Trump has a point about NATO’s role
President Donald Trump is ruffling trans-Atlantic feathers once again, this time planning to proceed to Helsinki to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin after meeting with North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies, whom he is already needling about their relatively meager financial contribution to their own defense. Trump’s rhetoric, launched even before he took off for Europe on Tuesday, may be undiplomatic, but he is tapping into something real. Changing American interests and new geopolitical realities are calling into question the future of NATO.
The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis established in 1938, now known as the March of Dimes, was dedicated to the eradication of childhood polio. By the mid-1950s, childhood polio was almost eradicated. Rather than close up shop, the March of Dimes took on new childhood public health challenges and went on to address other problems.
NATO, created a decade later, also enjoyed success. Established to “keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down,” by 1989 NATO succeeded as the Iron Curtain fell and the Warsaw Pact collapsed. Like the March of Dimes, it also sought new missions, such as consolidating East European democracy. Unlike the March of Dimes, however, NATO’s second act has not garnered universal applause.
To understand why, recall that after the fall of the Berlin Wall, East and West debated whether Germany should reunify. Reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev understood that reunification was inevitable. But since Russia and the Soviet Union had borne the brunt of German depredations in the two world wars, he was eager to minimize the danger of a reunited Germany.
In discussions with American leaders, Gorbachev secured verbal assurances that a reunified Germany would remain in the Cold War alliance but that NATO would not expand beyond the old inter-German border. Historians debate whether the subsequent retreat of the U.S. from these assurances marked bad faith or simply strategic absentmindedness. Either way, for Russians of all political stripes it did not matter, as NATO began to talk about expansion into states of the former Warsaw Pact and the collapsed Soviet Union.
Not coincidentally, the turn of the century witnessed the first wave of NATO expansion and the ebbing of Russian democracy. In the late 1990s, Boris Yeltsin would appoint a hitherto obscure former KGB lieutenant colonel. as prime minister. When Yeltsin resigned in 1999, Putin succeed him as president of the Russian Federation. Since then, Putin has tightened his hold on power through behind-the-scenes chicanery bolstered by widespread Russian belief that Russia needs a strongman to stand up to the West.
Indeed, Putin’s most brazen acts — the war with the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, the seizure of Crimea and the ratcheting up of the proxy war in Eastern Ukraine — came after NATO’s 2008 Bucharest Summit opened the door for further expansion of NATO to include Georgia and Ukraine.
Revisiting this history is important because many Americans have only a hazy understanding of the geopolitical context that helped bring Putin to power — his recent malfeasance did not come out of the blue.
The efforts from NATO to remain relevant after victory have not solved new problems, such as spreading democracy in those new states. Of the 13 new NATO members admitted since the end of the Cold War, 10 have recently seen a decline in their democracy scores from their peak in the period between 1989 and 2017. Rather than consolidating democracy, NATO has gone from playing an important role in winning the Cold War to helping cause a new one.
None of this is to dismiss European concerns about Putin’s bad behavior, but you have to ask how concerned our wealthy allies really are when their average defense spending remains so low.
Europe is capable of matching Russia in almost every category of military power. Given that, perhaps it is time to ask, as Trump is ham-handedly doing, whether Europe and the U.S. might be better served by a different security architecture in Europe.
Michael C. Desch, director of the Notre Dame International Security Center, is author of the forthcoming “Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security.”