In late February Washington played host to the fourth and final Group of Experts seminar on NATO’s New Strategic Concept. The resulting recommendations will now work their way through the Alliance, and the process will eventually yield a document second in importance only to the Washington Treaty. Though the story has been only marginally covered in the media, internally the exercise has been accompanied by a sense of urgency born of the realization that NATO faces a serious identity crisis. Nowhere does this reverberate more than in Central Europe, where the “new allies” regard the continued ability of NATO to provide for common defense as key to their security.
The internal dynamic of U.S.-European security relations has not kept pace with the improved atmospherics following the election of Barack Obama, and the condition of the alliance reflects the state of trans-Atlanticism today. NATO remains divided on the key issues of mission, capabilities, funding and decision-making. Two challenges loom large: the current ISAF mission in Afghanistan and the need for a coherent strategy towards Russia that would engage Moscow while clearly stating that intimidation along the periphery will not be tolerated. The latter concern has roiled Central Europe since the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia. How the New Strategic Concept articulates NATO’s relations with Russia will help define the meaning of Article 5, which needs to reconcile NATO’s current out-of-area operations with its bedrock task of territorial defense.
In recent years, different security optics of the members have splintered NATO. The United States wants an expeditionary alliance with a global reach, able to deliver security where needed. The Western Europeans hold to a vision of a regional club of liberal democracies that continues to anchor America in Europe but does business close to home. The Central Europeans tend to hew to the U.S. vision, but with the clear expectation of a quid pro quo: that Washington will stand by them should they find themselves pressured by Russia. NATO is also divided on how to reform its decision-making processes and how to fund and resource its home and away missions.
In Afghanistan, the Alliance faces the most difficult operational challenge to date, with a real possibility of strategic failure. The Americans, albeit reluctantly, have ratcheted up the military campaign; Europe continues to demur, with some allies looking for the exit door. The Central Europeans have thus far remained steadfastly in America’s corner, but they expect reciprocity: strategic reassurance from the United States that Washington appreciates their regional security dilemma, and that NATO remains at the core a defense alliance. They want this reflected in NATO’s Strategic Concept, backed by contingency planning and additional assets on their territory.
The overarching problem is how to define the core business of NATO, which since the Cold War has increasingly become a veritable smorgasbord of every security-related task: cyber defense, energy security, WMD proliferation, stability and reconstruction missions, out-of-area missions, territorial security, enlargement, partnership-building, and norm-setting and democratization. Recently, there have been suggestions that NATO should also be ready to address the consequences of climate change — a point made on several occasions by the new Secretary General. But an alliance that purports to defend against all threats will be unable to defend well against the critical ones. Instead of endlessly multiplying NATO’s security tasks, the discussion over the New Strategic Concept needs to reorder the question: define NATO’S appropriate roles and go from there.
The allies need to refocus, agree on the basics and address the perennially most difficult task: how to pay for defense. Today only five NATO members spend at or above the symbolic two percent of GDP on their military, while the majority of European defense budgets continue to shrink. NATO needs to adapt institutionally and operationally not only by addressing the most immediate hard security tasks at hand, i.e., confronting nuclear weapons proliferation and formulating a common position on how to sustain --or wind down-- current operations. If the New Strategic Concept is to provide a meaningful blueprint for the future, it must articulate a new consensus on the meaning of Article 5 as it credibly rebalances out-of-area tasks with regional territorial defense contingencies.
Today as we grapple with new challenges and out-of-area missions, NATO needs to revisit one old idea: its core territorial defense role. In a world where America has been hobbled by massive fiscal deficits, where China is positioning itself as a new hub of global power, where transnational threats continue to grow and where Russia reasserts itself in the “near abroad,” the United States and Europe need to reach consensus on the meaning of common defense. If they are unwilling or unable to do so, the current drift will continue. To maintain allied cohesion and provide strategic reassurance to the allies along the periphery, the New Strategic Concept has to capture and reinforce one core premise: when it comes to out-of-area and territorial defense, NATO’s mission can never be an either-or proposition.
Andrew A. Michta is a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center. He is also the M. W. Buckman Distinguished Professor of International Studies at Rhodes College and a Member of the Center for European Policy Analysis Advisory Council.
