Why NATO Matters
The only thing worse than fighting with allies is fighting without them.
— Winston Churchill
The US needs NATO as much as Europe, perhaps more. Europe’s beauty hides a dark heart. Over the past two millennia most wars (certainly the most destructive ones) have started in Europe. Often, they did not stay there. Although the US has changed a lot in its nearly 250 years, the US retains deep ties to Europe. And, as much as it may want to, the US can’t avoid involvement in European conflicts. After WWII Europe was destroyed and divided. Europe needed an architecture to guarantee security and stability for those parts still beyond the Iron Curtain. Enter NATO. In addition to providing a security framework, NATO also serves to defend the shared values of liberal democracies. In more practical ways, NATO provides an array of capabilities that allow the US to quickly project power to Europe. The current tensions in Eastern Europe demonstrate the continued importance of NATO in helping the US and Europe present a unified, coordinated response to threats. Admittedly, there is a cogent argument to be made that NATO expansion following the dissolution of the USSR was unwise. But that toothpaste is not going back in the tube…and certainly not with a gun pointed at NATO’s head. Finally, contrary to popular narrative, NATO saves the US money. Mountains of money.
Europe is unique. Nowhere on earth do so many cultures and languages live so close to one another. The EU, with a population of 550 million people, has 24 officially recognized languages and about 160 distinct cultures. All in a space half the size of the US with only 340 million people. This linguistic and cultural density and diversity occurs nowhere else on earth, making Europe equal parts amazing and volatile. North America was colonized by Europe: the Spanish, Dutch, French and British. America existed as an extension of Europe for the better part of three centuries. About as long as the US has existed as an independent nation. While drafting our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, America’s founders were reading European philosophers — among them Rousseau, Voltaire, and Locke, who were writing about the ideas of liberty, nationhood and justice — ideas that are baked into America. Successive waves of emigration in the 19th and early 20th centuries further cemented this Europeanization. Feel it or not, the US is fundamentally European. The US can’t ignore fighting in Europe — it’s compelled to respond by history and demography.
After WWII, Europe faced imminent social unrest — countries could not feed or house their citizens. The Marshall Plan was the US response, but it was an infrastructure redevelopment plan for civil society — not a security plan. Something permanent was needed to replace the allied forces arrangement used to defeat Nazi Germany. To fill this role the Washington Treaty of 1949 established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) with an initial membership of 12 nations. In addition to the US, the original NATO members were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and the UK. Within a few years Greece, Turkey and West Germany joined. As treaties go, the Washington Treaty is a model of clarity and brevity — just 14 articles and a handful of pages. The most important is Article V, the statement of common defense — an attack on one is an attack on all. This guarantee of mutual defense has served as the stabilizing force in Europe for over 70 years and remains the backbone of Euro-Atlantic security.
The US allied with the USSR during WWII, not because they shared values, but because they shared an enemy. NATO is the inverse — a defensive alliance based on the shared values of Western liberal democracies, not on the transitory expediency of a common foe. NATO’s core shared values are democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law. In practical terms, NATO provides a standing set of echeloned HQs, a well-functioning command-and-control architecture, a fully developed logistical support infrastructure and equipment standardization. Additionally, NATO member nations that host US forces contribute significantly to those costs. When critics claim NATO members are “behind in their payments”, they reveal a basic misunderstanding of how NATO funding works. Most operational NATO costs are paid by the nation that incurs them. NATO has a term of art for this, “costs lie where they fall.” There is a NATO common funding budget to fund the civil and military staffs and to invest in common-use capabilities…think ports, airfields, pipelines, fuel and munitions storage — that kind of stuff — not sexy, but very important. This budget is about €2.5b annually (~$2.8b). The 2% of GDP figure often heard refers to a goal for member-state investment into their own militaries. (the US invests 3.4% of GDP in its military). That said, by providing the US with a broad set of ready facilities to use in the event of conflict in Europe, NATO allows the US to keep a relatively modest permanent footprint in Europe, saving the US hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
The current situation in and around Ukraine is a vivid illustration of NATO’s enduring importance. Without NATO, would Russia already be in Kyiv? It seems likely. NATO is bolstering its defensive capabilities in member states that border Ukraine and at key NATO installations in Germany. NATO will not use allied combat capability to defend Ukraine, but if the regional stability of that part of Europe is threatened all bets are off. Recall that the 1999 bombing campaign against Serbia was a NATO operation — ALLIED FORCE. None of the countries involved in the civil war were NATO members, but the security of NATO members in the region was threatened by the humanitarian crisis the war caused. It does not take a lot of imagination to see a similar dynamic playing out along Ukraine’s borders with NATO members. This understanding may be checking Putin for the time being. Although NATO will make every effort to prevent direct contact between Russian and NATO forces, in the hybrid war favored by Russia the battlespace includes many forces whose alignment and allegiance are unclear. Video has already surfaced of units bearing no national or unit insignia. Things could and likely will get confused.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many former Soviet satellite states expressed interest in joining NATO. There was a lot of debate about it at the time, but ultimately the alliance agreed, and to-date 15 new NATO members have joined from Central and Eastern Europe — doubling the size of the alliance to 30 members. This provides Russia with a ready-made talking point about “encirclement” and, while inaccurate, it’s an easy narrative to push. Another problem with NATO expansion is that it makes NATO difficult to manage. NATO is a consensus organization. All decisions must be unanimous. That was hard enough with 12 members. Now with 30 members…that’s a heavy lift. In practical terms this means NATO rarely takes up anything difficult or controversial. With a 30–0 mandate as the threshold only the simplest of things are even attempted. A possible solution is to create a NATO version of the UN Security Council where a smaller subset (perhaps 8–10) of NATO’s primary contributing nations must agree on issues of alliance strategy and management but key issues like invoking Article V remain at 30. However, this would require smaller nations to agree to reduce their own influence, so it’s unlikely to happen.
NATO is the most successful political/military alliance in history and, while imperfect, remains relevant today because it defends liberal democratic values in defiance of illiberal autocracies. NATO provides the US the security architecture it needs to defend shared values and promote effective burden-sharing among all member-nations. Although expansion has brought challenges, without NATO the US would find itself defending democratic Europe through a byzantine array of bilateral and multilateral agreements providing access to fewer facilities and capabilities and at much higher cost. Those who think NATO is provocative or has outlived its usefulness don’t understand the alliance, European or American security.
The author is a retired USAF colonel who served 4 years in Belgium at NATO’s Supreme HQ Allied Powers Europe, the alliance’s highest military HQ and 3 years as Chief of the Office of Defense Cooperation at the US embassy in Budapest, Hungary.
Twitter: @curtmilam
