration prefer an ad hoc coalition to the institutionalised alliance? If Afghanistan suggested a change of US attitude towards NATO, why would the Alliance be able to continue with second and third rounds of enlargement in 2004 and 2008, respectively? Anyway, since NATO had gone through more transformation and expansion after Afghanistan, there was a great hope for the Alliance to shoulder more responsibilities. Whereas when the Libyan crisis came along, the US was reluctant to intervene at the very beginning, not to mention to utilise NATO to conduct the mission immediately. Why did the US hesitate to initiate military actions against Libyan military targets, given that the US had always played a dominant role in carrying out operations? Although the US then joined its allies, it quickly transferred the Libyan mission to NATO and started “leading from behind”. Thus, in terms of how the US anomalously behaved, did Libya imply a new “American way of war”? Furthermore, the contribution from other NATO members to the Libyan mission was still quite small: “less than half have participated, and fewer than a third have been willing to participate in the strike mission”. 7 As a result, Libya pushed the “burden-sharing” debate to another climax. Would NATO remain useful to the US, given that task divisions between Washington and European capitals remained unequal?
As the crisis in Syria deteriorated in the summer of 2013, the US not only hesitated to intervene, but was unprecedentedly uncertain about whether to resort to NATO, the highly controversial alignment that served as the main though sometimes inefficient mechanism to resolve conflicts in the past. The plan to wrest chemical weapons from Syria offered Washington a buffer against tremendous pressure on intervention, but it could not assure that military action would be forever unlikely. If a missile strike on the Assad regime became the only option, would the Obama administration agree to conduct military operations under the framework of NATO, taking into account the increasing US consciousness about working with allies? Moreover, the Ukrainian crisis showed NATO reverting to its original purpose: to contain Russia. Yet on the other hand, President Putin is believed to be testing what NATO can do. The irony is that even though the candidate of NATO is threatened, so far NATO has done very little. Hence as Ian Bond, the director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform, said Russia’s annexation of Crimea raises questions about the Alliance’s options and ability to act: “Putin has just given NATO something to do, but the question is whether NATO is up to it”. 8 This again puts forward the question: Will the US remain committed to NATO? If yes, what role should NATO play, a global alliance or a regional alliance with global partners?
Organisation
This book mainly seeks to explain the continuing US commitment to NATO in the post-Cold War era. The initial focus is on the recommitment decisions of the Clinton administration. It also extensively explores the operations in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and, in particular, Libya. The case study on Libya is especially important in exploring the Obama administration’s understanding of the purpose of NATO in the context of current economic pressures, domestic US debates about post-War on Terror interventions, and of increasing American preoccupation with Pacific rather than European security. Libya is apparently one of this book’s contributions, as so far there has not been much work on the Libyan mission. James Mann, Francois Heisbourg, Martin Indyk, and Luca Tardelli all talk about the Libyan operation in their works, but none treats it as a detailed case study. In general, this book aims to contribute to the literature on the US commitment to NATO. The majority literature on the subject of NATO has been from the point of view of the European side, not the American foreign policy side, so this book chooses to address the topic mainly from a US foreign policy perspective. Specifically, the combination of realism and liberal internationalism serves as the overarching theoretical framework to explain US foreign policy as a whole, as historically, US decision-making on international intervention has been greatly influenced by the debate over the relationship between self-interest and universal values like democracy, freedom, and human rights. Additionally, Alliance Theory is applied to address why NATO has persisted after the Soviet threat subsided and why more powerful countries would like to cooperate with less powerful countries. On the micro level, this research adopts a “Foreign Policy Analysis” focus, with particular emphasis on intra-US administration bureaucratic politics. The “pulling and hauling” among players is vital to understand why the US pursues certain foreign policy, who might influence it, and how it is conceived.
Chapter 2 outlines the purpose of NATO and historical background. It mainly focuses on the debate over the role, purpose, and utility of the Alliance; the Clinton administration’s commitment to NATO expansion; and NATO’s “out-of-area” operations in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Libya. Chapter 3 outlines theoretical frameworks that are applied to the research. The introduction of theoretical frameworks contains Alliance Theory; the explanation of US foreign policy according to interaction between realism and liberal internationalism; and Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA), especially the Bureaucratic Politics Model. Alliance Theory is used to explain why NATO persists in the post-Cold War era, rather than disappearing due to the lack of the Soviet threat. The latter two theoretical frameworks are both important to analyse how the US makes policy on NATO. To be specific, interaction between realism and liberal internationalism is useful to comprehend the traditional approach of US foreign policy-making at the macro level, while the Bureaucratic Politics Model provides a more detailed understanding of the decision-making process at the micro level.
Chapter 4 introduces the debate over NATO’s persistence immediately after the end of the Cold War, focusing on the Clinton administration’s commitment to NATO expansion. This chapter mainly analyses why, how, and when NATO expanded in the post-Cold War era, and which countries could gain the membership of NATO in the first place. Chapter 5 addresses NATO’s engagement in Kosovo, which demonstrated the strength of the Alliance deriving from its institutional structure while underlining intra-alignment disputes about the capabilities and relevance of NATO. The Kosovo mission was chosen as a case study, for it was the first test of a newly transformed NATO immediately after the end of the Cold War. Chapter 6 firstly discusses NATO’s engagement in Afghanistan, focusing on why the Bush administration decided to bypass NATO and choose an ad hoc coalition to implement the campaign, and why it then decided to utilise NATO to deal with reconstruction issues. It then analyses the evolving concepts of NATO since the Kosovo operation.
Chapters 7 and 8 provide an overview of the Libyan operation, concentrating on why the US was reluctant to intervene in Libya at the very beginning, why it changed its ...