CAN NATO KEEP THE PEACE IN EUROPE FOR ANOTHER 75 YEARS?
Having curbed Russian aggression for three quarters of a century even as its members grew complacent in the wake of the Cold War, the military alliance marks its anniversary revitalised by the Ukraine invasion. Yet it may now face its greatest threat in Donald Trump
IN THE mid-afternoon of December 31, 1947, the US State Department’s director of European Affairs strode into the office of his deputy, Theodore Achilles, and announced the two of them were about to change the world. “I don’t care whether entangling alliances have been considered worse than original sin ever since George Washington’s time,” Achilles later quoted his boss John D Hickerson as saying. “We’ve got to negotiate a military alliance with Western Europe in peacetime, and we’ve got to do it quickly.”
Hickerson had just returned from London and a four-way meeting of foreign ministers from the United States, France, Britain and the Soviet Union. At that gathering, British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin had collared Hickerson’s boss, US secretary of state George Marshall, to persuade him that only a transatlantic alliance network could save Europe from Kremlin domination.
Marshall was initially lukewarm, but Hickerson was convinced and together with US, European and Canadian officials, pulled together a remarkable diplomatic effort to build a transatlantic treaty. Three quarters of a century later, the modern North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, formed during those heady days of international diplomacy, has grown well beyond the 10 nations that signed in Washington on April 4, 1949.
With the addition of Sweden last month and Finland a year ago, both in response to renewed Russian aggression, NATO’s membership now stands at 32. In population terms, were it a single nation, it would be the largest in the world, after India and China.
As NATO leaders gather inWashington this July to celebrate the 75th anniversary of its founding, there will doubtless be plenty of self-congratulatory comments.
It comes at a time, however, when the modern Western alliance is being questioned on a scale NATO has rarely seen before. Perhaps unsurprisingly – particularly given this year’s summit comes only four months before the US presidential vote – many of headlines will focus on Donald Trump. During his last spell in the White House, he repeatedly ranted about the EU not “paying” its way when it came to defending Europe.
During his first term, though, Trump was restrained by a cadre of senior officials and former generals. There are likely to be fewer such figures in any second term.
JOHN Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser and now a strident critic, has warned repeatedly that his former boss would have quit NATO altogether had he won re-election in November 2020 and will likely do so if he retakes theWhite House.Yet interviewed earlier this month by Nigel Farage, Trump said the US would “100 per cent” remain in NATO, but only assuming Europe paid its “fair share”. If not, he noted there was a “nice big, beautiful ocean” between the US and the continent.
Even if he doesn’t pull out, officials and diplomats within NATO’s glass and steel HQ in Brussels – dubbed “the death star” – are still braced for a bumpy ride.
The challenges facing the alliance, however, go well beyond a single rogue US president. Even within the Biden administration, officials have made it clear that, as the US refocuses its attention on Asia to confront a rising China, it will have fewer if any additional military forces to spare for Europe.
That in itself is a major change. Ever since legendary US General Dwight D Eisenhower was appointed NATO’s first Supreme Allied Commander Europe in December 1950, US military muscle – as well as command and control – have been at the heart of the alliance. Initially, Eisenhower breezily suggested the US might only need to keep troops from the continent for a decade before European nations filled the gap themselves. But within months, he realised that might never happen.
At the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union kept its vast military machine largely intact, maintaining as many as five million military personnel, 30,000 tanks, and 100 combat-ready divisions ready to strike Europe, with as many in reserve.
By 1950, Western combat-ready forces on the continent, pared back heavily after 1945, stood at barely 10 divisions, with a few thousand often-outdated tanks and only 400 combat aircraft, compared to several thousand on the Russian side. Eisenhower’s two years in charge were dedicated to turning that around.
Today, Trump’s histrionics might be something new, but multiple US presidents – including Eisenhower, Kennedy and Nixon – complained that Europe was not pulling its weight. Eisenhower, though, always argued a balance must be struck. NATO nations must spend enough on their military to deter war, but not bankrupt themselves.
Over the four decades of the Cold War, the Atlantic alliance successfully achieved that, with successive Kremlin leaders unwilling to attempt a land grab in Western Europe and the Soviet empire eventually going bankrupt, in part due to its excessive efforts to maintain military dominance. The consequences were huge – in Europe, several successive generations got to grow up in relative peace.
Securing that peace took commitment and often tough decisions. In the 1980s, the US maintained 300,000 troops in Europe – three times the number that it has today – as well as thousands of nuclear weapons, at a cost of billions of dollars.
Yet from 1945 until the early 1990s, not a single European city was bombed from the air or shelled. Even when conflict returned to Europe in the 1990s,
in first the Balkans and then Chechnya, those wars were relatively limited. So were earlier 21st-century confrontations in Georgia and eastern Ukraine.
The “peace dividend” that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 saw massive and immediate disarmament. The British Army at the end of the Cold War was 180,000 strong, with 55,000 troops in Germany alone as part of the British Army of the Rhine. On current plans, it will shrink to roughly 73,000 by next year.
NATO is, of course, no stranger to crisis.
AS US ambassador to the alliance, future US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld once quipped it was “saved” roughly once a decade by a new crisis with the Kremlin. The Berlin airlift and blockade of 1948 helped Hickerson and his allies get the initial treaty signed, the Korean War in 1950 sparked the creation of its modern military structures under Eisenhower and his British deputy, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery.
Decades later, the 9/11 attacks and a desire to heal divisions created by the invasion of Iraq set conditions for the alliance to take over responsibility for Western military operations in Afghanistan. Now it is Vladimir Putin’s full-scale Ukraine invasion of February 2022, unleashing firepower on a scale unseen in recent European history, that has forced the alliance into its most serious and realistic military planning since the 1980s. It has been a massive wake-up call to NATO and its members.
The scale of fighting in Ukraine over the past two years has outstripped anything the alliance thought possible. Foreign efforts to rearm Ukraine first wiped out much of the West’s stocks of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, then those of artillery shells and, increasingly, other ammunition. The result has been a US and European industrial rearmament effort that is still getting under way.
With the US increasingly distracted by Asia and elections, European leaders know they must step up – but the growing pains of that process are proving pretty savage, yielding high-profile disagreements between leaders, such as French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
All agree decisive action is needed – but the public rows about what and how are at best not particularly helpful, and at worst risk leaving lasting diplomatic damage.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the states of Eastern Europe that have proved the most determined to defend themselves and support Zelensky’s government by everything
short of sending their own soldiers into battle in Ukraine. Poland now spends 4 per cent of its gross domestic product on defence, more than any other NATO state, and last month called for all alliance nations to commit to 3 per cent as their new minimum.
Overall, half of NATO’s 32 nations reach the current target of 2 per cent, itself a major increase over the last decade since Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.
Britain, which has long prided itself as a leading NATO member, may now be left behind. After last month’s Budget, Britain became almost the sole European nation not to significantly hike defence spending in the current year – while the UK has also notably failed to match German and Canadian pledges to respectively triple and double their forces assigned to NATO in the Baltic states.
In Poland and Germany, officials are expressing increasing concern that Russia – which has refocused its entire economy on war to regain lost ground in Ukraine – might be tempted to move against exposed areas of NATO’s Baltic states, either not long after or even before the Ukraine conflict ends.
That would forever undo the alliance’s boast not to have lost “even one inch” of its territory and leave the credibility of the alliance in pieces for all to see.
Putin would only take that risk, most of them believe, if he thought that NATO’s member nations – particularly the United States – would not step up to meet their commitment under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty to treat an attack on one member as an attack on all.
NATO’s activities this year are designed to signal that would be a suicidal gamble. In the largest alliance military drills since 1989 – Steadfast Defender 2024 – some 90,000 troops were deployed, from the Arctic to the Mediterranean.
For all that, however, decision-making in a 32-member body is getting ever harder – Turkey and Hungary held up Swedish accession for almost two years.
Should Trump choose to quit NATO, or even just significantly complicate its workings, that would take the world’s most successful military alliance into uncharted waters.
Even without that, NATO’s next 25 years may prove as stormy as anything that came before.