The current NATO ministerial in Brussels is taking place at a time when rhetoric and reality on the future of the alliance remain disconnected. U.S. and NATO leaders have been issuing condemnations of Russia’s actions in Ukraine and warnings not to try to intimidate the alliance members along the northeastern flank; the conclusions they have drawn about the sanctity of NATO’s border should be reassuring. For instance, speaking in Berlin on June 22, 2015, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter noted that “as Russia aggressively modernizes its military capabilities, it also actively seeks to undermine NATO.” Carter underscored that, while America does not seek a cold or hot war with Russia, “we will defend our allies, the rules-based international order . . . and stand up to Russia’s actions and their attempts to reestablish a Soviet-era sphere of influence.” This general thrust remained, albeit with a different tone, when three weeks prior NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg opined, “Russia poses no immediate threat to NATO countries, and the military alliance still hopes bilateral relations will improve.”
Speaking on a visit to Norway, Stoltenberg asserted, “What we see is more unpredictability, more insecurity, more unrest. . . . [But] I believe we don’t see any immediate threat against any NATO country from the east.” Last but not least, the German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen seemed less circumspect than usual when she said, after the recent NATO exercises in Poland, that “it is essential to make it clear to our neighbors that we stand up for their protection.” The tenor of professed solidarity across Europe has been similar, though with evidently more urgency and determination emanating from states along the northeast flank, such as Poland and the Baltics who have argued repeatedly not for reassurances but for a permanent NATO presence on their territory as the most reliable deterrent against any attempts by Putin to jump NATO’s red line.
The “reassurance” rhetoric has been buttressed somewhat by a slew of small-scale exercises, like the latest NATO exercise in Poland of the so-called Spearhead Force rapid reaction unit of some five thousand troops drawn from several member-states. Other NATO exercises will continue through June, involving 15,000 troops from 19 member-states, with more follow-up exercises in the fall that should again engage roughly 10,000 troops. Last but not least, the U.S. is discussing prepositioning heavy equipment, including armor, along NATO’s northeastern flank to support up to 5,000 troops should they needed to be deployed in an emergency. So far so good, at least in symbolic terms and on paper.
But all such NATO actions need to be taken in context. The first and obvious discrepancy between what NATO has been doing and what Russia has been doing is the scope of the effort on the ground. Most of the U.S. contingents deployed on exercises in Poland or the Baltic States are mostly company size, with limited numbers of mechanized equipment, aircraft, and ships. Those exercises are clearly overmatched by Russian exercises, which show Moscow’s ability to mobilize 30,000–100,000 personnel, with mobilization times as short as 48–72 hours. (To put it in perspective, 48 hours is the beginning of the NATO decision-making cycle, assuming that the crisis does not occur on a weekend, when we may be looking at 72 hours.)
But the larger question is one of NATO’s overarching strategic vision and its changing internal dynamic. Since the war in Ukraine, NATO has become “particularized” to an unprecedented degree, whereby the security optics of individual European member-states now drive the debate to a greater extent than at any time since the end of the Cold War. The northeast and southeast flank countries are both commendably more proactive in their commitment of resources to defense, but also increasingly, if understandably, narrowly focused in their perspective on the future of the alliance. In Poland, the Baltic States, and Romania, recent history of Russian (Soviet) domination remains the immediate reference point for thinking about collective defense. The more recent members who remain the most exposed to a Russian attack—hybrid, conventional, or even nuclear—are also the most eager to buttress their NATO security guarantees with direct defense cooperation with the United States, seeking a strategic security relationship with Washington of the kind only a few select states in different parts of the world enjoy today. The surge in Russia’s involvement in the war in Ukraine has transformed the relationship into one in which an increasingly elaborate pattern of cooperation exists between the U.S. and the frontier allies.
The situation is different for the largest players in Europe—France, to an extent the United Kingdom, but especially Germany—for whom thinking about NATO is defined by a more generalized vision of an alliance whose very existence, rather than its mission, defines its core value. Hence the territorial defense issues now touted by frontier NATO states are the respected, but nonetheless somewhat mundane, commitments against which to measure the totality of Europe’s relations with Russia, its important business interests, and the larger question about the future of Europe’s normative order. In this culturally postmodern but economically mercantile Europe, there seems to be no contradiction between the tough rhetoric on Russia’s war on Ukraine, the general disavowal of a military solution there, and the contemplated negotiations of another leg of the Nordstream pipeline or other future business deals. NATO’s “view from 20,000 feet” has also resulted in growing fissures between the “old” and “new” members, and on the part of the former a growing sense of buyer’s remorse over letting the latter into the club in the first place—for the price to pay in their relations with Russia seems higher than what they had bargained for.
This sense of a growing disconnect between the “old” and “new” allies has recently been shown to be more than just unease among policy elites in Western Europe. A recent Pew study provided concrete data on public disengagement in Western Europe when it comes to allied solidarity, the very foundation of collective defense. In the Pew study roughly half or fewer in six of the eight countries surveyed agreed that their country should use military force if Russia attacked a NATO ally. At least half in three of the eight NATO countries stated that their government should not use military force in such circumstances. Perhaps the most telling of the new fissures opening up in NATO since the Ukraine war is the fact that the strongest opposition to responding with armed force comes from Germany (58 percent), followed by France (53 percent) and Italy (51 percent). In short, there is now clearly a political obstacle in Western Europe to doing what is necessary not just to properly resource defense, but also to demonstrate enough cohesion to deter threats and defend against aggression.
This leaves the United States both as the key provider of allied security and the country most in need of clarity as to what assets Europe can bring to the increasingly complex and dangerous international environment—from Asia through the Middle East to Eastern Europe. And here things get complicated. Besides the U.S., only four NATO members (Greece, Poland, the United Kingdom, and Estonia) out of the 28 members are projected to meet the 2 percent GDP defense spending threshold committed to during last year’s summit in Wales. Worse still, as Stoltenberg just warned, NATO’s total defense spending this year will decline 1.5 percent, and although 19 of the 28 members are increasing their outlays on defense in real terms, collective NATO defense spending will go down for yet another year, from $968 billion in 2013 to $942 billion in 2014 to $892 billion this year, respectively. Germany, the country that the Obama administration has relied on to manage and resolve the Ukrainian crisis, has questioned the rationale of the 2 percent defense commitment, sticking to 1.3 percent of GDP as its defense outlay, arguing that the size of the country’s GDP makes up for the reduced number.
The question of Europe’s overall unwillingness to step up to the plate on defense expenditures has been raised repeatedly with little overall success by U.S. politicians, analysts (this one included), and the media. But regardless of how mundane this argument may seem in Europe today, the simple reality is that doing more with less has always been a lark, and that the U.S. effort to develop a new strategic approach for the alliance requires money. The current situation in which the United States provides 70 percent of NATO defense spending is not so much unsustainable (after all, strategic stasis is nothing new when it comes to the past quarter century of European alliance politics), but rather simply a fundamental limitation on what NATO’s European allies will be able to do with the United States, and hence how relevant European security concerns are going to be in Washington in the coming years. While Europe celebrates the accelerated exercise tempo and the establishment of the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF), the United States urgently needs NATO to develop a new playbook, not just for Europe but for other areas of the world where security conditions will likely continue to deteriorate. NATO needs to be able to respond collectively to cyber and terrorist threats, and to work together as a new field of transnational threats emerges. But most of all, if Europe wants to have a credible security guarantee from the United States, in return it must accept its fair share of security responsibility. That means making the principle of mutuality the centerpiece of the strategy going forward. As much as Europe wants to continue to rely on the United States for defense, Washington has to have at least a clear sense that in crises outside of Europe the allies are willing and able to contribute real capabilities. That means Europe needs to make a significantly higher investment in defense, without which it will never field the new capabilities it needs to work with the United States going forward. If Europe continues to ignore this investment imperative, it may not destroy the alliance outright, but it will continue to cheapen and ultimately undermine NATO’s credibility and, ultimately, its ability to deter and defend in a crisis.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization remains without a doubt the most successful alliance in history. And yet since the Russian invasion of Crimea and the ongoing war in Ukraine it has become an organization riven with strategic self-doubt. This doubt exists not because NATO’s members no longer believe in shared values, but because Europe has in effect taken a page from Dickens’s Christmas Carol, Scrooging the alliance out of existence. The alliance, which has evolved from the collective defense of the Cold War era, through out-of-area operations in the Balkans, to ISAF in Afghanistan and a joint operation in Libya, today confronts a stark choice: find the resources to fulfill the increasingly urgent collective defense needs of Europe and the United States on the Continent and balance those tasks with continued global requirements, be they working with the U.S. to provide regional security in areas outside Europe, or in cyberterrorism, or other transnational threat areas; or else become a relic of a bygone era whose glittering but hollowed-out shell will serve to underscore its growing strategic irrelevance. I know it’s been said before, but it really is up to the Europeans to decide how this plays out.