Nato loses its footing, and Trump’s not helping much

Future of alliance in doubt as European countries develop their own security projects

As French philosopher and essayist Paul Valéry noted in 1937, “the trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.” The sentiment applies to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) and a mission that’s been in a state of constant flux since the end of the Cold War. Nato has transformed for at least five futures. In the 1990s, realists predicted NATO’s imminent demise, pointing out that no alliance in history had outlived the disappearance of the threat against which it was formed. But Nato survived the 1990s as a high-level political agency for managing transatlantic relations. US proposals that the alliance should “go out of area or out of business” reflected a sense in Washington that payback time had come for 40 years of unconditional US security guarantees to Europe. Europeans in general balked at the idea of offering blanket support to US global strategy. Nato’s first post–Cold War future ended in deadlock.

Conflicts in the Balkans, 1991-1999, offered a brief second future for Nato as a regional crisis management agency, a profile encapsulated in the 1999 “new strategic concept” adopted at the 50th anniversary summit in Washington. In Bosnia (1995) and in Kosovo (1999), Nato conducted its first military operations, seemingly demonstrating that it could go “out of area” and put an end to ethnic cleansing. These operations proved controversial. An international commission of inquiry deemed the Kosovo campaign as “illegal but legitimate.” Moscow subsequently used the campaign as a precedent for Russian unilateral interventions in Georgia and Ukraine/Crimea. Nato’s first “shots in anger” rebounded awkwardly.

Meanwhile, a third future for Nato was devised in the mid-1990s with membership expanded to former members of the Warsaw Pact. This process, conducted in the name of a Europe “whole and free,” saw the alliance progressively advance to Russia’s borders. In 1997, George Kennan, the father of containment, denounced Nato expansion as “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold war era.” As Kennan predicted, Moscow’s reaction, especially under Vladimir Putin, has been robustly reactive. In 2016, the eminent Russian and East European expert Richard Sakwa commented acerbically: “Nato exists to manage the risks created by its existence.”

The 9/11 attacks provided a fourth future for the alliance. For the first time, the day after the twin towers fell, Nato invoked ‘article 5’ — an attack on one member-state is an attack on all. In 2011, the alliance engaged in a renewed experiment with humanitarian intervention and in mid-March launched “Operation Unified Protector” in Libya. This operation proved as controversial as the Kosovo mission and considerably more counterproductive. Exactly half of the Nato member states were politically opposed to the mission, with only a handful engaging in the airstrikes intended to protect the Libyan population from the predations of Muammar Gaddafi. In mid-April, the mission morphed from protection of the population to regime change, ensuring prolongation for six months until Gaddafi’s death in October. The spillover from this mission destabilised much of North Africa and the Sahel, galvanised radicals from Nigeria to Syria, and precipitated Libya into a still ongoing civil war. Perhaps the most notable aspect of the Libyan operation was the explicit new posture of the US — a key feature of what came to be known as the “Obama doctrine” — American “leadership from behind.” European states were expected to take on the heavy lifting.

The notion at the heart of President Donald Trump’s initial assertion that “Nato is obsolete” is a variant on the Obama doctrine and one that goes back to the Cold War period: burden-sharing. The US complaint is that the Europeans are free-riding on American security guarantees and should be cajoled or threatened into stumping up more resources for their own defense.

A complexity surrounding this sixth “future” for Nato is that the Europeans have been developing their own security project, the Common Security and Defense Policy. This was sparked in the 1990s by European aspirations to become a global actor and by American pressure for the EU to take over responsibility for stabilisation of its Eastern and Southern neighbourhoods. That pressure over the past two decades, has become strident under Trump.

In June 2016, the European Union published a document outlining the European Global Strategy. The objective is for the EU to achieve “strategic autonomy,” while at the same time engaging in closer cooperation with Nato. While the document says little about the implementation of these seemingly contradictory projects, the way ahead seems clear. Europe does not need two rival security entities in its relatively limited geographic space. EU-Nato cooperation, in my view, should lead, over the next decade to the Europeanisation of Nato. Under this schema, Europe would achieve strategic autonomy through its progressive apprenticeship in leadership via Nato, and the US could reduce its footprint in the alliance and concentrate on strategic challenges elsewhere.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower said at the time of Nato’s creation in 1949: “If Nato is still needed in 10 years, it will have failed in its mission.” Perhaps in 2029, its 80th anniversary, Nato can declare “mission accomplished” when Europeans become entirely self-reliant in security terms. That was the initial intention of Nato’s founding fathers. — Yale Global Jolyon Howorth has been a visiting professor of political science and International affairs at Yale since 2002.