NATO Beyond 9/11

The Transformation of the Atlantic Alliance

E. Hallams, L. Ratti, B. Zyla, E. Hallams, L. Ratti, B. Zyla

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780230391222
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This collection reflects on the significance of the 9/11 terrorist attacks for the transatlantic alliance. Offering an analysis of NATO's evolution since 2001, it examines key topics such as the alliance's wars in Afghanistan, its military operation in Libya, global partnerships, burden-sharing and relations with the US and Russia.

Part I

A New Paradigm for NATO?

1

NATO after 9/11: Theoretical Perspectives

Mark Webber

If 9/11 is to be regarded as a watershed in global politics then it would be logical to assume that NATO, the globe’s most durable, extensive and powerful alliance, would be bound up in that process of transformation. For NATO, 9/11 accelerated changes already in train (namely, the need to focus out of area) and in so doing made possible a role for the alliance (fighting an expeditionary war in Afghanistan, for instance) that would otherwise have been inconceivable. A decade on, NATO’s major powers have modified significantly their assumptions of what can be achieved in far-flung operations driven, in part, by the demanding experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan, and, in part, by the operational constraints of defence austerity. These processes have shone a light on NATO. Its complex mission in Afghanistan conducted simultaneously with a range of other operations and initiatives (enlargement, missile defence and partnerships) indicates a body that continues to be adaptable and relevant. Yet, at the same time, the multiplication of tasks (some of which have courted the risk of failure) seemingly betoken an alliance that is directionless and stretched to the limit. In that sense, the period since 9/11 has been yet one more chapter of a familiar story of NATO in crisis. What that means and whether it has substance is a question that has policy, empirical and theoretical relevance; this chapter is primarily concerned with the latter.

The puzzle of NATO

Theoretically informed writing on NATO covers a number of issues of significance: why NATO was formed, how policies are arrived at, why states honour their commitments to fellow allies and why NATO goes to war and with what effect.¹ This is a broad spectrum and so to give focus to this chapter a narrowing of attention is required. The central question of NATO scholarship, and the one of interest here, is the shape of the alliance’s likely future. Debates on the past and present condition of the alliance usually have this in mind. It is a question that is partly functional (how NATO has adapted and taken on new tasks), partly geographic (how NATO has enlarged and moved ‘out of area’) and partly political (how internal debates have shaped the alliance). But it is also more than these things. Put simply and starkly, the question reduces to this: is the alliance experiencing a process of regeneration or one of irreversible decline?

There is a certain irony in posing the question at all. NATO has, after all, a history that extends over six decades, has weathered the storms of several existential crises (of which 9/11, the subject of this volume, is but merely one) and with few demurrals has been celebrated as the ‘most successful alliance in history’.² That it is necessary to ask what shape is its future follows, in large part, from the enduring insistence in popular writings and in some policy circles that NATO’s days are numbered. This was a view, understandably, much in evidence at the Cold War’s end and repeated during the Bosnian and Kosovan crises; 9/11, meanwhile, gave rise to the view that NATO – notwithstanding the invocation of Article 5 – no longer performed ‘a serious military role’.³ Two years later, the Iraq controversy plunged NATO into a still deeper crisis. Writing in its midst, Charles Kupchan suggested that NATO lay ‘in the rubble’ and was at a ‘definite end’. ‘The central question facing US and European policy makers’, he argued, is ‘not how to repair the transatlantic relationship but whether the end of alliance will take the form of an amicable separation or a nasty divorce.’⁴ A decade on, having faced a drawn-out combat operation in Afghanistan and the challenge of dwindling defence budgets, opinion remained sceptical. NATO, Ishaan Tharoor argued in mid-2012, was still ‘searching for a reason to exist’ and could be ‘fading into obsolescence’.⁵

Such views could be dismissed as eccentric if it were not for the fact that they have been mirrored in the statements of prominent politicians. At the Cold War’s end, West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and French president François Mitterrand both envisaged a Europe organized on pan-continental lines and so without a need for the alliance. For somewhat different reasons, NATO’s viability was called into question in the ensuing decade as it prevaricated over crises in the Balkans. ‘NATO would be finished’, Senator Joe Biden argued if it had not acted in Kosovo; it would be left to question ‘its own relevance’ according to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.⁶ Reflecting on 9/11 and the Iraq crisis, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder noted in 2005 that NATO was ‘no longer the primary means for dialogue in the transatlantic relationship’.⁷ And in a widely cited speech, Robert Gates, the outgoing US Secretary of Defense, suggested in 2011 that the alliance was increasingly marginal for the United States and so had ‘a dim, if not dismal future’.⁸

Yet alongside these gloomy opinions, NATO has also attracted far more optimistic comment. For every journalist or scholar predicting its demise there is one proclaiming its revival. Indeed, the very same person may hold both views according to circumstance. Charles Kupchan, who had heralded NATO’s end in 2003, voiced an entirely opposite opinion in hearings before the Senate in 2012. The alliance, he suggested, had ‘demonstrated impressive resilience and solidarity’, had ‘defied history’ in its stubborn development after the Cold War, and would (the retreat from Afghanistan notwithstanding) ‘surely continue to play a direct role in addressing security challenges well beyond its borders’.⁹ Such views are largely born of NATO’s ability to reconfigure and adapt. One US official, commenting in June 2007, summarized this process as follows: ‘In 1994 NATO had 16 members and no partners. It had never conducted a military operation. At the end of 2005 the alliance was running eight military operations simultaneously and had 26 members and partnership relations with another 20 countries around the world.’¹⁰ NATO’s then Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), General James Jones, noted similarly that NATO had since the end of the Cold War ‘becom[e] more proactive than reactive, more expeditionary than static, and more diverse in its capabilities’. NATO, he continued, was still in the midst of ‘the most fundamental physical and philosophical transformation in its history’.¹¹ ‘The Atlantic Alliance, which some had declared moribund at the end of the Cold War’, a report of the North Atlantic Assembly proclaimed in 2011, ‘has never been more operationally active than it is today.’¹² Global financial crisis and defence austerity has dampened but certainly not expunged this enthusiasm. Reform within the alliance and the political will to deal with burden-sharing issues will, according to its leading figures, ‘result in a more cohesive and stronger trans-Atlantic alliance, adapted to the 21st century’.¹³

How, might one ask, can such contrasting views coexist? Clearly, there is a logic of exaggeration at play here as well as a political one. Talking up or talking down NATO’s prospects comes to reflect a political preference as much as a statement of the facts. Equally, it may be a calculated act, a narrative manoeuvre intended to spur the alliance into corrective action. Thus, taking statements of NATO’s demise at face value are at best a partial and imprecise guide to the nature of NATO’s condition. As Wallace Theis has persuasively argued, no one has yet provided a convincing account of how or why a crisis in NATO need transmogrify into the death of the alliance, or indeed, what such a death would look like. That NATO has survived periodic, almost perpetual, crises throughout its history (each of which has been met by misplaced auguries of imminent collapse) suggests for Theis that the alliance has an inbuilt ability and capacity for repair and survival. Indeed, once one starts to contemplate what institutional death would look like, it becomes obvious that NATO is still very far from experiencing that condition. No ally has shown an inclination to renounce the North Atlantic Treaty and withdraw from NATO (indeed, membership has inexorably increased and the once semi-detached France has reintegrated itself into NATO’s military structures). Nor has any member posed an either/or choice between NATO and an alternative (be this a European Union (EU)-based defence arrangement, neutrality or defensive self-sufficiency) and decided unambiguously on the latter. This line of argumentation leads to a simple point: any assertion that NATO is ‘dead’, ‘near-death’ or at the end of its useful life is misleading and inaccurate.¹⁴ But equally, an unqualified optimism also has its problems. How assured, one might ask, is NATO’s ability to transform and adapt? Is banking on NATO simply an expression of liberal wishful thinking, a predisposition in favour of cooperative organizations that is blind to evidence of decline?¹⁵ To be fair, even NATO’s supporters concede that several profound questions dog the alliance. How can NATO galvanize the leadership and solidarity needed to perform ‘its core tasks of collective defence, crisis management, and cooperative security’?¹⁶ Does NATO have a future now that the United States ‘styles itself more as a Pacific, than a European power’, and European governments ‘are plundering their defence coffers to stave off the worst economic crisis in living memory’?¹⁷ And how can its members recommit themselves to ‘the principles represented by the Atlantic Alliance’?¹⁸

Alliance ‘Theory’

The binary opposites of pessimism and optimism noted above provide an unsatisfactory means of analysing NATO. Each, when examined closely, is either guilty of excluding counterfactuals or ends up qualifying its central claim. Neither has the benefit of precision or rigour on its side. An alternative approach is to eschew an analysis of NATO which depends on the ephemera of its everyday activities and the contemporaneous commentary which follows. This means approaching NATO as an example of a more general phenomenon; to frame it, in other words, according to the study of alliances. At first sight, recourse to such work seems eminently sensible. NATO is, after all, often assumed to be ‘the quintessential military alliance’¹⁹ conventionally understood as a formal association of states, bound by treaty to employ force (or associated measures) in specified circumstances against states who pose a threat to members’ security.²⁰

When approaching the substantive developmental question posed at the outset of this chapter, such work does, however, have its limits. A common underlying assumption here is that alliances are subject to limited lifespans. D. Scott Bennett, having considered some 207 interstate alliances spanning the period from 1816 to 1984, found that the vast majority were temporary, enduring on average for just 12 years.²¹ Ole Holsti, P. Terrence Hoppman and John D. Sullivan have divided alliance development into periods of formation and disintegration with activity in the crucial intermediate period (the alliance lifespan, in other words) measured according to degrees of cohesion among allies. Here, alliance formation is seen as the formal agreement by which two or more states enter into cooperation on national security. Alliance disintegration is equated with the termination of this agreement. Cohesion, meanwhile, is understood in terms both of behaviour (‘the proportion of the total interaction among all [. . .] members [. . . that is] characterised by cooperative as contrasted to conflictual behaviour’) and of attitudes (‘consensus about the external enemy’).²² Bruce Russett has suggested similarly that alliances pass from formation (seen as a treaty-based moment) to termination (the expiration or denunciation of the relevant treaty, war between allies, or defection to a new alliance). In between these two end points, the development of alliances can be judged against four ‘integration variables’: evidence of contact between defence ministries; the provision of mutual military aid; the establishment of an integrated military command and other common institutions; and the maintenance of military bases across allied territory.²³

The categories produced by these developmental typologies are useful descriptively but are, nonetheless, static measures. They tell us at what point of development an alliance may be at but not how it got there or where it might be going. Further, the issue of long-term change is only addressed indirectly or incompletely in much of the alliance literature. The works of Glen Snyder, Stephen Walt and Patricia Weitsman, for instance (among the best and most sophisticated studies of alliance), are thus primarily concerned with alliance formation.²⁴ Snyder and Weitsman do devote some attention to intra-alliance management and cohesion but reserve the application of their general arguments to historical cases that predate NATO; indeed, Snyder quite explicitly makes ‘no claim for the [. . .] applicability [of his study] to the post-cold war world’.²⁵

Similar shortcomings apply to the economic or public goods theory of alliances. The principal concern of this literature is with burden-sharing and the allocation of resources. The seminal work of Olson and Zeckhauser argued that an alliance serves to provide collective goods, but that smaller allies will free ride on the contributions of the larger.²⁶ For NATO during the Cold War, collective goods were manifest in allied defence against the Soviet bloc. But that, in turn, gave rise to a collective action problem – ‘an apparent undersupply of conventional forces in Europe’ as European allies looked to the extended nuclear deterrent provided by the United States to satisfy the requirements of deterrence.²⁷ That bargain proved sufficient strategically but belied a persistent internal challenge of burden-sharing – ensuring (through political bargaining, institutional monitoring and moral suasion), in other words, a proportionate distribution of commitment to the common defence. The course of NATO’s development in the last two decades has changed the nature of these burden-sharing discussions. The traditional measure of effort, the share of gross domestic product (GDP) devoted to defence expenditure, has remained as a guideline but it has been supplemented by more specific ‘output side’ measures on the deployability and sustainability of forces (commensurate with NATO’s orientation to a wide range of missions) as well as less formal assumptions concerning a willingness to share risk (commensurate with NATO’s move towards expeditionary and counter-insurgency operations).²⁸ The complexity of NATO’s post-Cold War missions means that burden-sharing disputes and collective action problems have become...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – A New Paradigm for NATO?
• Part I: A New Paradigm for NATO?
• Part II: The Transformation of NATO
• Part III: Old Issues, Expanding Partnerships, New Networks
• Part IV: Conclusion – NATO’s Retrenchment?
• Index