NATO in Search of a Vision

Gülnur Aybet, Rebecca R. Moore, Gülnur Aybet, Rebecca R. Moore

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781589016309
• eBook ISBN: 9781589016767
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As the NATO Alliance enters its seventh decade, it finds itself involved in an array of military missions ranging from Afghanistan to Kosovo to Sudan. It also stands at the center of a host of regional and global partnerships. Yet, NATO has still to articulate a grand strategic vision designed to determine how, when, and where its capabilities should be used, the values underpinning its new missions, and its relationship to other international actors such as the European Union and the United Nations.

The drafting of a new strategic concept, begun during NATO’s 60th anniversary summit, presents an opportunity to shape a new transatlantic vision that is anchored in the liberal democratic principles so crucial to NATO’s successes during its Cold War years. Furthermore, that vision should be focused on equipping the Alliance to anticipate and address the increasingly global and less predictable threats of the post-9/11 world.

This volume brings together scholars and policy experts from both sides of the Atlantic to examine the key issues that NATO must address in formulating a new strategic vision. With thoughtful and reasoned analysis, it offers both an assessment of NATO’s recent evolution and an analysis of where the Alliance must go if it is to remain relevant in the twenty-first century.

CHAPTER 1

NATO at Sixty—and Beyond

Jamie Shea

FOR SEVERAL DECADES, NATO has represented something of a paradox: An Alliance that is generally seen as being permanently in crisis reaches yet another milestone of longevity. Twenty years have passed since the Berlin Wall came down and a Soviet analyst, Giorgy Arbatov, famously jibed that the Soviet Union had dealt NATO a death blow by taking away its enemy. On the contrary, the Alliance has been enlarged, become globalized, and become involved in more activities in more parts of the world than its founding fathers could ever have envisioned. At NATO’s Summit in April 2009 in Strasbourg-Kehl, its leaders welcomed two new members, Albania and Croatia; noted that after an absence of nearly half a century, France would return to its integrated military structure; and felt sufficiently confident about its long-term future to initiate the preparation of a new Strategic Concept. The hundreds of seminars and thousands of scholarly articles, opeds, and editorials that are devoted each year to agonizing over NATO’s problems stand in puzzling contrast to its ability to just soldier on and add yet another decade and summit celebration to its already impressive life span.

This chapter explores the historical evolution of NATO’s “acquis atlantique” and how it can be preserved and moved forward in an era of multiple challenges. Though NATO needs to address the immediate challenges it faces related to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, its relations with Russia, and its ongoing mission in Afghanistan, it also needs to develop a common vision for the future—including a common threat assessment that achieves a balance between the requirements of Article 4 (political consultations) and Article 5 (collective defense) of the Washington Treaty.

Forging a Consensus from Crises: The Cold War Experience

Certainly, all historians of NATO understand that there has never been anything easy or automatic about its evolution. Its successive transformations have often been preceded by bitter internal debates. It sometimes seems to need to go through a period of disarray as a precondition for later reemerging stronger and more purposeful. For instance, in the 1940s, its American founding fathers hotly contested whether a Western Europe falling under the strategic shadow of the Soviet Union needed a short-term economic shot in the arm or a long-term military pact. It took more than a year to persuade a skeptical Congress, where even convinced internationalists were worried about Europe’s long-term dependence on the United States, to accept the permanent commitment to Europe that the North Atlantic Treaty implied. Even then the Senate would not accept an automatic obligation to use force as part of the treaty’s mutual assistance clause, Article 5, which accordingly had to be watered down. And the Harry Truman administration still found it very difficult to provide its new European Allies with military equipment because Congress feared that such supplies would only weaken the Europeans’ willingness to increase their own defense budgets. However, at every critical moment when the treaty seemed to be doomed, Joseph Stalin, somewhat providentially, engineered an East/West crisis that temporarily cowed its critics and helped to keep the proposal for a transatlantic pact alive. The Berlin Blockade and the Prague coup d’état in 1948 combined with the Soviet first atomic bomb test in 1949 to persuade the Truman administration and Congress that the Marshall Plan’s economic aid would not bear fruit if the United States was not first and foremost ready to underwrite the military security of Western Europe.

The second great crisis occurred in the early 1950s, when the outbreak of the Korean War finally put the “O” into NATO—in other words, it forced the still-reluctant United States to convert the paper guarantees of the Washington Treaty into an actual organization—with a peacetime headquarters, a command structure, a secretary-general, a U.S.-chosen but European-located supreme Allied commander, and, inevitably, civilian as well as military bureaucracies. The nineteenth-century Italian nationalist Massimo d’Azeglio once proclaimed that he had to first make Italy in order to make Italians. NATO went the other way round; it first created the Allies and only some years later created a functioning Alliance. The paradox was that this emerging NATO structure—originally located in Paris at the Place du Trocadéro and in Fontainebleau, in the heart of France, which would later become the NATO dissident—was the creation of a war in Asia and not in Europe. Had that Asian war not broken out in Korea, the U.S. secretary of state, Dean Acheson, and the Truman administration would have found it much harder to break their promise to never send U.S. forces to Europe, notwithstanding the creation of NATO.

Other famous crises characterized NATO’s next decades, each time threatening to undermine an institution that always depended more on the “entente cordiale” among its members than on the size and strength of its organization. The first crisis occurred already in the 1950s, when the United States pushed the French into proposing the European Defense Community (EDC) as the way to place German troops at NATO’s disposal and to facilitate America’s concentration on the war in Korea. John Foster Dulles, the U.S. secretary of state, threatened the Europeans with an “agonizing reappraisal” of the U.S. commitment if they voted down the EDC. In the event, the French National Assembly did precisely this in August 1954; but instead of weakening NATO, the failure of the EDC project positively strengthened it. The Germans were brought into NATO in 1955, the United States increased its forces in Europe by more than a division and then brought in thousands of tactical nuclear weapons, the British agreed to station an Army of the Rhine in northern West Germany, and the prospect of a purely European defense identity replacing NATO in the long run disappeared for several generations. Heeding the lessons of the EDC, European statesmen relaunched the European project in Messina a year later with the idea of economic integration and a common market (the European Economic Community) rather than a common European army directed by a single supranational European authority, as provided by the failed EDC Treaty.¹

The 1960s witnessed another major rift within NATO, when it had to respond to France’s attempt to either gain a seat at its top table (Charles de Gaulle’s great-power “Directoire”) or leave it altogether. The French decision to withdraw from NATO’s integrated military structure in 1966 was all the more painful because it exposed two other fault lines in the Alliance at that time: a disagreement between the United States and Europe over the desire of Robert McNamara, the U.S. defense secretary, to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in NATO’s strategy (Europeans feared this might make their continent “safe” for a conventional war); and the unhappiness of the small Alliance member states at their lack of a voice and role in NATO’s discussions, particularly in exploring détente with the Soviet Union.

De Gaulle’s decision to partially withdraw from NATO in 1966 cleared the way for the Harmel Report of 1967, which for the first time gave NATO a political role in seeking security with the East through negotiation, confidence building, and arms control as much as through deterrence, military exercises, and the occasional nuclear modernization program.² The Harmel exercise, by creating more space in the Alliance for political consultations, also gave its smaller members a voice and a sense of belonging that a set of military arrangements alone had previously denied them. But it could also be argued that France’s partial withdrawal, by burying the notion of the Directoire, was just as important in upgrading the role of the small Allies. They could offer political insights and show solidarity even if they could not offer many troops.

Another crisis-driven nadir was reached in the late 1970s, when NATO’s members were obliged to reluctantly give up détente—a comfortable if ultimately unproductive policy—in order to face up to a more intimidating Soviet Union. NATO’s dual-track decision of 1979 proposed to deploy nuclear weapons carried by Cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe in response to the Soviet deployment of SS20 missiles. At the same time, the Alliance offered to negotiate, through U.S.–Soviet arms control talks, a reduction in the levels of these weapons on both sides—although no NATO planner at the time would ever have dreamed of the ultimate outcome of the zero-zero option enshrined in the later Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force (INF) Treaty of December 1987.

At the time of the dual-track decision in 1979, NATO’s opponents believed all too readily that the offer of arms control talks was nothing but a fig leaf to disguise the United States’ firm intention to modernize NATO’s nuclear arsenal in Europe. The Soviet Union had begun first with its SS20 missile deployments, had taken advantage of détente to back a number of its allies in Africa, and, for the first time since 1945, had sent its forces outside its Cold War boundaries to invade a neutral state, Afghanistan, thereby dealing a death blow to détente and the ratification of the Second Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT) treaty by the U.S. Congress. Yet for the peace movements in NATO’s member countries, the Cruise and Pershing missiles were more the cause of the return to Cold War conditions in Europe than the symptom of increased tensions. The next few years were to rock the Alliance as Western European governments had to contend with massive antinuclear protests and the defection of many left-wing European parties away from the prevailing political consensus on defense strategies toward the East. The “INF saga,” as it came to be known, cost Chancellor Helmut Schmidt control over his own Social Democratic Party in West Germany. And the other NATO members’ governments also wobbled as the year for the deployment of the missiles—1983—approached.³

Once again, however, crisis brought unexpected benefits. After years of anticipating more and more détente against the backdrop of a permanent military status quo, NATO had demonstrated that it could return to 1950s-style vigilance if necessary. France, which supported the INF deployments by West Germany and others, showed, as it had done at the time of the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, that in a time of crisis it would instinctively draw back to NATO’s center ground. The Alliance’s governments finally decided to respond publicly to the arguments of the peace movements and to the abundant Soviet propaganda. The actual deployment of some Cruise missiles in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy in late 1983 produced a “fait accompli,” which led the peace movements to fade away remarkably quickly. President Ronald Reagan’s “zero-zero” option, which many had dismissed as a propaganda stunt to make a realistic arms control result less likely, ultimately turned out to be the basis for the INF Treaty. The NATO members’ governments, by pulling together at a difficult time, achieved the double benefit of strengthening military containment and totally removing hundreds of very unpopular, controversial nuclear weapons. The anticommunist right and the pacifist left emerged equally satisfied. What was significant about the INF Treaty was not so much its unprecedented arms reductions but its extensive verification provisions, including onsite inspections. If the Soviet Union was willing to accept these intrusive verification and transparency measures, then surely the suspicions and distrust that had fed the Cold War must be waning. Viewed from this perspective, NATO’s INF crisis in the early 1980s was one of the most productive in its entire history. Yet, and not for the first time, it was based on a paradox: The acceptance of escalation was the key to a peaceful outcome. If the Alliance was not prepared to face up to its adversaries head-on, it could never hope to persuade them to cooperate. The specter of Afghanistan was perhaps already present in the difficult debate over the INF strategy in the early 1980s.

NATO’s New Missions and the Balkan Crisis of the 1990s

As we draw closer to the present, we see the same pattern of NATO’s “crisis of the decade.” In the 1990s there were in fact two crisis points: one caused by the “catastrophic success” of the end of communism in the USSR in 1990–91, when the challenge to NATO came from the overfulfillment of its objectives rather than failure or stagnation; and the second in the form of the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991–92, when NATO had to decide whether to move “out of area or out of business” (as U.S. senator Richard Lugar famously put it) and use its forces not to defend its members’ territories but to impose peace on their peripheries.⁴ In hindsight, and somewhat ironically, the conflict in Yugoslavia was more important for NATO’s post–Cold War evolution that the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. As a political-military organization, whose forte is to use military power to bring about peaceful international outcomes, NATO needs military challenges. Otherwise what purpose would its military capabilities and political-military culture serve?

At one level, the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago was a fitting vindication of NATO and a retroactive endorsement of most of what it had undertaken and stood for. It could then have gone out on a high note, or at least been downsized to something significantly smaller than what we have today. No doubt the Treaty of Washington would have survived (who in today’s circumstances would wish to give up a U.S. security guarantee?); but NATO might well have contracted to something more closely resembling its structure in the early 1950s, before the full impact of the Korean War began to be felt. A permanent peace in Europe after 1989 would have given NATO a role in partnership activities, security sector reform, and exercises and training as the old adversaries of the Warsaw Pact grew economically and politically closer to Western Europe. But how long could NATO have claimed a front rank in the world’s system of international institutions on the basis of managing a secure peace rather than of dealing with crises and intractable conflicts? Those who invest in NATO’s stock are not devotees of Emmanuel Kant’s “perpetual peace” or of what some believe is the increasing obsolescence of military force as the dominant element in crisis management and conflict resolution.

The Balkan crisis of the 1990s was perhaps the most bitter and protracted in all of NATO’s history. Many of the usual ingredients were present. The United States and the European nations differed over strategy—the United States wishing to use air power against the Bosnian Serbs or alternatively Belgrade and to take sides in the conflict, but the Europeans opting for evenhandedness and a UN peacekeeping force on the ground. Some viewed the conflict in Bosnia as a civil war based on ancient feuds and hatreds that had to be allowed to burn themselves out before international peacemaking had a chance of succeeding beyond the short-lived cease-fire agreements. Others perceived a Kuwait-style instance of international aggression, an attempt to change borders and populations by force, which had to be militarily resisted to prevent setting terrible precedents and killing any hope for a post-1989 “New World Order.” Some put their faith in negotiation backed by vague threats to use force; others were convinced that NATO had to use force first to restore its tarnished credibility and lay the basis for real negotiations, undergirded by the credible prospect of a major NATO intervention.

NATO’s old dividing lines were thus supplemented by new ones—about its role in the post–Cold War world. Would it move from “being” (deterrence) to “acting” (intervention)? Thus far, it had been good at preventing conflicts; would it be as successful at fighting them? Would its new out-of-area role be essentially a timid and secondary one, in support of leading actors such as the United Nations or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, or would it be able to prepare politically to take on the primary roles of first responder and chief enforcer, with all their implied risks and responsibilities for winning the peace? During the Cold War, the comfort of deterrence was that it was unlikely to be tested, allowing NATO to maximize its strengths and minimize its weaknesses. As Napoleon often stressed, “On s’engage et puis on voit.” Action has a way of making a mockery of the bestlaid plans. It tends to do the opposite of deterrence—expose weaknesses and minimize strengths. Nuclear deterrence may never have worked very convincingly in theory, but it turned out to work very well in practice. Conversely, and on paper at least, NATO seemed massively superior to the Serbs and its Balkan opponents; but would superiority on paper easily translate into NATO victories on the battlefield? The Kosovo air campaign of 1999, lasting seventy-eight days, showed that such assumptions were highly vulnerable to real events.

This said, the Balkan crisis once again turned out to be a blessing for NATO. The Alliance was good for the Balkans, but the Balkans were perhaps even more beneficial for it. They were the proving ground where the Alliance could adapt to its major new post–Cold War role: organizing peace support operations beyond its members’ territories and learning to specialize not only in the techniques of conflict termination (naval embargoes, no-fly zones, and air campaigns) but also of peace implementation (ground forces turning “mission creep” into a full spectrum of tasks beyond more patrolling—from disarming militias to the reconstruction of roads and railways). As NATO was learning these things, it manifestly did make many mistakes—not anticipating the collapse of Yugoslavia and being totally absent from the initial international crisis prevention efforts; not intervening early enough, as when Dubrovnik was shelled by the Bosnia Serbs in the spring of 1991; not having confidence for too long in the only real asset at its disposal, the use of its multinational military force to stop a conflict; and perhaps most damagingly, agreeing to “dual key” arrangements, whereby it subcontracted its air assets and ultimately its credibility to the United Nations, which had a very different approach to peacemaking strategy in Bosnia.

Despite all these mistakes, however, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, having done all the wrong things, NATO ultimately did all the right ones. Thus, when Kosovo imploded in March 1998, NATO had learned its lessons—its threats to use force were made credible and were much more tightly linked to its international crisis management and negotiation strategy; it had the benefit of a focused United States and Europe; it made a much more concerted effort to analyze the dynamics of the conflict and to reach a common analysis; and finally it showed a willingness to escalate through the use of a ground offensive which, contrary to Bosnia, made it much more difficult for Slobodan Milošević and Belgrade to determine where the limits of the Alliance’s determination and readiness to use force actually lay.

“Bosnia alive or NATO dead,” the U.S. columnist William Safire had written in 1994.⁵ For a long time NATO seemed to be losing its way in the Balkan conflicts—even to be losing for a while to Milošević during the Kosovo air campaign of 1999. Yet it emerged from these conflicts with a new role and with its prestige immeasurably enhanced. Not only had the Europeans painfully emerged from their post–Cold War “peace dividend” euphoria or “strategic vacation,” but the United States had also become prepared to revise its doctrine of overwhelming force in clearly defined conflicts and accept a new military role in peace support and stabilization operations. The U.S. secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, might later have expressed her skepticism about using the 101st Airborne Division to “escort kids to school,” but NATO had nonetheless emerged with a new purpose and a new transformation agenda. In contrast to the former situation, France had participated in the Kosovo air campaign as the second-largest contributor, and Germany had crossed the Rubicon in sending its forces into combat action for the first time since 1945. What could hold NATO back in the future?

This historical recapitulation clearly shows that NATO is either good at escaping from crises or uncannily skillful in using them to good effect. History also demonstrates that as an organization, it is better able to resolve its difficulties through action, and the bottom-up pressure of events, rather than through theoretical discussions or new treaty-drafting exercises. In this respect, it is very different from the European Union, which is based more on the top-down, constitutional approach. If something works in practice, who cares whether it works in theory? Yet the purpose of this historical overview is to bring out a more fundamental point. In each decade of NATO’s existence, an external or internal crisis (ultimately, they tend to be one and the same) has placed it at a turning point—and after a period of drift and uncertainty, and of looking for cheap, quick-fix solutions to its problems, its leaders have had to decide whether to renew and re-resource it or allow it to drift into obsolescence. Thus NATO has always reached a fork in the road requiring strong political leaders who can make the decisions needed to guide it in adapting to new circumstances and move it from a phase of introspection and self-doubt into one of clarity and a sense of shared purpose. As ever in the past, such decisions do not make themselves. Ultimately, then, its leaders must use the Alliance. They cannot hide behind it.

Multiple Challenges, One Vision

Today, NATO marks another anniversary decade beset by formidable challenges and problems—how to rise to the challenge in Afghanistan to avoid the first strategic defeat in its history; how to salvage its post–Cold War cooperative relationship with Russia and prevent Russia from becoming a new factor of divi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Missions in Search of a Vision
• 1 NATO at Sixty—and Beyond
• 2 The NATO Strategic Concept Revisited: Grand Strategy and Emerging Issues
• 3 NATO’s Secretaries-General: Organizational Leadership in Shaping Alliance Strategy
• 4 Implementing NATO’s Comprehensive Approach to Complex Operations
• 5 NATO–Russia Relations: Will the Future Resemble the Past?
• 6 Missile Defenses and the European Security Dilemma
• 7 The “New” Members and Future Enlargement: The Impact of NATO–Russia Relations
• 8 NATO Enlargement and the Western Balkans
• 9 The Future of the Alliance: Is Demography Destiny?
• 10 Partnership Goes Global: The Role of Nonmember, Non-European States in the Evolution of NATO
• Conclusion: Looking Forward
• Contributors
• Index