Alphen,
Netherlands. 29 September. Winston
Churchill once said, “Civilization will not last, freedom will not be kept,
unless a very large majority of mankind unite together to defend them”. This week Norway’s former Prime Minister Jens
Stoltenberg will take over as NATO Secretary-General. In the wake of this month’s NATO Wales Summit
Stoltenberg will face the greatest strategic challenge to the Alliance since
the Cold War. The threat comes not
specifically from Russia or Islamic State unpredictable and potentially
dangerous though they are. Indeed, no NATO
member presently faces an existential threat.
No, the real threat to the Alliance comes from the members themselves
and the steadfast refusal of many of them to see the world as it is, not as
they would like it to be. European
leaders bereft of vision and political courage talk endlessly about long-term
strategy when they mean short-term politics.
Solving NATO’s strategy conundrum is without doubt the greatest
challenge Stoltenberg faces.
In
that light Stoltenberg’s tough job will be no less than to nudge the European
members of the Alliance back to a strategic reality in which credible military
power is re-established in Europe as the hard rock upon which the twenty-first
century influence of a twenty-first century Atlantic Alliance must necessarily
be built. Sadly, all my research shows
the exact opposite is happening. Only
four NATO members meet the Alliance target of 2% GDP on defence and if one
looks closely at the language of the Wales Summit Declaration few have any
appetite to meet it.
Even
those states that nominally spend 2% GDP on defence either spend badly or use
accounting tricks to maintain the illusion of upheld defence expenditure. Take my own country Britain. David Cameron made much of his commitment in
Wales that Britain would continue to spend 2% GDP on defence. Sadly, like so much of his smoke and mirrors
premiership the ‘commitment’ is in fact a political illusion and a mask for
further defence cuts. Senior word from
within Parliament tells me that Britain will only maintain the 2% target on
defence by including costs hitherto outside of the defence budget, such as
nuclear forces, pensions and operations.
As ever with Cameron clever politics masks appalling strategy as in all
likelihood should he win the British general election in May 2015 he will move
to cut the conventional force even more.
Proof of this is the difficulty the Royal
Air Force has had mustering six ageing Tornado aircraft for operations
against Islamic State this week and the spin operation by London to pretend
otherwise.
Strategy-killing
politics oozes from the many pages of the NATO Wales Summit Declarations and reflects
a fundamentally false assumption; that the United States is and will remain the
strongest military power on the planet, by some distance and for the
foreseeable future. Yes, the Americans
are still the strongest military power on the planet but Washington is mired in
debt and uncertainty with the US military facing defence cuts between now and 2020 greater than the combined defence expenditure of ALL the NATO
Europeans. In other words, the great age
of unrivalled American supremacy is coming to an end and NATO needs
collectively to get its heads around the implications of that.
The
terrifying truth Secretary-General Stoltenberg will face this week is that the military
balance of military power is shifting away from the West at breakneck
speed. By 2016 Russia will spend more on
defence than France and Germany combined.
China, which now spends at least $130bn per annum on it armed forces (and
probably far more) has been investing per annum double-digit percentage
increases in defence ever since 1989.
President Xi is determined to further increase such expenditures. Contrast that with NATO Europe. Thirteen of the world’s top twenty defence
slashers between 2012 and 2014 are in NATO Europe. These are cuts upon cuts for between 2008 and
2012 many NATO Europeans cut their defence budgets by up to 30%.
And
yet, if NATO members got their collective act together as part of a
twenty-first century transatlantic security contract they could a) help keep
the US strong where it needs to be strong – Eastern Europe, the Middle East and
Asia-Pacific; and b) demonstrate to the world that whatever a state spends on
armed force such expenditures will never outstrip those of the West and are
thus a waste of money. To do that NATO
and its members will need to look hard at how to generate real efficiencies and
generate new strategic partnerships the world to multiply real effectiveness. That will require a radical NATO. Sadly, the words ‘radical’ and ‘NATO’ are
strangers to each other.
There
is one other challenge Mr Stoltenberg will need to consider on his first day in
the office – the coincidence of crises.
It is annoying that the Russia-Ukraine War and the threat posed by
Islamic State to the Sykes-Picot Middle Eastern order should come at one and
same time. It would be so nice to deal
with crises separately and sequentially.
Welcome to the real world. The
future Alliance will rarely be allowed the luxury of choosing crises. Indeed, the West’s adversaries will do all
they can to complicate American strategy (and by extension NATO ‘strategy’) by
generating simultaneous crises.
NATO’s
bottom-line is this; the United States is the world’s only world power that is
present in strength in every world region.
However, to be critically strong in every region the US will need NATO
Allies that can act credibly in and around Europe as crisis first
responders. Succeed and NATO will
reinvent itself as an Alliance and regenerate itself in the American political
mind. Fail and NATO will simply fade
into anachronistic strategic irrelevance and the world will be a very much more
dangerous place for that.
European
defence irresponsibility has been a major factor in making the world today more
dangerous than it need be because it has made the costs of challenging the
West’s supremacy both achievable and bearable.
Therefore, if freedom is to be defended Stoltenberg’s first challenge
will be to shift the Alliance beyond its false comfort zone. To do that Secretary-General
Stoltenberg will need to get the North Atlantic Council to look up and outwards
at big strategy rather than down and inwards at narrow politics where so many
of Europe’s short-sighted leaders find false comfort.
Good
luck, Mr Stoltenberg!
Julian
Lindley-French
