Sprightly or Superannuated?

Given that its roots lie in the generation-long standoff between the USSR and the West, it is both understandable and prudent that NATO’s ability to deal with the world’s current security dilemmas should be questioned. With the Cold War’s end, the Atlantic alliance appeared largely shorn of its raison d’être. However, it also saw new and not so new security dilemmas emerge or re-emerge, with NATO members’ armed forces facing increasingly disparate - but more numerous - missions, resulting in higher-intensity combat. This trend toward “threat complexity” – that is, a very wide range of security risks that were difficult to prioritize – clashed with pressures such as that to reduce post-Cold War defense budgets. It also led to NATO fighting wars for which it was not intended.

When NATO forces eventually saw combat, it was not in the massed armour type defensive battles its founders envisaged against invading Soviet forces but in messy peace keeping/ peace enforcement missions in the former Yugoslavia. So too, the alliance’s current war in Afghanistan is a long way from the conflict it was designed to fight.

Such factors notwithstanding, it is worth noting that the Berlin Wall fell when NATO was 40. As such, the organization has been operating in a post-Cold War world for nearly a third of its life, with all its combat missions conducted in this period. Despite this, however, the alliance has clearly had problems keeping pace with the evolving international security environment.

In this regard, the prospect of a new strategic concept is promising. Such a move is overdue – the last was adopted in 1999. As a recent external pagereportcall_made by the Jamestown Foundation outlines, the broad strokes of the new concept were laid out this February at a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Poland and include combating terrorism, nuclear proliferation, cyber warfare, climate change, energy security and other ‘post-modern’ challenges. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the external pageprocesscall_made by which any new strategic concept will be formulated is as yet unclear, with some member states said to favor outsourcing it to a commission of experts, others insisting that it be limited to NATO governments, and a hybrid of both methods forming a third approach.

Apparently, the degree to which any new strategic concept will be revolutionary rather than evolutionary is also unclear. The UK reportedly favors the more radical approach, with Germany tending toward a more gradual evolution. Berlin’s approach is underlined by the degree to which any new NATO vision must renew and build on the consensus among it members. That any fresh concept will be the first to emerge since NATO’s last wave of enlargement or the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 gives added salience to such deliberations. However, this is but one part of an evolving jigsaw that the alliance must contend with as it nears 60.

France’s recently announced re-integration into NATO-proper represents another important development. It could potentially improve the oft-times difficult dynamic between transatlantic military affairs and the European Union’s own security and defense policy. As a champion of an EU-centric approach to defense, France’s further engagement in NATO could help reconcile the tensions between these two areas. Despite this, France’s increased role in NATO is unlikely to prove the pivotal development of the organization’s 60th year.

Neither is the prospect of a new Secretary General. The tenure of the post’s current holder – Jaap de Hoop Scheffer – ends in July. The selection and appointment of NATO Secretaries General has of course always been politically motivated. On this occasion, however, the impact of post-11 September politics shaped the debate to a noteworthy degree; with the suitability of the current front-running candidate – Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen –being questioned because of his handling of the Prophet Mohammad cartoon furor that erupted in his country in 2006.

By contrast, the appointment of a new US president, Barack Obama, and, in particular, his affect on how America and NATO conducts operation in Afghanistan will likely be of much great significance in the year ahead. Currently, NATO risks becoming the scapegoat for any western defeat in Afghanistan – a scenario with which the fate of the alliance has been directly linked in recent months. This intensive focus on Afghanistan, with the country often said to be ‘at a tipping point’ and NATO’s fate ‘hanging in the balance,’ puts enormous pressure on the alliance and is a dangerous gambit to play.

Avoiding defeat is as much about managing expectations and redefining victory as it is about winning militarily. In this regard, the new Obama administration’s recent tempering of America’s stated goals in Afghanistan is welcomed. Yet his accompanying talk of the need for an exit strategy before the extra US troops slated for Afghanistan have even been deployed could be construed as less than prudent and may make some Afghans uncertain of Washington’s commitment to their country. Moreover, unless managed with discipline, exit strategies can morph into exit timetables that pay insufficient attention to the situation on the ground or the achievement of victory – however redefined it may be.

There is some cause for hope, however, that the new US administration will be able to inspire more unity of purpose in NATO’s efforts in Afghanistan, and indeed in NATO generally, than its predecessor. For one, it stands absolved of the cardinal sin committed by the George W. Bush administration when it turned down NATO’s invocation of its Article V collective security clause in the immediate aftermath of 11 September.

In hindsight, it is difficult to see how any American administration would have restricted its scope for action by embarking on a NATO military operation rather than a US one. The character of the American way of war, the sheer preponderance of military might enjoyed by the United States, and the nature of the 11 September attacks themselves combined to make NATO’s offer of military assistance an effective non-starter.

Though the Bush administration’s rejection of Article V assistance was damaging to the alliance, it was also largely symptomatic of the latent fault lines that had existed within NATO since its conception. The alliance was built to fight a war of survival rather than a war of choice. Today, absent the zero-sum arithmetic of Cold War era mutually assured destruction, NATO allies have the luxury – some would say burden – of being able to choose where and under what conditions they will deploy troops. This a la carte way of war risks seriously- even fatally - undermining NATO’s core principle of collective security.

Meanwhile, Washington’s decision to reject NATO’s collective security invocation after 11 September appears to be partly justified in light of the current disunity of purpose among the allies in Afghanistan. As the ongoing conflict there demonstrates, NATO’s degree of cohesiveness depends on the seriousness of the threat it faces: the prospect of nuclear war unified the alliance in ways that the threat of a more unstable Afghanistan has thus far been unable to.

In the meantime, NATO’s old adversary has not disappeared quietly. Last month, Russian President Dmitri A. Medvedev announced that his country would begin a “large-scale rearming” within two years. Medvedev described this move as a necessary reaction to continuing threats to the country’s security – with encroachment by NATO constituting a significant one.

For its part, NATO has claimed Russia is seeking to undermine western institutions, with the organization’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe – US General John Craddock – recently saying that relations between the two old opponents would be more tense in the coming years that at any point since the end of the Cold War. The Russia-Georgia conflict of August 2008 proved a sanguine reminder that NATO’s Article V might not be as theoretical as it seemed in recent years, convincing some that collective security remains a valid and possibly urgent concern.

While there has been much talk lately of pressing the “reset” button on US-Russian relations (and by extension NATO-Russian relations), clearly much remains to be done here. Work on this will quicken after the NATO summit this month, after which the formal ties between the alliance and Moscow (broken as a result of last year’s events in Georgia) will be resumed. Underlying all this is the fact that NATO remains largely defined by the threats it must counter. The irony here is that the Atlantic alliance, while facing its most immediate challenge in Afghanistan – the same country that helped precipitate the downfall of its old nemesis and raison d'être, the USSR – may find its future partly secured by the perceived threat posed in part by a resurgent Russia.

As it nears 60, NATO is troubled and overstretched. However reports of its death have been exaggerated. If its fate can be disentangled from that of its ongoing campaign in Afghanistan and if it manages to play catch-up with an ever-changing strategic environment, it should also remain a viable if imperfect force in international relations for some time to come.