European Central: NATO, Past, Present, and Future

Markku Ulander l GETTY IMAGES

Approximately two years ago, on the 24th of February, 2022, Russian forces invaded Ukraine, triggering the largest armed conflict in Europe since the Second World War. In a sudden, swift, seismic shift, all of the assumptions of post-Cold War Europe came crashing down at once. Ideas that had been maturing since the Berlin Wall fell were rendered obsolete in a stroke. This new wave of Russian aggression has pushed NATO, previously seen as a somewhat anachronistic relic of the Cold War to the forefront of security concerns on the continent. To contextualize this shift, and what it may mean for the future of the European security apparatus, you need to look at NATO as an entity, specifically its history and historical role.

Fundamentally, NATO began as a product of the Cold War. On the 4th of April, 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty that gives NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) its name was signed by representatives from Canada, Norway, Portugal, the United States, Italy, Denmark, and Iceland, as well as representatives from an earlier mutual defense pact, the Brussels Treaty Organization (composed of France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg). This established NATO as a mutual defense pact in line with the Truman doctrine of international solidarity against communism, partially as a response to communist aggression such as the February coup d’etat in Czechoslovakia in 1948. By 1952, NATO was holding major military exercises such as Operation Mainbrace, a week-and-a-half-long series of wargames composed of 203 ships from 9 nations, over 1,000 aircraft, and approximately 80,000 men. That same year, Greece and Turkey ascended to membership, and when they were allowed to rearm after the 1955 London and Paris Conference, West Germany joined the alliance, locking into an increasingly tense struggle with its Soviet counterpart, the Warsaw Pact, after the erection of the Berlin wall in 1961.

Imperial War Museums

At the core of NATO is a mutual defense obligation: an attack on one is an attack on all. This obligation is spelled out in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Charter:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

Functionally, this is a deterrent measure, a guarantee that an attack on any one NATO member will escalate to conflict with all of them. Even if one NATO member is weak, its weakness is covered by another member. This deterrent, while theoretically broad, had, in practice, a singular target: the Kremlin. A deterrent that, based on events such as the Warsaw Pact invasion of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in 1968 to crush the liberalizing movement known as the Prague Spring, was fundamentally necessary. Both NATO HQ in Brussels and the Kremlin saw each other as an enemy poised to strike (despite NATO’s fundamentally defensive nature), and war seemed inevitable for the better part of 40 years.

Then, in 1989, after a decade of close calls (Exercise Able Archer ’83 almost led to nuclear war, prevented only by the quick thinking of Lt. Col. Stanlisav Petrov), everything shifted as the Kremlin’s control over the rest of the Warsaw pact faltered as events such as the Solidarity movement in Poland led to The Hole-in-the-Flag revolutions. These revolutions swept across Eastern Europe, semi-peacefully toppling communist regimes from the Baltic to the Balkans. On November 9th, 1989, the winds of change reached gale force, as the Berlin Wall, the physical manifestation of the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe in two, fell. Eleven months later, the two Germanies were now one, and on December 25, 1991, the Hammer and Sickle of the USSR was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time. History was over, and NATO was an alliance without a purpose

Lionel Cironneau | AP

In the 90s, many of NATO’s core member-states embraced the so-called “peace dividend”, slashing their defense budgets and scaling down the size of their militaries to far below the 2% of GDP commitment their membership required. This shortfall, was, at least to some degree, made up for by the entry of new members into the alliance, primarily former nations of the Eastern Bloc, such as Poland (1999) and the Czech Republic (1999). Through the mid-and late nineties, NATO conducted a series of interventions in the Balkans in the aftermath of the breakup of Yugoslavia. It is important to note that despite myths to the contrary, no commitment was ever made by any NATO leader to prevent NATO from accepting the membership of former Warsaw Pact States, with Gorbachev himself stating as much.

Even as nations from Russia’s historic sphere of influence successfully sought to join NATO, the alliance itself was less and less focused on its historic role as a hedge against Russian aggression. With the war on terror, especially the unpopular Iraq war, the necessity of the alliance itself was called into question. After all, if Russia was no longer a threat, why was an alliance against Russian aggression necessary? Or at least, this was the line of thinking amongst many of the core members in Western Europe. However, this began to change in 2008, with the South Ossetia crisis in Georgia, and the resurgent threat of Russia was thrown into sharper relief with their 2014 invasion of Crimea. In the 2016 Warsaw Summit, NATO leaders voted to create a new rapid reaction force in Eastern Europe in response to this growing threat.

NATO

Of course, 2022 was the real paradigm shift, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine proving the pessimists of 2014 & 2016 right. The threat of Russia drove long-time neutral powers Sweden and Finland into the alliance, augmenting its capabilities in Northern Europe and the Baltic region. However, it also proved just how unprepared some NATO members were for a full-scale conflict, as merely supporting Ukraine led to shell shortages in some member states. For example, in 2022, Rheinmetall (A major German arms conglomerate, one of the largest in Europe) was producing 60,000-70,000 shells a year: Ukraine has used ~250,000 shells a month during this war. The Western European nations who had eagerly cashed in their peace dividends in the 90s were now experiencing the cost in the form of atrophied military-industrial complexes that struggled to support an ally, let alone support a hypothetical large-scale future conflict. More worryingly, a resurgence in isolationism in the US could lead to a significant pullback in commitment or even withdrawal from NATO entirely. This would not only be a disaster for the alliance, which places significant reliance on the presence of American military strength, it would also be a disaster for the solidarity between free nations that NATO represents. Even in this worst-case scenario, however, NATO, or something like it, will exist. Perhaps not under that name, but, as long as Russia remains a revanchist threat, there will be a geopolitical drive for those who feel threatened by Russia to commit to mutual defense.