Nato is alive, but not well.  It is still relevant in European affairs and important to the United States as a source of legitimacy.  It has been particularly important as an instrument of democratization in East Europe, but enlargement is reaching its logical conclusion.  Nato membership for Georgia or Ukraine would be asking for trouble.

Nato hoped to become a force out of area.  It has failed miserably in that regard in Afghanistan.  I wrote about this at length in the January 2009 edition of Armed Forces Journal.  We are now on the cusp of a serious re-Americanization of the war effort.  It would be comforting if NATO could take over stability ops, while we did the fighting, but they are not good in that regard either.  The vaunted EU and its members are also cheapskates when it comes to aid.  Sadly, the new Administration has a good white paper on Afghanistan, but it will not hold Euro feet to the fire at the April Summit. Perhaps humiliating the allies is not worth the cost of doing so...even though they deserve it.

America, the system-leader, finds itself on what it fears as the historical defensive. The last pillar of our world authority is our supreme military power, which we must effectively orchestrate to ritually sustain that authority. The other NATO states are only too happy to let the leader take most of the burden. But then there are the difficulties. Andy Bacevich pointed out in Wednesday's LA Times that “as long as the United States sustains the pretense that Europe cannot manage its own affairs, the Europeans will endorse that proposition, letting Americans foot most of the bill.” So from the standpoint of Europe's actual interests, our using NATO to ritually sustain American world authority is bad for European security. Europe will be stronger if it stands up for itself. The United States is perpetuating and even indirectly encouraging Euro-weakness.

But it ultimately also works against the very purpose we have made of NATO: sustaining American world authority. Part of our ritual authority-orchestration is showing how our military enterprises are also NATO enterprises. We need to use the alliance to be able to show ourselves off to good advantage. Hence we are using NATO rather shamelessly in Afghanistan — where it has no reason to be. Moreover Afghanistan has not been an effective enterprise: so that the longer we persist in coaxing NATO to be there, the greater their resentment, and the weaker the alliance. It does not help that we are constantly patronizing toward our NATO partners there.

It is not so much that Europe and America are “diverging” civilizations, but rather that the dynamics of the alliance itself are actually creating a pulling apart. Thus saying, as so many do, that NATO “is a convenient vehicle,” “worth keeping around,” “worth saving,” “best friends” forever, “as strong as ever,” is empty and rote recitation in the face of very real problems and strains created by the alliance itself. So how to answer Paul Starobin's puzzlement: “I am struck, and somewhat at a loss to explain, how divergent the views are”?

Change times always threaten a system-leader, which long ago dug itself into being the defender of the status quo. So naturally, the canonical verses of longstanding imperial rhetoric will be trotted out to paper over or obscure what is really happening. It is a form of buying time, and also a form of denial — both useful tools of an old establishment.

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Rumors of NATO's death are very much premature; but the organization needs to be something more than a vehicle for adding new members. There is no point in adding new states to the increasingly unwieldy membership, if those who are already members appear unwilling or unable to step up to the challenges that currently face the alliance.

In particular, because NATO is no better than the policies of its members, the Europeans need to get serious about their contributions to the war in Afghanistan. Those who send troops need to change rules of engagement. Their forces should be in Afghanistan to fight, not merely to conduct patrols in safety.  And European allies should  minimize the circumstances in which deployed units need to get authorization from their headquarters in Europe before they can undertake any activity (there have even been reports of  medevacs that were stymied by the need for the medical unit to get approval from its capital for the use of its equipment).

France's return to the integrated military commands could be a boon, if French intentions are more than merely to provide command billets for senior officers. France currently is making a siginicant contribution in Afghnaistan; it should encourage other European allies to do the same, and more. 

Finally, NATO needs to be vigilant in the face of an increasingly assertive Russia. It should support weaker members both in word and deed. Cyber attacks on allies should be met with a commensurate response; so should threats and bullying tactics. We are not in the midst of a Cold War, but weakness inb the face of bullying is the surest way to return to one.

NATO need not be a paper tiger, but unless our European allies step up to their security responsibilities, that is how it wil be perceived, with conseuqences that could only be problematic for all its members. 

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NATO is not the important issue.  It is a convenient vehicle for both the Americans and the Europeans.  Having survived the end of the Cold War, it could go on a lot longer, if only out of bureaucratic inertia.  It went out of area and stayed in business.  As one wag told me in the 1990s, "Have you ever been to NATO?  All those paper pushers aren't going anyplace just because the Soviet Union fell apart!"

That said, the trans-Atlantic divide is growing.  Some would like to blame this on Bush, but even a president as popular in Europe as Obama is having trouble lining the Europeans up for concerted action on the financial crisis, which is a common threat if ever there was one.  If Obama fails to get satisfaction in London, and is again disappointed with what the Europeans ante up for the 60th NATO anniversary, our young, next generation president may well decide he has better things to do than worry about whether Sarkozy is going to walk out of a Summit.  

Underlying this divergence are growing demographic and economic changes.  Europe is an aging society with mostly declining populations; it needs economic growth a good deal less than the US (and social security a good deal more). America is a young and expanding society, one that depends on growth for its livelihoods and vitality.  There are also political divergences:  American religious conservatism has little counterpart in Europe, European socialism has little counterpart in the US.  

The two continents share many common interests and values, but these are not sufficient to make the Alliance vibrant, despite the many NATO speeches lauding them.  What Europe and America need are common enterprises--things they do together to promote their common interests and values.  The post-Dayton Balkans peacemaking operations of the 1990s were common enterprises. Together, Europe and America cobbled together a Bosnian state, liberated Kosovo and saved Macedonia from civil war.  More recently, they have quarreled over Iraq, slipped dangerously close to defeat in Afghanistan, failed to counter Russian efforts to dismantle Georgia and botched the Middle East peace process.

Afghanistan is a prime candidate for a common enterprise, but so far Europeans have viewed it as obligatory assistance to the US rather than as something that needs to be done to protect their own security.  They were of course encouraged in this direction by the Bush Administration's concerted effort to keep the NATO peacekeeping mission separate from the US anti-terror mission.  Shared values don't mean much unless mission objectives are held in common and soldiers (and civilians) are prepared to work together to achieve them.  If Obama can win the Europeans over to a shared strategy and achieve unity of purpose in Afghanistan, he can make it an Alliance-saving enterprise.

Otherwise, NATO will bumble along, serving a good purpose now and again but taking a back seat to other arrangements (coalitions of the willing, US/Russian and US/Chinese bilateral cooperation, EU peacekeeping, etc.) when it comes to the truly vital interests of the day.  

A footnote:  Iraq also has potential as a joint US/EU (not NATO) enterprise.  The capacity building so much needed today in Iraq is a European strong point:  in my lifetime, Europe has prepared 21 countries for membership.  Is it too much to hope that Europe will apply some of its capacity building skills in a country that has tremendous potential as an oil supplier to the world market and a gas supplier to Europe?  

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Saving NATO from Itself

NATO could last another sixty years and be worth the effort of keeping it around, but it is badly in need of spring cleaning. Here is a “to do” list that would keep the alliance strong and relevant.

Agree to a Declaration on Allied Security that makes sense for the 21st century--include a new threat perception including new dangers like cyber-terrorism and ballistic missile attack--and make concrete recommendations on how to address each threat.

Keep an open-door policy and that includes Georgia and Ukraine and wild cards, like Israel. Don’t let Russia drive the membership agenda.

Keep NATO as the cornerstone of the trans­atlantic alliance and the primary actor in Euro­pe’s security as well—the EU should stick to doing windows.

Add new decision-making rules based on a "coalitions-of-the-willing-and-able" approach, in which contributors to a coalition are authorized to undertake the planning and management of the operation among themselves…and stiffen the burden-sharing rules (benchmarking spending at least 2 percent of GDP on defense should be made an enforced requirement for gaining mem­bership and for retaining full voting rights).

I do believe one of the international policy issues the Obama Administration needs to tackle is which Cold War institutions are worth saving in the 21st Century.  Times are changing rapidly in an increasinly multi-polar world.  Whither NATO?

NATO has obviously wandered a long way from home over the past 18 years.  Designed to meet the Warsaw Pact head on, it has "involved" into a loose military alliance with the US -- EU meets the Pentagon. However, begining in the early 1990's, it has also served as an informal, though questionably potent, protection against Russian nationalism in the "near abroad" of the former Soviet Union. And, with its deployment to Afghanistan and the formal rejoining of  France, indicate there appears to be new life in the organization.

Ultimately, NATO is a fine platform for fulfilling the mutual interests of the North Atlantic community of nations. We do share a common interest in tamping down Islamic terrorism at its roots.  We do share a mutual interest in seeing to it that there is some balancing mechanism against a resurgent Russia -- still licking old wounds and headed by men who believe in hegemony and balance of power.  And we do share a mutual interest in maintaining a place where we can carry out a military and defense dialogue avoiding the tangled political and economic complications of the G-20 and the EU.

Bottom line: I think the Obama people will (and are) finding NATO a useful and flexible tool for US interests; a league of like minded nations.

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I actually don't think NATO's 60th anniversary raises existential questions.  The fundamental bargain is sound; and while it's often frustrating that Europeans won't do more, without NATO they would do much less.  Moreover, NATO's no more in crisis now than it was in 1950 (when North Korea invaded South Korea, precipitating the creation of NATO's military structures), in 1953 (when Europeans rejected German rearmament in the EC despite John Foster Dulles' threat of "an agonizing reappraisal" of American involvement if they did), 1956 (the US refusing assistance to Britain and France in Suez), etc.

These are our best friends in the world, and the countries that have the greatest capacity to contribute to solving problems.  Our challenge is to keep persuading them its in their interests to do so.

There's no question that NATO has changed since the end of the Cold War. But it's my opinion that the basic raison d'etre for the Atlantic Alliance is as strong as ever. Remember that the fundamental reason we and our European allies established the Alliance, and all the complex webs of supporting treaties and arrangements, was for our mutual defense. The winners of WWII, and eventually West Germany as well, realized that the isolation of the U.S. from Europe in the 'twenties and 'thirties had been a major contributor to the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany, and the threat of an aggressive Soviet Union in the postwar period looked a lot like the windup for another war. Secondly, the United States had accepted as a principle of postwar foreign policy that, in Spykman's terms, the peace and security of the United States is tied inextricably to the peace and security of central Europe.

For awhile after the collapse of the Soviet Union (during our famous "holiday from strategy") a case could have been made for a diminished NATO -- a sort of keep-the-powder-dry alliance that might eventually have been superseded by other instruments of statecraft, had global events gone otherwise. But today the Alliance remains -- and should remain -- a strong pillar of American foreign policy, and one of the anchors of our worldview. The most obvious Alliance concern that binds us together today is global terrorism, coming at a time when European society, already culturally very different from that which existed in 1945, is on the brink of enormous change, not least around its southern tier. Secondly, Russia is in transition from a bumbling proto-democracy to some version of a truculent and aggressive neo-dictatorship with some significant problems -- legal illegitimacy, inefficiency, crime, a soaring public health problem -- and disastrous demographics that will inevitably reduce her to a third-rate power with the arms and natural resources of a great state, regardless of the actions of Putin and his successors. So Russia and the Russians are facing another difficult transition -- from an empire to a great state, and from a great state to ... something else. The West -- which is neatly summed up in NATO's membership -- has never been in greater need of a common defense forum.

Considering the wide range of challenges facing Europe and the United States, I think a version of Spykman's observation still holds true -- that even with the rise of the Pacific powers, the peace and security of the United States remains bound up in the peace and security of Europe more than anywhere else. Given the range of interests and cultures represented in the Alliance, it's my view that Russia, which today seems to be intent on playing the spoiler, should not be admitted to the Alliance until it reaches a greater level of political maturity. There is no reason for the U.S. or our allies to admit into NATO's councils a state that seems intent on frustrating NATO's goals.

With regard to NATO support for U.S. goals in Afghanistan and greater burden-sharing, I have to remember that burden-sharing has been an unending debate in the Alliance from the very first days. Certainly we want them to do more; NATO's political leaders, on the other hand, have a difficult time explaining why events in a far-away country about which they know so little should matter to the average European. Certainly they should do more; certainly we should press them to do so, but these are kitchen-table arguments that should not come close to threatening the marriage.

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Ten years ago, I wrote of a number of my concerns about the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in a chapter for a book* commemorating the 50th anniversary of NATO. Then the issues were: a more difficult timely decision cycle due to enlarged membership; the need to “organize, structure, staff and train” to meet the “evolving nature of threats;” the importance of positive relations with Russia; and the focus on tasks other than war fighting had the potential of weakening, and possibly, destroying the very core of the capacity that had been built over the preceding fifty years. So what’s new?

Nothing has lessened my concerns. September 11, 2001 and the succeeding years have reduced the importance of NATO for some good reasons and because of bad leadership by the strongest member.

In the fall of 2001, the United States had the chance to fight the campaign in Afghanistan with NATO; we chose another path until the folly of Iraq. Then the U.S. expanded NATO’s role in Afghanistan in hopes that we could muddle through there while we tried to save ourselves in Iraq. But we never led with conviction in Afghanistan until this week when President Obama announced his strategy to plus-up military and civilian and diplomatic resources as he refocused our efforts on clearer, if more limited, objectives.

Though there has been coordination with NATO in developing this new strategy there has been little buy-in by most of the Alliance members. Thus as he flies to Europe this week with the daunting challenges of the global economy, a war on the brink of disaster, and a tired, over-weight alliance that is fast on the way to irrelevance, President Obama may well think that Senator Burris came out with best deal after all.

I have a long and abiding loyalty to NATO; I grew up in the U.S. Army as a NATO soldier. I patrolled the Fulda Gap – literally. I went on field training exercises; I went to oh-so-many conferences; I worried and planned and wrote about how to get “10 divisions in 10 days” to Europe to fight the presumed Soviet invasion; and I was justifiably proud when the Wall fell, and we had persevered. And after the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995, I commanded a NATO division when we intervened in Bosnia, and we did a great job keeping the peace.

But today, it’s not only different; it’s over. NATO is not dead yet, but its role as the primary framework for the security arrangement between the United States and Europe is no longer a strategic imperative. As it is now, there are just too many weak links. The priority is not how to fix NATO, but how to build and transition to a new strategic arrangement.

*Susan Eisenhower, Ed. NATO at Fifty: Perspectives on the Future of the Atlantic Alliance. Washington, DC: Center for Political and Strategic Studies, 1999.

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The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has not only survived well beyond the demise of the Soviet State and the Warsaw Pact, it's also seemingly flourished despite the absence of a unifying threat to its members. Yet appearances are deceiving.

To force cohesion on an alliance without an existential threat, American national strategy after 1991 turned to sanctions, no-fly zones, periodic strikes in Iraq, missile strikes into Afghanistan and Sudan, and an anti-Serb intervention in Bosnia, until it reached its highpoint in the air war against Serbia in Kosovo. European reactions to these operations were very mixed, but with the disastrous results in Iraq and the widening anti-Pashtun war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, European public opinion is growing more and more resistant to American demands for European contributions to military operations in Central Asia and the Middle East.

European governments tend to chase European public opinion rather than shape it, but it is increasingly obvious that people in Central-East Europe hold views on everything from economics to out-of-area operations that are fundamentally different from the views of Europeans in the West and South of the continent. The question now is just how much longer the NATO alliance will survive in a form that is politically and militarily meaningful?

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I was listening to the White House Press phone-in on Saturday. Taking on the parade of perfectly parsed, anointed phrases, I suddenly realized that NATO is no mere military alliance. Rather it represents something altogether grander and more necessary — to American identity.

NATO came as second best aftermath to the sacred narrative of World War II. As the millennial vision of San Francisco and “broad, sunlight uplands” shifted quickly into Cold War, NATO became the core cargo, the treasure-promise of world hopes deferred. On its face it was an existential bulwark in the new Manichaean narrative of Free World vs. Slave.

But its promise was realization awaiting at the end of millennium-deferred. 1989 was enunciated triumphantly as the end of that waiting time. NATO had done its job, but in doing so over the decades it had also become touchstone and symbol of the larger narrative itself. It is this story we should acknowledge, if we are to truly see what NATO means to the United States today.

This need was uncovered in the Clinton years and then etched in sharp relief during the Bush era. This is what we need to see:

NATO is the core institutional and ritual source of American world authority. The United Nations, back in San Francisco, was originally groomed to serve this role, But the Manichaean split with the Soviets followed by the Trinitarian excerpting of a new, “3rd World,” grew into a mudslide that buried the UN venue of humanity’s future.

But NATO grew into an alternative kernel of American world authority. Symbolically it served every need. NATO’s 13 nations were after all the heart of how we saw history — forever Euro-Western centered — and it was also the center weight of a surging world economic recovery in the 1950s and 1960s.

Above all we were the undisputed Primus Inter Pares — the beneficent, the strong, the unselfish. NATO became the kernel for how American world authority might extend itself to all humanity. 1989 — The End of History — was the thunderclap announcement, and “civil” wars in Yugoslavia were the first venue for how a new model of world leadership might be showcased.

It was here that the original military essence of NATO became so valuable. Not merely a military alliance, it was above all an existential pact of arms — in which every member must stand shield-to-shield. What immense authority flowed to the United States: the guarantor of such fidelity and commitment!

Now this model might be extended as part of The End of History Plan. Thus “NATO Enlargement” was in truth the test of a new American world authority model, après Soviet, après Manichaean. What better place to test it that in the pliant wreckage of Red Empire? What better way to hammer home authority than through collective peacemaking and nation building in the former Yugoslavia — and the unmistakable message delivered to all through our little war with Serbia?

The racing imagination of those days had breathless scope — of a NATO that would one-day link Europe with all Asia. But then there was 9-11 — and a new electric urgency to vision’s completion. How smoothly it began to fall into place in Afghanistan: a shining token that NATO was infinitely extensible.

But a curious mélange of unstoppable impatience and narcissism brought The Leader to casually ditch the entire model whole in Iraq — and this became the basis for the model’s eventual unraveling. How was a “Coalition of the Willing” in 2003 any different from Napoleon’s in 1812, or Herr Hitler’s in 1942? Iraq turned the model of NATO as America’s “We are the World” into petty imperial self-justification.

Thank God there was still Afghanistan! The new administration — from its proffered terms-of-art and overall earnestness in Saturday’s conference call — senses this salvation acutely. How it reiterated again and again the mantra linking of NATO-G20-EU! This was an “ignore your driving and listen” car radio moment for me.

The United States — meaning the world enterprise of the US Government — desperately needs NATO now, and above all it needs the military legitimation of world authority that only an existential arms’ compact — tied at its source to American sacred narrative — can fulfill.

In 1945 an American untouched by war was 50% of the world economy. In the classical era of Cold War we held on to 25% or so of global GDP. Today we are at 20% and slipping. We may be the world’s biggest economy, but we are also mired in unimaginable debt and at the mercy of those who do not have our best interests at heart.

Repeated official linking of NATO-G20-EU is a public way to let the world know that the United States is still humanity’s global Champion — and its proof, tested for 60 years and there for all to see — is NATO. Here Afghanistan is our ritual symbol. The Alliance is now critical for American world authority primarily through its exercise in the ritual and symbolic realm of world consciousness.

What this means is that NATO cannot risk tests where it might fall down or fail: it is all about looking good. As long as it looks good, the administration can trump the decline of American authority elsewhere — and counterbalance glacial EU-European pulling away.

But this is the iron bottom-line: American world authority — for the first time in our national life — is vested now almost wholly in our ability to translate military supremacy into the credible appearance that we are committed to a vision of world security — with NATO as its model.

Think of this as an ancient tale of some potentate’s currency debasement (for us a contemporary anecdote wrecking its sorry way from 2002 to 2008) with the new emperor trying to restore full faith and credit by bringing the coin back to .9214 fine. If only it was so straightforward.

Yet the larger story — with consequences yet unseen from the Baltics to Afghanistan to Turkey and Kurdistan — is still unknown. That story will be all about how well we can restitch and resume the American sacred narrative. But it will also be about how much American world authority is dependent on the mysterious penumbra of an old alliance.

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