Whither NATO? (Part III)

In this third post on the future of NATO I'll discuss the current status of NATO in America's foreign policy in light of the announced pivot to Asia. You can read my first two posts on this topic here and here.

Given the announcement by the Obama administration of an American “pivot” to Asia, a not unreasonable question to ask is: What should the US do, if anything, with NATO?

To answer that question, you must first ask a different one: What purpose does NATO serve in the contemporary international system? As I pointed out in my two previous posts, NATO began as a North-American/Western-European effort to defend Western Europe from a possible Soviet invasion. The US had two primary reasons for entering this alliance: to keep the Soviets out of Western Europe and to keep Western Europeans from entering into a working relationship with the Soviets. Those purposes disappeared, however, with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and NATO’s role shifted to performing the security function of bringing former communist Eastern European countries into the democratic, free-market fold and to acting as a legitimizer for US military efforts outside the European region.

The first of those roles is no longer an important one for NATO to play as the post-Communist expansion of Europe has almost been completed (though, admittedly, the economic and political roles of that effort played by the EU are currently on shaky ground). And the second of those roles is no longer a viable one since world opinion no longer sees America’s European allies as being independent actors because of their dependence on the US for their ability to engage in out-of-area military actions. It’s also highly unlikely that those allies will, after Afghanistan, ever again allow themselves to be put into the fire solely out of a feeling that they must uphold their commitments under NATO.

Given that the two post-Soviet roles for NATO have gone by the wayside, it would seem that a prudent thing for the members of NATO to do would be to wind the organization up and call it a day. Unfortunately for the US, that would likely, however, be a mistake. With the pivot to Asia currently underway, the US has its hands full with trying to convince China that the pivot is not about containing or confronting China’s rise. If the US were to dismantle its European alliance because it no longer has a real world rationale for existing, but did not also dismantle its Asian alliances, the obvious question to ask would be: What threat remaining in the Asia-Pacific region necessitates the continuation of these alliances. Given Russia’s weakness in the Asia-Pacific region, the only logical threat, either present or near-term, that exists is China. North Korea and Islamic fundamentalist terrorist groups might be threats to the US, but North Korea is only a threat to the US because of its alliances with South Korea and Japan, and the Asia-Pacific region is simply not where the action is when it comes to anti-American terrorism. So, any move to dismantle NATO without also dismantling the US’s alliances in Asia would only manage to drive China into an even higher state of anger regarding the pivot to Asia, which would be bad for America and especially bad for its allies.

This does not mean, however, that NATO must spend its future days as a weight around America’s ankle. There is something that the US can do through NATO in conjunction with its pivot to Asia that could make the organization as vital to US security in the 21st century as it was in the second half of the 20th. I’ll discuss what that is in my fourth, and final, post on NATO.