Whither Goes NATO? Institutional Identity in the Twenty-First Century

By Peter R. Faber

"Strategic Outlook 2008: National Security Issues for the Next Administration" / Winter 2008 Vol. 18 / No. 1

Peter R. Faber is an adjunct faculty member at the Elliott School of International Relations, George Washington University.

As NATO gamely marches towards its 60th anniversary, one thing is certain – those who invested in its creation will not let it die. They know all too well that creating a common strategic culture is a painstaking process, as is the maintaining of human interoperability. Once these things are lost, putting an enlarged Humpty Dumpty back together again would be possible, but only at truly prohibitive costs. So despite the overheated rhetoric of pundits on both sides of the Atlantic, the question of "whither goes NATO?" has never been about its survival. What it has been, and continues to be about, is NATO’s identity and its utility.

On the question of identity, we immediately face an existential question – is NATO an Article 5 or Article 4 organization? Advocates of the latter view have argued since the 1990s that the Cold War distorted the Alliance’s true identity as a political organization and caused it to over-concentrate on common defense. Its enhanced role in post-Cold War security sector reform and democratization, among other disparate functions, thus represented a return to first principles and not some desperate attempt to find a new institutional meaning after the death of the Soviet Bear.

The above view of NATO might have become dominant earlier in this decade if a succession of new members had not insisted on continuing to define the Alliance as a geopolitical tool. For them, the Alliance had to continue serving as an Article 5 bulwark against continued Russian attempts at suzerainty, even if they were now primarily political and economic in nature. The new arrivals also came to regard the NATO accession process as the equivalent of honing one’s acting skills in the provinces before playing in a national-level theater, in this case the European Union. Because NATO membership action plans and other requirements were largely circumscribed (i.e., security-centric), candidate nations could develop their procedural "chops" in boutique-like, manageable ways, and therefore prime themselves properly for the complex, multi-pillar demands of EU membership. NATO, in other words, became a prologue to more complex transnational arrangements.

Now if the above "tilts" did not raise questions about NATO’s identity, then the attempt to redefine it militarily as a light and lethal expeditionary force certainly did. This process began in earnest in the early 2000s, after the United States military began to believe that the Revolution in Military Affairs (now known as "Military Transformation") could be formalized into a permanent process driven from the top down. In the name of burden sharing, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld particularly wanted garrisoned and heavy mechanized NATO assets to become a nimble transformation force. (No comparable demands were made of Alliance political structures, by the way.) Not surprisingly, particular members of "Old Europe" began to balk at this concept, although at first fitfully and mostly in passive-aggressive ways. Why embrace the concept of a transformational force, they asked, if it perpetuates American primacy in NATO, forces "SWAT Team" concepts of military operations down the throats of dubious allies, and permits the U.S. to continue casting a disproportionately long shadow over European defense policy development, to include driving a wedge between Eastern European nations and the EU. (From the beginning, the perceived sin of "New Europe" was that it sought to divide its interests – i.e., it wanted to rely on the U.S. for its security guarantees and the EU for its economic revitalization. Such choosiness over which EU pillars to embrace remains anathema to Brussels, which sees itself as a three-dimensional institution that must develop and retain three dimensional capabilities, including "hard power." The recent Russian invasion of Georgia, however, may have ebbed EU progress in this area yet again.)

Despite the continued discomfiture of selected Alliance members with significant parts of NATO transformation, it has served as a prime source of institutional identity up through the organization’s increasingly troubled involvement in Afghanistan. And here NATO’s identity (and by extension utility) now stands. All the dark and recent mutterings about Afghanistan being the Alliance’s Rubicon ultimately turn on the original question – whither goes NATO in the future? Should it finally be Europeanized – i.e., should the U.S.’s role recede and be replaced by a truly collegial relationship among equals? Should the Alliance retreat from its decade-long flirtation with becoming a transformational force – i.e., a burden sharing junior partner helping the U.S. proactively shape and regulate the global commons? If it does retreat from this anti-European Defense and Security Policy (ESDP) approach (at least as a preferred means for solving problems), should the Alliance define its area of operations in geographical terms? (Should it restrict itself, for example, to Western and Eastern Europe proper?) And if NATO comes home, should it privilege an Article 4 or Article 5 identity? (EU advocates, of course, see no point in pursuing a duplicative Article 4 identity in a "one dimensional" institution run by "old think" nation states.) And finally, if NATO does indeed reemphasize its Article 5 identity, will this mean that it will become an insurance policy tied up in a shoebox in the uppermost corner on the highest shelf in the most inaccessible closet in the house, never to be retrieved, except in extreme emergencies?

The above questions will be answered in due time, but there are three near-term developments we should follow in order to determine whither goes NATO:

First, the Alliance must and will update its 1999 Strategic Concept. This pre-9-11 document is a proverbial kitchen sink – i.e., it includes every conceivable threat or risk the Alliance might face in the future. Unfortunately, these threats and risks are equally weighed and valued. In contrast, a new post-9-11 Strategic Concept with clearly identified priorities will go a long way towards defining NATO’s future challenges and interests, and therefore its actual roles and missions.

Second, France will return to the Alliance’s military command structure, but how it will do so and what impact its renewed presence will have on NATO-EU military cooperation remains an open question. At the beginning of 2008, the U.S. finally "got off the fence" when viewing the EU as a burgeoning military organization. It accepted President Sarkozy’s assurances that France and its like-minded EU partners seek to complement NATO’s military capabilities rather than eventually supplant or absorb them. At the same time, the French leader continues to argue that Europe must be able to defend itself; that parallel NATO-EU operational planning headquarters are necessary; that the EU needs to field a "pioneer group" of 60,000 soldiers; and that European nations need to drop the juste retour principle for military procurement. From a NATO standpoint, these initiatives (and others) are ambiguous at best and ask the Alliance to "trust me." Well, should it? Its future identity does indeed depend on it.

Finally, there is the well-publicized challenge of Afghanistan. Central Asia is now the focal point of world terrorism. Unfortunately, the U.S. and its allies not only mixed up initial success with long-term stability there, but NATO engagement has become, in the view of at least one critic, a huge symptom of the broader adjustments the Alliance has failed to make. A vague overall mandate has led to "troops with caveats" (i.e., varying interpretations of national responsibilities) which has resulted in a two-tier operation (some NATO nations fight, some do not) which has undeniably eroded group solidarity and consensus. So as in the case of a revised Alliance Strategic Concept and a fully reintegrated France in NATO’s command structure, how the Alliance disentangles itself from Afghanistan or not will play a critical near-term role in determining its future identity. •