Note: This article - drafted before the recent Summit - appears in the current issue of the Foreign Service Journal - minus my interrogatory punctuation in the title. As the article is lengthy, I've made this an "extended entry," so be sure to click below to read through to the end. Image courtesy NATO.
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Informed Americans have never doubted that NATO has always been devoted to the defense of Europe. The “North Atlantic” in the treaty organization’s name refers to the indispensable presence in the Alliance of the U.S. (and Canada), and the extension into the Cold War era of the trans-Atlantic lifelines thrown to Europe during both World Wars.
Yet among European publics in the post-Cold War present, NATO appears to be mostly about the United States and its continued influence in Europe. Though it is an alliance based on mutual defense, with decisions reached by consensus of the biggest and the smallest member-states, NATO still translates as “American” in most European minds. This perception has its ramifications for European efforts to find the proper alignment between their defense posture as NATO members and their plans for a defense role for the European Union.
The number of European uniforms visible at NATO’s sole headquarters in North America, Allied Command Transformation (formerly SACLANT) in Norfolk, was always minimal compared to the thousands of US and Canadian troops stationed in Europe. During the Cold War, of course, it was Europe that needed boots-on-the-ground protection against the Soviet Union. Now, despite NATO’s wider horizon, Europe remains the Alliance’s geopolitical epicenter.
Europe’s attitude towards NATO is schizophrenic. On one hand, the Alliance provides strategic protection for European member-states and lessens their need to spend money on defense. The flip side is having to deal with American activism, whether nudging NATO’s borders ever closer to Russia’s sensitive frontiers, or taking NATO “out of area,” all the way to Afghanistan. But, as David Calleo observed in the December 2008 Foreign Service Journal (“NATO’s Future: Taking a Fresh Approach”), the “toolbox” strategy of using NATO as an intervention force risks transforming “a defensive European alliance into an instrument for American intrusions around the world.”
Since the end of the Cold War some two decades ago, almost every NATO summit has been an excuse to rehash op-eds proclaiming “The End of NATO.” The underlying disagreements usually pit the United States against the Europeans, but are almost always patched up to allow the alliance to carry on.
This is not to minimize what can be existential (in terms of NATO as an organization) questions. Does the North Atlantic-European quadrant of the globe still require a standing alliance in the face of a diminished threat from the East? As NATO expands to almost double the number of member states it had during the Cold War, can its decision-making apparatus withstand the increasing difficulty of reaching consensus? And – for both Europeans and Americans – does an alliance dedicated solely to defense capture the growing complexity of relations between the world’s largest trading partners and densest concentration of democracies?
Membership Means Something
After the Second World War, with the Cold War blasting its Siberian air on a ravaged Western Europe, the wartorn population greeted the creation of NATO in 1949 with relief. The postwar path of multilateral defense went in hand with cooperation in the economic sphere: the Marshall Plan and its successor, the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the European Coal and Steel Community, the almost-forgotten precursor to today’s European Union. There was strength in numbers.
In some sense, NATO is a victim of this success. European member-states – which also tend to belong to the E.U. – no longer see NATO as their primary institution of reference. Even in the collective security sphere, NATO’s monopoly is over. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has responsibilities for early warning, conflict prevention, crisis management and post-conflict rehabilitation, as well as a membership that truly extends from “Vancouver to Vladivostok.”
But the OSCE – “the largest regional security organization in the world” – isn’t a NATO competitor. With its 56-member state Council, including countries as different as Belarus and Belgium, OSCE is a convenient forum but not a defense alliance. NATO, with its potential membership list of 50 (the “Euro Atlantic Partnership Council,” which combines NATO’s 26 members with its 24 partner countries, has been a way-station to membership), should be wary of going down a similar “talking shop” route.
NATO membership means something, as last summer’s South Ossetia conflict powerfully reminded the world. In discussions throughout 2008 over Georgian accession hopes, both before and after Russia moved troops in August, NATO countries emphasized the Article V mutual defense clause. Peter Savodnik, writing in the January 2009 Harper’s (“Georgian Roulette”), posited the dilemma: “The question is whether NATO believes Georgia ... is worth defending.” He cites Charles Elbinger of the Brookings Institution: “Let’s assume that they had been admitted to NATO. Do we really believe that NATO would have come to their defense? I personally do not believe there’s any stomach for a military confrontation with Russia.” Savodnik believes that should NATO welcome Mikheil Saakashvili’s Georgia, the Alliance “may not survive a second attack.”
What Europeans Want
In the hierarchy of Europe’s multilateral organizations, neither NATO, OSCE nor OECD attracts the most attention and funding. The European Union does. And the E.U. has its own alphabet soup of security-related processes (most can’t be called institutions yet). Foremost among them are the Common Foreign and Security Policy, which is to dovetail with the European Security and Defense Identity within NATO.
How? That’s what is all rather confusing, especially to Europeans-on-the-street. Wags point out that there is no common policy, nor individuals to lead it as long as the Lisbon Treaty remains unratified. Nor is there an identity for Europeans to assume. Even so, CFSP reflects a longstanding desire in European countries to have a foreign policy and a military force independent of – but not opposed to – NATO.
European nations can boast an impressive numerical tally: 27 armed forces, 10,000 tanks, around 2,500 combat aircraft, and almost two million soldiers – but with much overlap and redundancy. According to a July 2008 white paper published by the European Council on Foreign Relations, “Re-Energizing Europe’s Security and Defense Policy” by Nick Witney, some “70 percent of Europe’s land forces are unable to operate outside national territory.” According to that study, one reason that the E.U.’s operational missions throughout the world remain limited in scope is that “the 5 percent of Europe’s nearly two million men and women in uniform currently overseas is the maximum that obsolete military machines can sustain.”
Until 2007, Witney headed the European Defense Agency, which attempts to “improve Europe's defense performance, by promoting coherence and a more integrated approach to capability development.” EDA’s goals may appear modest, but its attempts at coordination and efficiency among militaries that together consume one-quarter of the world’s defense budgets can be made to bear fruit.
France: Back in the NATO Fold?
Several important European countries share membership in NATO and the E.U., but among NATO’s top powers, only France has formally separated its political and military participation. France was key to NATO’s foundation, and until 1967 was the host to the organization’s political headquarters in central Paris and military headquarters (SHAPE) in the Parisian suburbs. That all changed when President Charles de Gaulle, proclaiming France’s independence in matters strategic, pulled out of the unified military command. Ever since, NATO has been in Belgium.
NATO’s 60th anniversary summit this month will be held in Strasbourg, the most European of French cities. Sitting on the Rhine, linked by bridges to Kehl, Germany (summit co-host), it houses such important institutions as the European Parliament, the Council of Europe and the European Court of Human Rights. It is also headquarters of EUROCORPS, which grandly proclaims itself “A Force For Europe and NATO” – consisting of earmarked troops from France, Germany, Spain, Poland, Belgium and Luxembourg.
Don’t expect a return to Paris – NATO will stay in Brussels and SHAPE in Mons, Belgium – but the summit in Strasbourg will mark a turning point. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has promised to return his country to NATO’s military command. In late January, NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer hinted about the incipient decision: “I hope that Strasbourg might be the moment in which we can welcome France's move to take its full place again in NATO, particularly in the military structure.”
In early February Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel co-authored a lengthy article that appeared both in Le Monde and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, providing the context for what they present as a net plus for both NATO and the European Union. “NATO and the E.U., alliances founded on common values,” wrote the French and German leaders, “take on increased importance” in the current context of global crises, the variety of which “requires a wider definition of security policy.”
This joint screed, coming as it did just prior to the annual Munich Security Conference and coordinated with leaks detailing France’s NATO negotiations, sets the expected French reintegration squarely into the continuum of both European Union and bilateral Franco-German security cooperation. Declaring that “the overwhelming majority of European nations have preferred joining NATO and the E.U.,” the leaders underlined the near-universal appeal of both organizations. Both NATO and the E.U. form parts of a whole, which the French and German leaders call the “Euro-Atlantic security partnership.”
President Sarkozy’s desire to rejoin NATO’s unified military command shows that the club still has its attractions. Sarkozy, who has already shown greater willingness to participate in NATO military operations, has also taken sometimes-unpopular (with French military and regional officials) decisions to rationalize France’s sprawling defense establishment.
It may be that by France “taking its full place again in NATO,” Sarkozy has made a calculation that collective security is a cost-effective way of dealing with constrained national defense budgets. Yet the relative lack of preparation of French public opinion for the reintegration into NATO’s military command highlights Sarkozy’s downplaying its importance domestically, where there is a tradition of anti-militarism in the Socialist opposition and proud independence among ruling UMP conservatives. Much depends on spin, and Sarkozy’s (self)-satisfaction with modest progress on E.U. defense during his 2008 presidency provides sufficient cover to present French rapprochement within NATO as a prudent measure whose time has come.
NATO Expansion and Power Projection
Though Americans might scoff at French recalcitrance over the years, there has long been a realization in foreign policy and defense circles that France’s absence from NATO commands was a net loss for the alliance, and not just from an institutional aspect. France, with its worldwide territories and overseas “departments,” has a navy that literally patrols the seven seas. Its army, though considerably downsized after the end of conscription in 2001, remains a force capable of power projection, whether independently or as part of E.U., NATO or United Nations operations.
Many Americans might recall “freedom fries” and Bush administration anger at France’s opposition to the invasion of Iraq, but far fewer remember President Jacques Chirac’s commitment of French combat troops to Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks. That presence has been reinforced under Pres. Sarkozy, despite the highest French combat casualties since Lebanon in 1983.
As one of Europe’s most important military powers, what France does regarding NATO greatly influences the Alliance’s European members. As NATO looks beyond its eastward expansion and undertakes missions out of its traditional area, the French dimension will gain in importance.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, NATO engagement with Eastern Europe has led it to admit many former Warsaw Pact members into its ranks. Future expansion rounds are proving more problematic, however. The gap between the United States and several European allies, already evident at the Bucharest Summit in April 2008, widened after fighting broke out between Russia and Georgia last August. In December, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her fellow foreign ministers put a Band-Aid on the divisions, using a face-saving construct to temporize on membership plans for two countries, Ukraine and Georgia, which Russia does not want to see join NATO.
Meanwhile, NATO has also been mindful of its southern flank. Before stepping down in 1995, former Secretary General Willy Claes, who started NATO’s Mediterranean Dialogue, warned about the dangers posed by Islamic fundamentalism. The Alliance has maintained the dialogue and added countries to its list of Mediterranean interlocutors, but it remains largely a forum for dialogue.
Apart from the odd op-ed calling for Israeli or Moroccan membership in the Europe-based organizations, there appears to be no groundswell of support in Europe for dialogue to lead to accession. The European Union has its own Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, and Pres. Sarkozy launched his 2008 E.U. presidency with a Paris summit proposing a “Union for the Mediterranean,” recently embraced by the European Parliament as a worthy forum for conflict resolution.
For E.U. countries, the conceptual linkage (there is no formal one) between a country’s joining NATO and its accession to the European Union is another area of concern. Turkey, originally brought into NATO to help shore up the southeastern flank against the USSR, has been knocking on the E.U. door for many years, watching increasingly impatiently as several former Warsaw Pact states have joined both organizations. Such proliferating expansion has caused considerable “enlargement fatigue” to set in. Within E.U. circles, the “widening” versus “deepening” theological debates ebb and flow, as they do at NATO.
The U.S. - E.U. Equation
At a January 2009 European Parliament “Study Day” on E.U.-U.S. collaboration after the election of President Barack Obama, Ronald Asmus, a Clinton administration deputy assistant secretary of State for European Affairs, who is now executive director of the German Marshall Fund's Brussels office, considered the changes in American attitudes towards engagement with Europe. “Before, the U.S. wish list for Europe consisted of 70 percent NATO content and 30 percent E.U.,” said Asmus. “Now the proportions are reversed."
In an Obama administration that has so far stressed American “smart power” over repeated recourse to military engagement with the world, the menu of topics to share with the European Union is richer than that which can be tackled in the NATO framework. Climate change, energy security, population and financial flows – issues with “national security” implications, though out of place in a defense alliance – are natural topics in an enhanced European Union-United States dialogue.
Presidents Obama and Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel appear to agree on this wider definition of mutual security. We are likely to hear repeated references to the notion of “complementarity” – the European term indicating comparative advantage in the appropriate institutional domain. To each its own: NATO for that 30 percent which is defense, and enhanced E.U.-U.S. coordination for that wider variety of transatlantic and global questions that constitute the remaining 70 percent.
In the “variable geometry” of European Union institutions, the “Eurozone” includes the subset of member-states that have adopted the single currency, the euro. The E.U.’s fledgling defense efforts are in similar need of “pioneer groups,” as they are called – led by countries with comparative advantage in key defense areas. Just like the euro single currency and the “Schengen” mechanism governing external and internal borders, the E.U. may find its way to building on such initiatives by core member states in the defense arena as EUROCORPS, and by the Union as a whole through the European Defense Agency.
Similarly, NATO’s member-states have long claimed the right to opt in or opt out of myriad specialized agencies. This NATO version of “variable geometry” has meant that sub-groups of countries can take the lead in areas of particular interest to their circumstances, whether in strategic fuel pipeline management, munitions development or others.
NATO prevents none of this from happening in the E.U., and indeed has everything to gain from coordinated, parallel efforts to streamline and rationalize military establishments. Nor does NATO’s continued existence prevent enhanced U.S.-E.U. cooperation on the wide range of issues that fall outside the defense realm.
The Atlantic Alliance, cumbersome as some might find its requirement for consensus, affords Europeans and North Americans a unique tool to build on 60 years of common defense. In Brussels, the U.S. already has its seat at the figurative head of the table. If NATO – an alliance of free-market democracies – did not already exist, wouldn’t some trans-Atlantic visionaries try to invent it? ●