For decades, the most widely held belief in Washington’s foreign policy establishment has been that NATO is tremendously valuable to the United States. As former US diplomat William Burns wrote in his memoirs, even the expansion of the alliance “remained on autopilot as a matter of American policy, long after its fundamental assumptions should have been reassessed. Commitments originally intended to reflect interests transformed into interests themselves.” Being a NATO skeptic in Washington is like being a middle-aged white guy at a Bad Bunny concert. On both counts, take it from me: you feel out of place.
As Burns suggests, one thing about an unexamined consensus is that the arguments for it are not sharpened by contact with their opponents. Fortunately, Kathleen J. McInnis has stepped into the gap, offering Foreign Policy readers a case that Americans still need NATO.
His essay argues forcefully that NATO is the root of the “tremendous economic prosperity and freedom” enjoyed by Americans. But not just prosperity and freedom: providing security to Europeans “allows the United States to set the international security agenda,” improves U.S. credibility in Asia, helped facilitate Washington’s post-9/11 wars , helps manage “anti-piracy missions off the Horn of Africa… China, climate change and advanced disruptive technologies” in addition to “disinformation operations, pandemic response, migration and terrorism”.
For decades, the most widely held belief in Washington’s foreign policy establishment has been that NATO is tremendously valuable to the United States. As former US diplomat William Burns wrote in his memoirs, even the expansion of the alliance “remained on autopilot as a matter of American policy, long after its fundamental assumptions should have been reassessed. Commitments originally intended to reflect interests transformed into interests themselves.” Being a NATO skeptic in Washington is like being a middle-aged white guy at a Bad Bunny concert. On both counts, take it from me: you feel out of place.
As Burns suggests, one thing about an unexamined consensus is that the arguments for it are not sharpened by contact with their opponents. Fortunately, Kathleen J. McInnis has stepped into the gap, offering Foreign Policy readers a case that Americans still need NATO.
His essay argues forcefully that NATO is the root of the “tremendous economic prosperity and freedom” enjoyed by Americans. But not just prosperity and freedom: providing security to Europeans “allows the United States to set the international security agenda,” improves U.S. credibility in Asia, helped facilitate Washington’s post-9/11 wars , helps manage “anti-piracy missions off the Horn of Africa… China, climate change and advanced disruptive technologies” in addition to “disinformation operations, pandemic response, migration and terrorism”.
Some of us might argue that lubricating US operations in the greater Middle East after 9/11 was a bad thing, given that the missions themselves were mostly bad. The United States wasted $8 trillion, thousands of lives, and almost two decades of attention in Iraq and Afghanistan. Anything that makes it easier should be counted as a debit, not a credit.
But there is a bigger problem. NATO is not about the response to the pandemic or the fight against piracy. He has no capacity, no authority, and no aptitude for such purposes. NATO is an old military alliance. As big as the problem of migration or misinformation is, the alliance was not designed and is still not adapted to deal with it.
These problems are not only missing from the North Atlantic Treaty; they only appear as marketing in more recent official documents, including NATO’s newly released strategic concept. NATO sells itself – and sells itself – as many things, but it is, by treaty and by the structure of its bureaucracy, a military alliance dedicated to the security of its members.
Given NATO’s origins as a military alliance designed to deter Soviet aggression, we should ask: With the Soviets out and the Germans down, why did the United States fight so hard to stay ‘there after the Cold War? The answer is simple: NATO is, and always has been, a vehicle for maintaining the United States as the dominant security actor in Europe. The fact that there was sharper disagreement about this idea in the 1950s than there is today says a lot about the lack of debate in Washington today.
Even the Rand Corp. report. that McInnis cites in support of the idea of ”defense in depth” in Europe notes that American leaders only reluctantly embraced the concept out of fear that “U.S.” the Allies were too weak to contain the Soviet Union on their own”. As this report observes, the four divisions that Congress agreed to send to Germany in 1950 “were not intended to remain there indefinitely; instead, US troops were to withdraw when Western Europe had recovered sufficiently to deploy its own conventional deterrent.’
Western Europe had recovered enough to put its own conventional deterrent in place less than a decade later. In 1959, a memo describes US President Dwight D. Eisenhower as lamenting: “The Europeans are now trying to regard this deployment as a permanent and definite commitment. We are carrying virtually the full weight of the strategic deterrent force, also conducting space activities and atomic programs. We paid for most of the infrastructure and maintain large air and naval forces as well as six divisions. He thinks Europeans are close to “making a sucker for Uncle Sam”; as long as they could demonstrate a need for emergency help, that was one thing. But that time has passed.”
Does the United States need to remain Europe’s main security provider forever? Recent events in Europe, spurred by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, suggest not. Germany’s Zeitenwende, officially translated as “watershed” but rather as “new era”, was almost unthinkable six months ago. Not only did Berlin cancel the Nord Stream 2 pipeline (analysts had worried it wouldn’t), but it also set up a 100 billion euro ($107 billion) fund to bolster its defenses and then pledged to spend 2% of its GDP on defense. Poland and several other states made similar pledges to increase spending.
But as political scientist Barry Posen discussed at a recent Cato Institute panel, there are reasons to worry that these promises will not materialize. The United States has rushed into the breach, sending an additional 20,000 US troops to Europe to reassure NATO allies. The downside to reassurance is that when you’re reassuring enough, your allies are likely to believe you and may not step up to their own defense. It seems likely that Europeans, confident behind the shield of Captain America, will return to business as usual in Europe. For example, as Jennifer Lind’s work on Japan shows, Japan did relatively more for its own defense only when it feared the United States might do less. In this case, the Russian invasion of Ukraine provided shock therapy for European threat assessments. Restoring the United States as Europe’s pacifier may restore indifference and inaction.
In 2022, America’s allies are not too weak to contain Russia on their own. They simply refuse to do it because of the well-founded belief that the United States will do it for them, and consequently its people will benefit from spending their own tax dollars on national priorities.
The United States cannot maintain its role as the cornerstone of European security while successfully competing with a rising China forever. And the cheap ride that affects the US alliance in Europe also adds to its alliances in Asia.
Eulogies in the transatlantic community are still fashionable in Washington because they are considered cheap. they are not Resource constraints are starting to bite. The defense budget, already inflated by $847 billion, is not headed for $1 trillion and more soon. Maintaining American dominance of the European security scene is a luxury the United States does not need in 2022. The United States fought two wars to prevent a European hegemon from emerging in the 20th century. There is no potential European hegemony on the horizon or even on the horizon at present. For all Russia’s bluster, it is struggling to take even a fraction of a much smaller, poorer neighbor, let alone hold it. It’s time to win.
For these reasons, proponents of NATO as a permanent alliance should probably start thinking about Plan B, not heralding the alliance as a cure for problems such as climate change, piracy and disinformation. Europe is rich and strong enough to defend itself. But the Europeans won’t unless America stops doing it for them.
