NATO

V

History

Until 1950 NATO consisted primarily of a pledge by the United States to aid members under the terms of Article 5 of the treaty, and there was no standing military organization for implementation of this pledge. The invasion of South Korea by North Korea in June 1950, with the connivance of the USSR, convinced the allies that the USSR might soon strike against West Germany from East Germany (see Korean War). The result was not only the creation of a military command system, but also the expansion of the organization. In 1952 Greece and Turkey joined the alliance, and in 1955, when German troops seemed essential to give the build-up of NATO conventional forces any credibility, West Germany was accepted under a complicated arrangement whereby it would not be allowed to manufacture nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. In its first decade NATO was mainly a military organization dominated by US power, which provided a security blanket for the revival of Europe’s economy and polity.

Soviet achievement of parity in nuclear weaponry with the United States resulted in concern among Europeans that the United States would not honour its pledge of joint defence if the price were to be the devastation of American territory. The 1960s were characterized by two consequent developments in NATO: the withdrawal in 1966 of France, under President Charles de Gaulle, from the organization but not from the alliance, and attempts to provide mutual confidence between the remaining members of the integrated military organization. A major element in this was the institution of a Nuclear Planning Group in which the Americans and other allies sought a common understanding of a strategy that was now more explicitly based on nuclear deterrence.

The 1970s and 1980s involved NATO in a complicated balancing act between confrontation and détente with an increasingly erratic USSR. The European partners became anxious when Soviet-American relations deteriorated, for fear of a possible war, and became anxious again when Soviet-American relations improved, for fear that the Americans would sacrifice European interests to maintain close ties with the USSR. In the 1980s relations became particularly tense when the USSR tried to undermine European confidence by deploying a large number of an intermediate-range nuclear missile, the SS20, which could devastate Europe but posed no direct threat to the United States. This drew renewed attention to the possibility of a nuclear war in which Europe was destroyed but the Soviet Union and the United States remained intact; this was the contingency President de Gaulle had earlier warned against.

The US response was to deploy a number of intermediate missiles of its own: the Ground Launched Cruise Missile (GLCM) and the ballistic Pershing II. This apparent outbreak of a new arms race proved intensely controversial in Europe but the crisis was averted when the USSR, probably impelled by increasing realization that it could not afford the strain of a continuing contest in military procurement with the United States, agreed to a so-called double zero disarmament treaty, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) agreement of 1987, whereby all weapons of this kind were to be removed and destroyed by both sides, (see Arms Control and Disarmament). The INF treaty presaged the breakdown of the Warsaw Pact and the decade ended with the apparent success of NATO in surmounting the challenge of the Communist bloc.

The end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the USSR (see Communism, Collapse of) brought new challenges for NATO. Russia had not unreasonably expected NATO to follow the Warsaw Pact into dissolution once the East-West confrontation was over and Germany had been reunited. Instead, the Western powers kept the alliance in being, though giving informal pledges that they saw no need to introduce nuclear weapons or permanently stationed forces of other allies on former East German soil.

The former East European members of the Warsaw Pact have now begun to join NATO as a safeguard against any future Russian aggression. Russia itself, meanwhile, initially opposed any extension of NATO into Central and Eastern Europe, viewing the maintenance of NATO, let alone its steady extension towards their territory, as an unfriendly act. Russia felt particularly sensitive about the case of the Baltic States, which were recently, as a result of Soviet conquest, part of the USSR itself and not merely nominally sovereign members of the Warsaw Pact.

Russia is equally concerned about the gradual transformation of NATO from a defensive alliance into an organization willing to intervene militarily under the banner of peacekeeping into areas beyond the borders of its members and, as a result, in areas often close to traditional spheres of Russian interest, notably in former Yugoslavia but also, if without military action, in the Caucasus. These anxieties were reinforced when, during the US intervention in Afghanistan, US forces turned up in former Soviet Central Asia.

In the Yugoslav case NATO did much to try to involve Russia as a partner, but although some Russian forces participated, Russia has kept away from policy decisions and remained suspicious.

The admission of the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland as full members of NATO in 1999 marked a considerable diplomatic defeat for Russia, especially when NATO announced an open-door policy towards a queue of other nations lining up to join. NATO’s criteria for entry entail commitments to democracy and peaceful behaviour, and a modicum of military capability, on the principle that new members should strengthen and not weaken the alliance, but there is no explicit geopolitical limit to membership.

NATO has tried to further its interest in a stable Europe while also placating Russia by establishing halfway houses to membership in which Russia itself is invited to participate. Thus the North Atlantic Cooperation Council, formed in 1991 and subsequently converted in 1994 into the European-Atlantic Partnership Council, allows Russia and others as far afield as Kazakhstan (because it is a former part of the USSR) to consult on security issues. The same is true of the parallel Partnership for Peace that provides for permanent liaison missions for members at NATO headquarters and for participation on an ad hoc basis in peacekeeping operations. To further placate Russia and recognize its special importance, NATO accompanied progress towards a new Strategic Concept, agreed in April 1999, and laying much more emphasis on peacekeeping operations out of treaty area, with the signing of a Founding Act with Russia in 1997. This established a bilateral relationship between Russia and NATO as a whole. The Permanent Joint Council has a standing organization and there is a permanent Russian presence at NATO headquarters. In 2002 the NATO-Russia Council was established to allow Russia to join NATO's decision-making process, as well as uniting the efforts of Moscow and the alliance in the fight against international terrorism in the wake of the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. NATO has, however, been careful, while promising consultation in crises, to reject any notion of needing Russian agreement to act. Such incidents as the Kosovo crisis (1998-1999), in which NATO virtually went to war with the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, a state friendly to Russia, severely strained relations.

The reinvigorated US defence policy under President George W. Bush at first seemed to presage a further deterioration in Russo-American relations, but President Vladimir Putin apparently decided that Russian interest would best be served by accepting the inevitable and maintaining as cooperative a relation as possible with the US, at least in Europe. In that way he might acquire economic assistance and a more understanding US policy towards Russian security interests elsewhere, notably in the Caucasus. Thus, in 2002, Russia made no serious objection to the invitation for Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the once taboo Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to join NATO. In return, Russia acquired some further special consultative status with NATO.

VI

Achievements

Over the years the existence of NATO and above all the years of integrated military structures and planning have led to a historically unprecedented degree of political and military confidence and integration between sovereign states. One result has been to create an unrivalled facility for joint operations as was exemplified in the Gulf War against Iraq, and in the several Yugoslav episodes, and led in 2003 to the creation of the NATO Response Force (NRF), which is able to deploy to a global trouble spot at short notice.

NATO gave a once demoralized Western Europe confidence within which it has achieved its current degree of politico-economic unity and welfare. NATO also almost certainly deterred further Soviet expansion, although it is impossible to know whether a full-scale conquest of Europe would otherwise have materialized. Certainly the peaceful unification of Germany was a remarkable achievement that is hard to imagine taking place in the absence of a sound structure of Western European solidarity.

Now, paradoxically, one of the greatest challenges facing NATO is the consequence of precisely its contribution to creating a “Europe whole and free”. The Western Europeans, increasingly integrated politically, are naturally turning towards a greater integration of their defence. The United States has always been ambivalent about this prospect, welcoming cooperation and the absence of strife in Europe, but nervous that a Europe united in defence might pursue unwelcome policies. Many US leaders have felt that the United States has a right to suspect too much European independence, because the history of the 20th century was one in which the United States often found itself involved in clearing up crises into which Europeans had fallen.

Much NATO diplomacy at the turn of the century has thus been about how to embrace the beginnings of European “defence identity” within the alliance mould. The Strategic Concept, adopted in 1999, recognizes that NATO is the only framework for collective self-defence, but that the Europeans may want to carry out peacekeeping operations in which the United States did not want to be involved. The concept adopted for such cases is that of Common Joint Task Forces (CJTF), whereby Europeans might, with US consent, draw on NATO resources (which frequently would mean such US assets as heavy airlift or satellite intelligence) to conduct operations under the European Deputy SACEUR. It was always obvious that it would take time to discover whether this formula would work and whether the various parties would be tolerant of each other’s needs and preferences. But the transformation in US security policy after the attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001 made the challenge even more dramatic. In late 2004 a European-led peacekeeping operation was established when a force under the control of the European Union took over from NATO peacekeeping duties in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a part of the former Yugoslavia.

NATO had always been a defensive alliance with a reactive strategy formally confined to the treaty area. Problems “out of area” had always caused NATO difficulties, as in the Suez Crisis and the Vietnam War. The problem of Israel was also always divisive. After “9/11”, as the Trade Center attack became known, NATO for the first time declared an Article V emergency: that is, an attack on a member requiring a united and mandatory response. But in the event, the US chose to pursue its attack on Afghanistan free of the trammels of NATO commands (although NATO later assumed control of peacekeeping there in its first ever operational commitment outside Europe). It nevertheless made it clear, as in the later Iraq crisis of 2003, that it expected allied support. This support was now likely to be needed primarily out of area and in support of a worldwide campaign against terrorism no longer confined to defensive reactions but to the new pre-emptive defensive policy announced by President Bush in 2002. To complicate matters further, the European allies developed sharply contrasting reactions to what some regarded as a unilateralist mood in which the US demanded support but also the right to ignore allied advice on the causes for which the support was required.

It seems unlikely that NATO will collapse. The political damage that open breaches can cause may seem too great, but NATO still remains an unrivalled mechanism for military cooperation when needed. But its role as a permanent feature of the post-Cold War world has become much more uncertain than it had appeared during the earlier stages of its triumphant expansion.