Whither NATO? (Part II)

In this post I'll briefly discuss the post-Soviet era of NATO up until today. In the first post on this topic, which you can read here, I briefly discussed the Cold-War era of NATO.

Though the Soviet Union ceased to exist during the presidency of George Bush, the answer to what would become of NATO after the Soviet Union’s collapse wasn’t answered until the presidency of Bill Clinton. There are three likely reasons why Bush failed or chose not to address the NATO issue when the Soviet Union collapsed. First, the administration’s European/Eurasian policy was far too concerned with what to do about the former Soviet Union. There were 13 new states that needed varying degrees of assistance in the raising up of their countries to the status of functioning states. More importantly, though, was the issue of the large nuclear arsenal that was spread over a vast territory of the former Soviet Union, and not all of the warheads were located on Russian soil. Second, not long after the Soviet Union collapsed Bush had to worry about his re-election campaign, which by that time looked decidedly more difficult than it did less than a year before. Third, Bush and his advisers were by nature cautious and conservative operators. Even if Bush had won re-election, his administration likely would not have addressed the NATO issue until the second half of his second term.

Clinton, however, didn’t rush to judgment about what to do with NATO either. Clinton came into office promising the American people that he would be focused on domestic issues, particularly the economy. Beginning in 1994, however, NATO began setting up partner organizations with several states on its European periphery, including Russia itself in the Partnership for Peace. The intent in establishing these organizations was to extend military contacts to regional states in an effort to reduce tensions in the region by developing military-to-military contacts between the NATO members on one side and the non-NATO members on the other. The decision to establish these partnership organizations was a clear statement that the NATO member-states saw the organization as having a role to play in a post—Cold-War world.

Cooperation between NATO and the former communist countries was initially good, but the relationship with Russia started to sour in the late-90s, mostly because the West lost interest in Russia and Russian officials felt that their interests and concerns were being ignored by the United States, if not being actively worked against. The relationship with Russia took a particularly difficult turn when NATO offered membership to three former Soviet satellite states: Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic (the western part of the former Czechoslovakia). NATO would eventually add nine more states, all of which were former Eastern European communist states. With this expansion, Russia now had states on its border that the US had pledged to defend in the event of a military attack. The strategic depth that the former Soviet empire gave to Moscow had now virtually disappeared.

This expansion of NATO, while deleterious to the West’s relationship with Russia, was meant to serve two goals. By bringing these countries into the NATO fold (and the EU fold as well), it was hoped that their status as democracies would be solidified and that they would become peaceful members of the European family of nations. Expansion also presented the US with the opportunity of using NATO as a base of operations to support its foreign policy in other regions. That is to say that the US hoped to be able to use NATO as a vehicle for lending legitimacy to “out-of-area” operations. The types of operations that the US had mind were on display during NATO’s operations in the Balkans in the 1990s.

The big test of this US goal arose, of course, on September 11, 2001. After the terrorist attacks of that day the US used the military forces of several NATO allies in its operations in Afghanistan against the Taliban and al Qaeda. The irony, of course, is that the George W. Bush administration wasn’t all that crazy about going into Afghanistan under the guise of NATO; it was actually interested in establishing the US’s right to act unilaterally in such situations, or, at most, with a coalition of the willing. But despite the major dust-up that happened between the US and UK on one side and France and Germany on the other over Iraq and the depths of unpopularity that the Afghan War would sink to in the opinion of many Europeans, the NATO operation in Afghanistan is still going to this day, and, if negotiations between ISAF and Afghanistan bear fruit, would still continue in a supporting role even after the end of 2014, which is when the US plans to have a good number of its troops out of Afghanistan.

And despite the sometimes rocky relationship that exists between NATO’s members, the alliance is actually in fairly decent shape today, at least from a political point of view. Militarily, however, the capabilities of all the member-states, save the US, have deteriorated since the end of the Cold War. In its heyday, NATO was more politically than militarily unbalanced. That is to say that the US had a greater surfeit of political and diplomatic push and pull in the world vis-à-vis its NATO allies than it did of military push and pull from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. The reverse is true today. The US is still the world’s leading military power, but its diplomatic and political power has been eroded a great amount over its actions in Iraq and, to a lesser extent, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The US’s NATO allies, by contrast, have largely maintained their level of political and diplomatic influence since the end of the Cold War, but their military capabilities have been seriously eroded, which was on display during the recent operation against Muammar Qaddafi’s forces in Libya when the Brits and French needed US support to pull off even that limited military operation so close to Europe’s shores.

In the next post I’ll discuss the future of NATO in light of the Obama administration’s announcement of the pivot to Asia.