What's Wrong with NATO and How to Fix it. Mark Webber

What's Wrong with NATO and How to Fix it - Mark Webber


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meanwhile, NATO launched Operation Allied Force (OAF) – a seventy-eight-day aerial bombing campaign that dislodged Serbian forces from Kosovo. The Alliance was thus in the thick of the action, but as the decade ended, some observers argued that it was now doing too much. NATO, Michael E. Brown argued, had become ‘preoccupied with activities unrelated to vital interests’. The high costs of military operations and the likelihood of serial failures, he suggested, threatened to inflict ‘irreparable damage’ upon it.9

      The Alliance at that point was certainly very busy. But as its own Secretary General, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, noted, the sheer range and difficulty of missions meant its resources were stretched as never before.12 As defence budgets plunged in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, this would become a recurrent theme. According to the 2010 NATO Parliamentary Assembly, several allies were of the view that ‘NATO is already stretched beyond its capabilities’ and should be wary of taking on new commitments.13 The termination of the Alliance’s combat role in Afghanistan in 2014 offered little respite. That development coincided with the Ukraine crisis and NATO’s refocusing on Russia. To this revived front to the east, the Alliance also staked out a role to its south in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) as well as on ‘the home front’ (in response to the ongoing challenge of terrorism alongside cyber and hybrid attacks). As one former NATO official remarked in 2019, this combination of problems was probably ‘unmanageable’. In dealing with it, NATO faced the distinct ‘danger [of] strategic overload’.14

      How has NATO found itself in this position? What internal and external factors have led the Alliance to a point where it is straining at the seams?

       NATO as an Institution

      First, NATO has an authoritative legal basis in the shape of the North Atlantic Treaty. It is not unique among international organizations in this regard – just think of the Treaties of the European Union or the European Convention on Human Rights of the Council of Europe. But the NATO treaty has the benefit of concision (it is a mere fourteen articles long) and flexibility. Its key provisions – Article 5 on collective defence and Article 10 on the admission of new members – are open to interpretation, but precisely because of this, according to James Goldgeier, they ‘provided the alliance with its purpose and scope’ during the Cold War and have ‘enabled [it] to move forward in the decades [since]’.20

      Third, NATO is characterized by robust force generation and defence planning processes. The former has had to keep pace with the growing number of NATO missions and the increased number of allies and partners participating in them. The latter, meanwhile, has had to accommodate NATO’s enlarged membership and increasingly complex capability requirements. But both processes, Christian Tuschhoff has shown, ‘have been confirmed, refined, and enhanced by continuing practice’.22

       NATO’s Politics

      NATO’s


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