When NATO meets in Madrid this week, the question inevitably arises: why does the United States need the alliance at all? Why is it worth risking New York to save Vilnius or Warsaw, capitals of distant lands separated from the United States by a vast ocean? The answer lies in the way NATO has worked, as has been amply demonstrated in practice, for the simultaneous advancement of both American and European interests.
While the US security guarantee to its NATO allies has been central to the politico-military framework of the alliance, and as a result the United States has spent significant sums on the maintenance of defense capabilities, this has never been a one-way deal. These treaty relations have placed the United States in a position of strategic leadership. As a result of America’s central role in the transatlantic and international relations that NATO has cemented, Americans have enjoyed immense economic prosperity and freedom.
In short, successive US administrations have been accorded privileged status when it comes to things like trade partnerships and access to bases, largely because of the outrageous role the United States plays in defending its allies. Nor would the United States have been able to maintain its sizeable portfolio of foreign military defense technology sales and cooperation activities without the strategic foundation established by its role as NATO’s main security guarantee for seven decades.
When NATO meets in Madrid this week, the question inevitably arises: why does the United States need the alliance at all? Why is it worth risking New York to save Vilnius or Warsaw, capitals of distant lands separated from the United States by a vast ocean? The answer lies in the way NATO has worked, as has been amply demonstrated in practice, for the simultaneous advancement of both American and European interests.
While the US security guarantee to its NATO allies has been central to the politico-military framework of the alliance, and as a result the United States has spent significant sums on the maintenance of defense capabilities, this has never been a one-way deal. These treaty relations have placed the United States in a position of strategic leadership. As a result of America’s central role in the transatlantic and international relations that NATO has cemented, Americans have enjoyed immense economic prosperity and freedom.
In short, successive US administrations have been accorded privileged status when it comes to things like trade partnerships and access to bases, largely because of the outrageous role the United States plays in defending its allies. Nor would the United States have been able to maintain its sizeable portfolio of foreign military defense technology sales and cooperation activities without the strategic foundation established by its role as NATO’s main security guarantee for seven decades.
This leadership position — reflected in its presence abroad — also allows the United States to set the international security agenda in both political and practical ways. For example, America would not have been able to pursue expeditionary and counter-terrorism operations in the Middle East and Africa were it not for the bases and pre-positioned equipment that the United States has been able to maintain on Allied soil in Europe.
Coalition operations to stabilize the Balkans or conduct counter-piracy missions off the Horn of Africa would not be relatively simple (or perhaps even possible) without the decades of interoperability standardization agreements, multinational training exercises, or the International Military Staff with which allies can collectively plan and deploy their military operations. integrate. NATO’s structures also provide US military leaders with direct experience of the complexities of conducting multilateral military operations.
Another long-standing reason for American involvement in European theater is to enable American strategic depth. Labeled by security experts as “defense in the deep,” military technological advances and hostile operations during the World Wars showed that the United States was no longer protected by the two oceans off its coasts. As a result, it was considered strategically wise to station U.S. troops abroad to face hostile aggression—if not outright conflict—far from the American homeland.
Not only did this make the American homeland less vulnerable to outright war, but forward presence was also considered relatively cost-effective, especially given the potentially enormous social, political and economic costs of war on the American continent. The advent of the nuclear age changed that calculation somewhat — intercontinental ballistic missiles left the American homeland vulnerable — but since even nuclear war with the Soviet Union would likely also involve combined arms battles in the European theater, the logic of deep defense persisted.
In recent decades, that rationale has persisted, even as the strategic context changed. For example, one of the main reasons for US counter-terrorism operations in the Middle East after the September 11 attacks was to address the root sources of violent extremist groups before they could rebuild sufficient capacity and capacity to carry out terrorist attacks against the US homeland. . The war in Ukraine, along with the accompanying security and defense concerns on the European continent that have now increased, underline once again the importance – and relative cost-effectiveness – of a forward military presence. In addition, the global political significance of the United States’ track record when it comes to maintaining these alliances over the long term can arguably give the United States a different kind of depth: credibility.
While the reliability of the United States as a security partner is often questioned in response to day-to-day events, it is noteworthy that US commitments to its allies in Europe have weathered a number of geopolitical storms. The day-to-day management of alliance relationships is, of course, a complex affair. But in building and recalibrating security relationships with other states, including critical ties in Asia, the US track record helps build and maintain a long-lasting alliance in building credibility with others.
More generally, NATO offers its members an extraordinary – and extremely important – degree of strategic flexibility. NATO has been able to reinvent itself, as evidenced by the post-Cold War experience. From the late 1990s until about 2014 – and largely as a result of US instigation – NATO’s main focus was collective security and crisis management in the near-term foreign countries of Europe and the Middle East. Security interests were formulated in terms of promoting global stability and prosperity, including by combating and dismantling terrorist groups outside NATO’s allied borders. In other words, contrary to expectations in the early 1990s, NATO has endured and evolved to meet myriad security challenges without an overwhelming threat. And by the way, against this backdrop, trade between the US and Europe remained strong.
In 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and started a proxy war in Ukraine, the old hostile geopolitics returned. NATO’s role as a bulwark against an expansionist and revisionist power immediately received renewed attention, even though the frontline is now considerably further east than it was during the Cold War. Complicating matters further, despite the many pledges made by Brussels, Russia has made it clear that it views NATO’s eastward expansion as contrary to its own interests, and that it considers the existence of the alliance itself a considers a threat. Yet NATO manages to both address the challenge of a revanchist Russia and a wider range of security challenges for the alliance, including China, climate change and advanced disruptive technologies.
More broadly, the lines between foreign and domestic policy, war and peace, civil and military, public and private are blurring, calling into question long-standing approaches to dealing with security and defense challenges. Non-traditional security challenges, including disinformation operations, pandemic response, migration and terrorism, have weighed heavily on governments of allies on both sides of the Atlantic. None of these challenges can be addressed by one state alone, not even the United States. And in these hazy spaces, NATO can – and has – played an important role in catalyzing solutions to these complex problems. For example, NATO played a key role in facilitating the international community’s response to the rise of the Islamic State, plans formed on the sidelines of the 2014 summit in Wales.
Strategic leadership, strategic depth and strategic flexibility are the reasons why the value of NATO is hard to overestimate. It is a politico-military arrangement that has proved remarkably resilient over the decades, consistently proving its worth to its members on both sides of the Atlantic. This is probably why Vladimir Putin’s Russia is so determined to undermine it.
The strategic conundrum for the United States – and for its NATO allies – therefore, is how to keep intact the alliance system, which provides the foundation for countless social, economic and political benefits for its members, in the face of an aggressive adversary. But the United States must defend its old and new allies. Otherwise, it risks losing leadership and benefits that have become a central, if overlooked, aspect of American prosperity. In a very real way, the security of NATO allies is inextricably linked to US interests.
