Has the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which its members describe as the longest and “the most successful alliance in history,” been effective at fighting wars or preventing them?
Many strategic analysts are asking this question as NATO has just celebrated its 75th anniversary in a summit meeting of its 32 member states led by the United States in Washington. The answer, when seen dispassionately, seems to be that NATO has been more effective in preventing rather than fighting wars.
However, the Washington summit, it seems, was dominated by talks on how to fight Russia, not anything else. Never before in its 75-year history has any NATO summit concentrated on arming and financially strengthening one particular country as it did at Washington.
Of the 38-point summit declaration on July 10, as many as ten points, incidentally among the largest paragraphs of the declaration, have been exclusively devoted to Ukraine and its fight against Russia. In fact, the declaration has been accompanied by a separate six-point “Pledge of Long-Term Security Assistance for Ukraine,” apart from a strong promise by the NATO leaders of the inevitability of Ukraine being accorded NATO membership in the future.
“We will continue to support it on its irreversible path to full Euro-Atlantic integration, including NATO membership. We reaffirm that we will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree, and conditions are met”, the resolution mentions.
However, notwithstanding the bravado they displayed at the American capital, the fact remains that NATO countries, particularly their leader, the United States, are not prepared to fight Russia directly by granting Ukraine membership in the foreseeable future, at least as long as that country is at war.
To do that, NATO has to make the clause of the alliance that says an attack on one is an attack on all infructuous. Otherwise, any membership to Ukraine, which is already fighting a war, will automatically make all the NATO nations war-combatants against Russia.
Arguably, if NATO has fought any war at all, then it was in Afghanistan. For nearly 20 years, NATO Allies and partner countries had military forces deployed to Afghanistan under a United Nations (U.N.) Security Council mandate.
NATO allies went into Afghanistan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States under the rationale that they would ensure that the country would not again become a safe haven for international terrorists to attack NATO member countries.
NATO allies went into Afghanistan in 2001. From August 2003, NATO led the UN-mandated International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which aimed “to create the conditions whereby the Afghan government could exercise its authority throughout the country and build the capacity of the Afghan national security forces,” including in the fight against international terrorism. In January 2015, NATO launched the Resolute Support Mission (RSM) “to train, advise and assist Afghan security forces and institutions to fight terrorism and secure their country”.
But then, the NATO intervention in Afghanistan, including that of the United States, was by no means a success story, with NATO Foreign and Defence ministers deciding to withdraw all allied troops from Afghanistan by May 2021. In fact, many consider NATO intervention in Afghanistan to be “a humiliating defeat.”
However, going by the speeches of the NATO leaders during the Washington summit, Ukraine, with the transatlantic alliance’s total and unconditional support, will defeat Russia. But, as many skeptics point out, do these leaders have the support of their respective countrymen in providing that support to Ukraine?
The recent success of the right-of-centre parties in elections in Europe and their growing reservations against ever-enhancing financial and military support to Ukraine at a time when most of these countries are yet to recover economically from the adverse impact of the Covid pandemic constitute apparently a huge challenge. For these leaders to keep their commitment of at least 2% of GDP, annual defense spending may not be all that easy.
This challenge could be all the more enormous if Donald Trump regains the Presidency in America. Going by the American media, for all the effort to strengthen NATO, Trump’s shadow was casting a pall over the Washington Convention Center, where the summit was being held. Trump has many supporters in the United States who are totally against Washington shouldering a disproportionate share of NATO’s financial and military burden.
Moreover, American strategic elites are also debating whether the U.S. should concentrate more on European security than on China’s rise and the complex security challenges of the Indo-Pacific.
Incidentally, the Washington Declaration devoted two major paragraphs on China, its “no limits” partnership with Russia, its large-scale support for Russia’s defense industrial base, its “malicious cyber and hybrid activities, including disinformation,” and its non-transparent “space capabilities, and activities.”
Against this background, NATO’s commitment to Ukraine is going to be under scrutiny by many skeptics.
But that said, NATO has a glorious record in preventing the Cold War with the then Soviet Union from becoming an open, full-scale war. Created on April 4 1949, NATO then had just 12 members, and it contained the Soviet Union in accordance with veteran U.S. diplomat George Kennan’s original conception of “containment” in the form of an anonymous contribution to the journal Foreign Affairs in July 1947 – the so-called “X-Article” titled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” It talked of preventing further Soviet military expansion in Europe by providing a military shield behind which Western European countries could develop successful economic and political systems.
NATO can be said to have realized this limited goal of preventing the spread of Soviet expansion in Western Europe. It was a great success story, possibly because NATO, despite its professed goal of protecting and furthering democracy, did not overstretch itself fighting its members’ wars, including that of the United States, in places other than Western Europe. It did not fight the members’ colonial wars in Asia and Africa. Likewise, it did not participate in the American war in Indochina and other Washington-backed anti-communist operations around the world.
However, things changed after 1990, when the Soviet Union disintegrated soon after the demolition of the Berlin War, which marked the end of the Cold War. Of course, the Soviet bloc collapsed from its internal problems and fault lines. If the Warsaw Pact was dissolved and many independent states emerged in East Europe, that was not because of NATO’s military victory.
Some argue that with the end of the Cold War, NATO lost its rationale. This argument may be too far-fetched, but Professor Anatol Lieven makes a lot of sense when he argues that with the end of the Cold War, “NATO prudence evaporated. The Soviet collapse was seen as the unconditional triumph of the West. The resulting ‘End of History’ mentality led to strategic and ideological hubris, which then combined to disastrous effect with other factors. Among these, the newly independent east European states (and their lobbies in the U.S.), obsessed with the fear of Russia, clamored for membership”.
And this happened because Moscow was too weak then to counter the NATO hubris, something Putin is now resisting. As was discussed earlier in the EurAsian Times by making Russia the villain after all its provocations that forced Russia to invade Ukraine (Western support for the color revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, U.S. intelligence and arming activities in Ukraine for years, the development of U.S. missile defense plans in Poland and the Czech Republic), NATO leadership is hell-bent upon denying Russia any sense of security, its honor, unity, and integrity. This is something no Russian government, whether Putin leads it or not, is going to accept.
As it is, the West seems to have betrayed Russia by expanding NATO after the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Moscow-led Warsaw Pact. Let it be remembered here that Moscow’s principal worry, even at the time of reunification of Germany in 1990 (the USSR had to agree to East Germany’s merger with West Germany to become a unified Germany), was the enlargement of NATO.
While Moscow did concede that a unified Germany would remain in NATO, it had to be assured that NATO would not include in future the Warsaw Pact countries that the Soviet Union led.
The declassified documents available today clearly show that James Baker (U.S. Secretary of State), George HW Bush (U.S. President), West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, French President Francois Mitterrand, and British Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major, among others, gave Soviet leaders security assurances against NATO expansion.
No wonder why the same Kennan wrote in 1997 that “Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy. Such a decision may be expected to impel Russian foreign policy in directions, not to our liking.” Similarly, when in 1999, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary – all members of the Moscow-led Warsaw Pact in the past – were allowed to join NATO, about 50 military, political, and academic leaders, including Paul Nitze and Jack Matlock, had written to the then U.S. President Bill Clinton that this would be “a policy error of historic proportions.”
Obviously, NATO leaders assembling in Washington did not share the above perception. They all spoke in glowing terms about “all the good things” NATO has done and will do, despite the aforementioned challenges they faced from their respective citizens.
Time will tell whether their optimism about NATO will be vindicated, but Professor Andrew Latham seems to have a valid point when he argues that NATO of the 1990s, when the world became unipolar after the collapse of the Soviet Union, cannot be the same in the world of 2020s when the world is truly multipolar with “the rise of China, a resurgent Russia, a more assertive India and the rise of other regional powers.”
He points out how today’s world has created a more complex, chaotic, and competitive security environment and suggests that NATO should adapt to “the new multipolar reality.”
Because, he adds, “the rigid, consensus-based decision-making process of NATO, designed for a world with a singular threat, is ill-suited for the fast-paced, dynamic environment of a multipolar world. The rise of new powers with competing interests makes it difficult to forge consensus on a range of security issues. The focus on collective defense against a single adversary no longer reflects the diverse threats facing the Alliance. A more nimble approach is needed. In contrast to the ossified structures of formal alliances, flexible working partnerships on specific issues offer greater promise”.
- Author and veteran journalist Prakash Nanda is Chairman of the Editorial Board – EurAsian Times and has been commenting on politics, foreign policy, on strategic affairs for nearly three decades. A former National Fellow of the Indian Council for Historical Research and recipient of the Seoul Peace Prize Scholarship, he is also a Professor at Reva University, Bangalore.
- CONTACT: prakash.nanda (at) hotmail.com
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