Why the Free World STILL needs NATO

“When American military men approach some serious situation they are wont to write at the head of their directive the words "over-all strategic concept." There is wisdom in this, as it leads to clarity of thought. What then is the over-all strategic concept which we should inscribe today? It is nothing less than the safety and welfare, the freedom and progress, of all the homes and families of all the men and women in all the lands”.

Winston Spencer Churchill, Fulton, Missouri, March 6, 1946

The eternal challenge of defending freedom

Alphen, Netherlands. 4 April. The Free World still needs NATO because the unfree world is again threatening it. However, the unfree world is becoming far more sophisticated in the way it threatens the Free World. Therefore, NATO must thus become much better at countering the threats of the twenty-first century.

Seventy years ago today the North Atlantic Treaty was signed by (inter alia) the prime ministers and foreign ministers of Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, United Kingdom and the United States. Since 1949 NATO has been joined (in order) by Greece, Turkey, Germany, Spain, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia and Montenegro.

Article 5 was enshrined at the heart of the North Atlantic Treaty and effectively committed all member nations of the Alliance to consider an attack on one ally as an attack on all. What was regarded as the Doomsday clause during the Cold War was invoked only once, on 12 September 2001, in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

Adapting NATO

In 2017 I had the honour to be the lead writer for the GLOBSEC NATO Adaptation Report. Under the leadership of General John R. Allen the steering committee comprised one former deputy secretary-general, a chairman of the Military Committee, a former ambassador to the North Atlantic Council, and one of Germany’s top generals. The report was crystal clear in its challenge to the Alliance, “NATO is at a crucial decision point. The Alliance has adapted well in response to the watershed events of 2014 – rebuilding deterrence against threats from the East, increasing its engagement with the Middle East, and forging a closer partnership with the European Union. But as it nears its seventieth birthday, NATO risks falling behind the pace of political change and technological developments that could alter the character of warfare, the structure of international relations and the role of the Alliance itself”.

There has been a lot of academic nonsense spoken about NATO as it approached today’s landmark. Some of it from Moscow’s fellow travellers, some of it by people who spend far too much time floating in clouds of theory. Frankly, I have lost count of the number of times I have heard academics cite ‘alliance theory’ to suggest NATO is doomed. It has become so bad of late that I have been reminded repeatedly of an alleged exchange between British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Irish Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald. After a particularly fierce ‘hand-bagging’ by Thatcher about the need for action Fitzgerald is alleged to have responded, “That’s all well and good, Prime Minister. What you propose may indeed work in practice but does it work in theory”. However, if NATO is to do more than merely hang after around after its seventieth the Alliance also needs to answer with honesty a series of profound questions.

NATO: A beast of burdens

Do North Americans and Europeans agree about the purpose of NATO? The Alliance is under threat, and not only from the likes of a Russia that wants to turn back the clock of European history, and extremists who simply want their interpretation of medievalism imposed upon the rest of us. The greatest danger faced by NATO today is from Americans who do not realise they are growing relatively weaker and thus need allies more not less, and from Europeans who refuse to recognise that the security guarantee America affords Europe can and will only be maintained if Europeans do far more for their own defence, the Alliance and the wider transatlantic relationship.

Back in April 1949 the strategic equation was simple if stark. America was the only atomic power and the ‘bomb’ offset a huge advantage in conventional forces enjoyed by the Soviet Union on the then inner-German border. Today, many former Warsaw Pact adversaries are friends and NATO allies. However, as the Free World has become freer, the unfree world has become more assertive as they espy an opportunity to fill a strategic vacuum. Much of this vacuum has been created by strategically-inept Europeans who for too long have been suffering from a post-Cold War peace hangover. Whilst this new tepid war of today lacks the ideological sharpness of the early Cold War it is nevertheless extremely dangerous, and every bit as cynical.

It also explains constant American pressure on Europeans to improve their defence performance. Indeed, such pressure was implicit in the North Atlantic Treaty and has regularly re-surfaced since 1949. The Korean War, Germany rearmament and the European Defence Community of the 1950s, the missile gap, Berlin crisis, Cuban missile crisis, France’s 1966 withdrawal from NATO’s military command structure, Vietnam and containment, Ostpolitik and the Harmel declaration of the 1960s, the Euromissiles crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, the Wars of the Yugoslav Succession of the 1990s, and 911, Afghanistan and Iraq have all, in some part, reflected American frustration with a Europe that Washington believes makes an insufficient commitment to its own defence and the obligations both explicit and implicit in the North Atlantic Treaty.

 

These tensions have been encapsulated since October 1949 in a series of so-called strategic concepts – the what, the why, the when, the how and the with what and whom of Alliance action. From New Look to Massive Retaliation and then from Flexible Response to the post-Cold War concepts of cooperation, reconciliation and enlargement the Alliance has been constantly adapting to strike a new balance between environment, strategy, capability, military capacity, technology and affordability.

    

Brittle NATO

How secure is the Alliance? The unfree world is engaged in a continuous war at the seams and margins of the Alliance employing disinformation, destabilisation, disruption, deception and destruction for comparative strategic advantage. The very freedom that NATO defended during the Cold War is being subverted precisely to undermine the strategic and political cohesion of the Alliance. One might also add a sixth ‘D’ debt to this 5D warfare. Russia, to some extent, and China, to a very much greater extent, are ‘investing’ in NATO Europeans. The strategic aim is clear – to influence countries such as Italy and Greece so that their policies become more Moscow and Beijing-friendly.   Even mighty Germany is not free from such influence as Berlin ludicrously seeks to portray the Nordstream 2 direct gas pipeline between the two countries as a commercial project that lacks and strategic implications.

The unfree world is also benefiting from the other-worldliness of many Western Europeans and their refusal to see the world as it is, not as they would like it to be. As the armed forces of China and Russia are being modernised to operate to effect across the seven domains of future war - air, sea, land, cyber, space, information and knowledge, too many European armed forces remain analogue anachronisms.

 

Why worry, many Europeans aver? After all, NATO has always really been American. First, such complacency represents a profound misunderstanding of Alliance history. For example, the largest land force under NATO command for much of the Cold War was Germany’s Bundeswehr. Second, US forces are stretched thin the world over. The Americans could be faced with multiple crises simultaneously the world over. The only way that future NATO can possibly continue to function as a credible deterrent and defence for over 1 billion free people is if Europeans help keep America strong where America needs to be strong. First and foremost, that means Europeans being able to act to far greater effect in emergencies in and around Europe.

A twenty-first century Maginot Line?

Is NATO a twenty first century Maginot Line? In May 1940 Britain’s Lord Gort and France’s General Gamelin failed the true test of any alliance on the battlefield.  When confronted with surprise and shock their front collapsed.  As the Germans broke through the Ardennes the pictorially impressive but utterly useless Maginot Line was bypassed and the allies forced back to Dunkirk. NATO is NOT a twenty-first century Maginot Line but it could become one.

The litmus test of a NATO that is truly future-proofed will be the ability of the Alliance to move forces rapidly and securely from North America to Europe, and then move them on across Europe to where they are needed. The hard truth today is that the Americans lack the means to move large forces quickly across the Atlantic that one once saw during the four massive REFORGER (Reinforcement of Germany) exercises during the Cold War.  Europeans lack the forces and resources to regenerate a meaningful defence quickly and the basic infrastructure – both actual and legal – that would ensure they could act as effective first responders.

Another test for the Alliance will be the extent, or otherwise, to which European allies embrace the emerging hyperwar concepts and capabilities the Americans, Chinese and others are developing. Any military alliance ultimately stands or falls on the ability of armed forces to operate together under pressure in a crisis, the very test Gort and Gamelin failed. Parade ground marches can look very smart, table top exercises can appear impressive, and real exercises can create the sensation of power. However, if such efforts do not actually address weaknesses in relation the enemy they can also become a form of self-delusion. It is the anachronism of European ideas about security and defence, allied to a refusal to properly consider the nature of future war that represents a major threat to contemporary NATO, just as the British and French in the 1930s wilfully refused to accept the threat posed by Guderian’s concept of Blitzkrieg and do anything purposeful to counter it.

Today, a revolution in military technology is underway that will be applied in future on the twenty-first battlespace against Alliance forces by enemies armed with artificial intelligence, big data, machine-learning and quantum-computing. If Europe does not stop talking and start doing the possibility of another Maginot Line or worse a twenty-first century Pearl Harbor cannot be ruled out – and this time with no chance of recovery and fightback.

A 360 degree Alliance?

There are signs that NATO is slowly being allowed by its member-states to address the fundamental division at its core, between NATO easterners who believe Russia is the main threat, and NATO southerners who believe instability and fundamentalism in the Middle East and North Africa is the main threat.  Since the 2014 Wales Summit, European defence expenditure has begun to slowly recover from the disastrous systemic cuts that took place in the wake of the Cold War and the banking and financial crises from 2008 on and markedly which accelerated the relative decline of America and the West.

NATO command structure reform has led to the creation of new commands to strength Alliance control over the North Atlantic and to strengthen the ability of forces to operate together across an ever-widening battlespace. Some improvements have also been made to the readiness and responsiveness of Allied forces. NATO has also made some efforts to consider its role in future war and to improve the Alliance’s ability to counter cyber operations and information warfare. The Enhanced Forward Presence to the eastern Alliance and the Tailored Forward Presence to south-eastern Europe have also brought some degree of strategic reassurance to allies. But, is it anything like enough? As Ukraine’s continuing agony attests, there can be no room for complacency in dealing with a nationalist Russia that is both militarily-resurgent and economically-backward at one and the same time. However, there is also a danger that NATO becomes a dumping ground for issues the allies find too hard to deal with.  If that happens this relatively small organisation with its relatively small budget and few personnel will be diluted to the point of irrelevance. 

If NATO and its members are really committed to a 360 degree alliance that is credibly capable of engaging threats from whatever angle and in whatever form they may emerge, then it is going to have to be endowed with far more armed mass, and that armed mass will need to be far more nimble and agile.

Too much of this important debate has been reduced to whether or not the European allies fulfil a commitment to spend 2% on defence by 2024 and President Trump.  Germany’s recent decision to maintain defence spending nearer 1% than 2% for the foreseeable future effectively kills off the so-called Defence Investment Pledge. It also reveals one of the Alliance’s major weakness - the US-Germany relationship. With the Brexit defeat and strategic demise of Britain the importance of the Berlin-Washington relationship for the Alliance cannot be overstated, but essential though it is it is anything but special.

Whatever one might think about the 2% debate and the arbitrary setting of defence spending goals, 2% of GDP spent on defence well is low compared with adversaries. And, if spent well 2% would realise at least twice as much legitimate military capability and all-important capacity than 1% spent badly…which is the case today. Importantly, the DIP also called on all allies to spend 20% per annum on new equipment. As for President Trump, he has become the latest European alibi to avoid doing enough for their own defence when, in fact, the American commitment to Europe’s defence as part of the so-called European Defense Initiative has increased under the Trump administration.            

Whither NATO at seventy?

What of future NATO? The West today is not a place but a global idea. Globalisation has connected free peoples the world over for which the defence of whom NATO should be central. The transatlantic relationship is a cornerstone of global security thus NATO cannot be seen in isolation from the security of other free peoples the world over. That does not mean NATO is going to enlarge to Asia, although one of its members, Turkey, is already a major Asian power. Rather, for all of its complexity the Alliance is, and will remain, the model for all legitimate military alliances of democracies and the most tested mechanism for the generation of democratic defence. In other words, NATO at seventy has a great opportunity to strengthen its service of peace. Will it?

Regular readers of these pages know I can be one of NATO’s fiercest critics, something ‘tell us what we want to hear’ officials at NATO HQ have not always thanked me for. The reason I am so hard on NATO is that I am both a NATO citizen and one of its biggest supporters. Equally, as a truly-informed NATO citizen I also demand performance and too often I do not get it. Words yes, strategic performance no. That is not the fault of the Alliance, but rather its members who hide comfortably behind the fact of NATO without doing enough to makes its reality credible.

Too often NATO is reduced to little more than a summit organising committee designed to generate communiques that make strategically-illiterate leaders feel warm and fuzzy when they should be concerned and anxious. It is precisely because NATO cannot deliver the feel good feeling too many European leaders seek that the Alliance’s seventieth anniversary celebrations are today so muted. THAT, says more about the leaders than anything worth hearing about the Alliance.  

Twenty-first century Flexible Response

NATO post seventy must be empowered by all its nations to properly consider the threats we all face, to create the forces a credible twenty-first century Article 5 demands, and endowed with the forces and resources necessary to maintain Allied defence at a level of readiness relevant to the environment in which they might be called upon at short notice to operate. The Alliance needs a new strategic concept with a new idea of Flexible Response. Until that happens, and it is not happening yet, NATO will continue to be undermined by a lack of political and military ambition in a world where such ambition lies elsewhere in spades. 

Flexible Reponse 21 could do worse than hark back to Churchill sage words of 1946. The over-all strategic concept to which we all the free peoples of the Alliance should inscribe today is nothing less than the safety and welfare, the freedom and progress, of all the homes and families of all the men and women in all the NATO lands. Nothing more, nothing less.

Happy birthday NATO! Time to get real. The strategic vacation is over. Now, get on with it!

Julian Lindley-French