President Donald J. Trump attends the North Atlantic Treaty Organization plenary session Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2019, with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the 70th anniversary of NATO in Watford, Hertfordshire outside London. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
During his time in the White House, President Donald Trump made it clear that the other members of NATO needed to do much more for the alliance if they wanted the United States to remain involved in it. NATO members are now gathering for the alliance’s 75th anniversary, and Donald Trump has a very real chance of retaking the White House in November’s election. How will the other members of NATO respond to Trump’s demands? Emma Ashford and Matthew Koenig discuss at Foreign Policy magazine:
Emma Ashford: Hey, Matt. Welcome to NATO summit week in Washington! The alliance’s leaders are here to celebrate its 75th anniversary, bringing lots of Europeans—and lots of extra traffic—to D.C., along with the incoming head of the alliance, former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who will be making his first official appearance.
This summit will be celebratory, with leaders singing the alliance’s praises. But I have to wonder if it isn’t the last time we’ll have a big birthday party for NATO. The question of what the future holds in store for NATO remains open: Donald Trump, U.S. defense budget constraints, the rise of China—it’s not at all clear that the United States will remain committed to NATO for the long term.
Matthew Kroenig: Hi, Emma! It is a big week indeed. The Atlantic Council is honored to have been selected by NATO as an official think tank partner for the NATO Public Forum, which will take place alongside the leaders’ summit.
Before we debate NATO’s future, I think it is helpful to look back at what NATO has accomplished over the past 75 years. It won the Cold War and expanded the zone of peace and prosperity in the trans-Atlantic space to include more than 30 countries and nearly half of global GDP.
There is a reason why it is often considered the most successful military alliance in history.
EA: I thought Ronald Reagan won the Cold War?
MK: Reagan dealt the final knockout blow, but the United States and NATO put him in good position by containing and outcompeting the Soviet Union for a half-century first.
EA: Look, I won’t deny that NATO has had some significant successes. It was extremely effective in bringing together European states and keeping the United States invested in European security in the face of the Soviet threat. But that threat disappeared 30 years ago. NATO’s history since then has been a lot less successful.
We’ve got NATO expansion, which had pros (helping to integrate Eastern European states into Western Europe politically and economically) and cons (antagonizing Russia and potentially contributing to wars in Georgia and Ukraine). There was NATO’s brief flirtation with questionable out-of-area missions, most notably in Libya, Afghanistan, and the first such mission in the Balkans. And there’s the clear slide toward making the United States entirely responsible for the security of 30-odd countries in Europe, even more so than at the peak of the Cold War.
NATO, to my mind, is an organization that has lost its way. No wonder the summit is expected to talk about crazy things like tying NATO into the Indo-Pacific.
MK: Far from crazy, NATO is rightfully taking more of an interest in the Indo-Pacific, given the global nature of the China challenge and given that democratic allies in that region, such as the Indo-Pacific 4 (Australia, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand), are helping NATO to counter Russian aggression.
Moreover, NATO has a new sense of purpose, and it is coming back to its roots with the renewed Russian threat to Europe. At this summit, it will make progress in implementing the new family of regional plans—essentially NATO’s first serious defense plans since the end of the Cold War.
Allies are also stepping up their contributions to the alliance, with 23 of the 32 allies expected to hit their 2 percent defense spending target this year. It is still not enough, but the trend lines are in the right direction.
EA: I’d argue that the fact that NATO is only now presenting its first serious defense plans since the end of the Cold War is a staggering indictment of policymakers over the last three decades, who often made decisions about the alliance without even thinking through the defense implications. Did you know that NATO expanded into the Baltic states in 2004, but didn’t start making contingency plans for how to defend them until 2008? Policymakers treated the alliance like a way to do social engineering in Europe over the last 30 years—no wonder it is struggling to provide a viable and sustainable path to European defense.
Read more here.
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