Whither NATO? (Part I)

With the Obama administration's recent announcement of a "pivot" to Asia, the question arises of what the future holds for the US's relationship with Europe. But as the pivot is essentially a military-diplomatic move, the question is particularly pertinent regarding the US's European allies in NATO.

NATO has been the military-diplomatic backbone of the liberal world order since it was formed in 1949. NATO was an alliance created for the nominal purpose of the collective defense of its members against unprovoked aggression. Its unstated purpose was specifically to prevent a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. But the US had an even more silent purpose in entering into the alliance because, given the importance that Western Europe had to US national security, there was little question that the US would act to defend Western Europe in the event of a Soviet invasion.

By legally binding itself to defending Western European countries, the US was attempting to accomplish two things. First, there was the assurance given to both friend and foe of the US's intention to defend Western Europe. The US put its reputation on the line by formally allying with Western European countries, which would help push those countries away from communism or some kind of modus operandi with the Soviets. Second, the US was attempting to break the cycle of engagement with and retrenchment from the world that had characterized US foreign relations to that point. By entering into a legally binding agreement to defend Western Europe, US policymakers were trying to get the American people to support an effort to use American power to actively manage world affairs, or, they at least hoped to get the American people's resigned acquiescence.

While the alliance's defensive rationale never had to be used against the Soviets, during the course of the Cold War it had been a fairly successful alliance. To the extent that it helped achieve the unstated goals of keeping the Western Europeans and Soviets at arms-length from each other—at least for the first years of the alliance—and convincing the American people to assume a global superpower role, it was a success. It’s highly doubtful that NATO was the decisive factor in preventing a communist takeover of Western Europe, but even there it—along with the Marshall Plan—played a role by giving the Western Europeans the financial breathing space required to get their economies up and running again.

And while NATO had reached a point of existential danger of sorts when France began pulling out of the alliance in the late-1950s (ending with its exit from the integrated military command in 1966), the first event that really raised a question about the alliance’s existence was the event that marked its greatest triumph: the collapse of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991. For an alliance whose existence was built upon defending Western Europe from a Soviet invasion, the fact that the Soviet Union no longer existed naturally raised the question of: now what?

In the next post I'll discuss a little about the post-Soviet history of NATO before ending with a third post on what I think the future of NATO should be, or if there even should be one.

First Post

I decided to take Matthew Yglesias's advice and start writing for free. Not that I expect anyone to actually read what I write here. This is primarily just a place for me to put my own thoughts on "paper" without the necessity of keeping a journal (which I've always found to be a bit teenage-girlish).

For anyone who might actually read this, though, my posts will primarily be about international relations and U.S. foreign relations and foreign policy. While not everyone considers those three categories to be entirely separate, I do. International relations deals with the nature of state-to-state relations (i.e., the way that things like the structure of the world system and human behavior affect the way in which states interact). Foreign policy is what a state wants from other states and the process by which it comes to that decision. Foreign relations is how states go about getting what they want; it's where the rubber meets the road. For example, what the U.S. wanted from Afghanistan on September 12, 2001 was to stop being a haven for al-Qa'ida. That was the U.S.'s foreign policy for Afghanistan. How the U.S. went about getting it was to initiate a war against Afghanistan that sought to topple the Taliban government and capture al-Qa'ida's leaders in Afghanistan. That was the U.S.'s foreign relations with Afghanistan.

Some might see this distinction as artificial, but I do think it helps distinguish between ends and means when it comes to the international arena. Not every country in the U.S.'s shoes could have gone the route of waging war to achieve the goal of clearing Afghanistan of al-Qa'ida, and those limitations of the means of achieving an end have ramifications for what the state will want as its end. For example, states that don't have the military means that the U.S. does will more likely than not have more pacific foreign relations with other states than the U.S. does even in exactly similar circumstances. If Peru had been the target of al-Qa'ida on 9/11, then Peru likely would have instituted a foreign policy of altering its foreign relations in such a way as reduce the likelihood of it being targeted again. This is so not because Peru is inherently more pacifist than the U.S., but because Peru simply doesn't have the means of clearing Afghanistan of al-Qa'ida forces.

I don't anticipate posting more than twice a week here, so this one should hold me over until at least Tuesday.